Opinion: How Africa will soon control Europe
By Jean-Paul Pougala(*) – Translated in English by Franclin Foping (Cork, Ireland) January 5th 2012
The German-born American Henry Kissinger, who served as National Security Advisor under the Nixon’s administration from 1969 until 1975 and later as Secretary of State from 1973 until 1977 once said “whoever controls oil will control the economy. Whoever controls cereals will rule the world”.
After a series of fortunate circumstances, Africa is about to control the entire European Union, with its arable lands, its agriculture as well as its food. It was to stop this catastrophic progress that Europe did everything in its power to delay to Africans the culture of cereals by overloading themselves with useless and unnecessary crops such as cocoa, coffee, and cotton. As it was not enough already, it was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that did the rest by funding projects aiming at exporting some products to Africa in order to kill its own agriculture and animal husbandry. But the Euro debt crisis added by the arrival to power in Africa of a new generation of decision makers who are more educated and skilful have completely turned around the stakes. And Africa is about to control Europe in the next 20 years. In order to understand this phenomenon, let us examine the reasons behind this revolution.
I- WHY
1 – The Overpopulation of Europe
When you ask this question: what is the most populous country in the world? The most obvious answer is: China. This is not true. China has the same population density as Nigeria, which has 134 inhabitants per square kilometer. It is Europe that has the most populous countries in the world. By way of example, Italy has 199 inhabitants per square kilometer, Belgium 385 and the Netherlands 400.
Surprisingly, it is Europe that we can notice the worst waste of arable lands despite the fact it is Europe that has the most people to feed on the tiniest space in the world. Even worse, with a density of 1.217 inhabitants per square kilometer of available lands according to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Belgium has an urbanization rate of 92.7% which means that the percentage of rural zone is just 7.3%. As Cazaux, Carels and Van Gijseghem pointed out in their report published in 2007, even that 7.3% is threatened by a strong need to build properties with the consequence of a programmed disappearing of not only the agricultural production but also the wildlife and the flora.
2 – Reduction of agricultural spaces in Europe
According to the French economic newspaper La Tribune, in its edition of 21/12/2011, the first agricultural power of the European Union, France is losing 26 square meters of agricultural land every second to urbanization, in other words France is losing 82,000 hectares of agricultural lands every year. Diego Furia, Director for the region of Piedmont of the Italian Syndicate of farmers COLDIRETTI declared on 25/07/2011 that the city of Turin, that used to have some food security, lost in 15 years 7,000 hectares of arable lands to the speculation of property. For the same reasons, 100 hectares of arable lands are vanishing every day in Italy. As a matter of fact, the agricultural deficit in Europe is significant: to reach food security in 2011, Europe lacks 35 millions of hectares of agricultural lands.
According to Robert Levesque, the Director of Terres d’Europe-Scafr, the Research Centre of the Federation of Safer, with an increase of loss of 9 millions of hectares in 10 years, a big famine is heading to Europe in the years to come as “in Europe, human beings are historically installed on fertile lands and the current cities were built around the first farms”. In 1960, urbanization in France was responsible for the loss of 40,000 hectares of fertile lands every year. In 2011, that figures have doubled, which means that those fertile lands are being used to build property as was claimed by Levesque. It is therefore a tragedy for European people as they are the biggest consumer in the world, and in Africa, some clever people are already ready to take advantage of that. This process is being accelerated at the rate of 26 square meters per second of disappearing of arable lands, and they are preparing themselves to capitalize on this shortage of food supply in Europe. For instance, in Cameroon, local authorities are rushing to gather not different components of a car but tractors. Throughout the African continent, it is the scramble for learning how to be competitive and productive. Everybody wants its own piece of the “European” cake, like vultures waiting to eat their prey. The less informed wrongly started a campaign aiming at stealing lands in Africa, but the truth is elsewhere: by opening their arms to foreign investors on their lands, Africans want to import advanced agricultural techniques that were overshadowed by 200 years of growing coffee, cocoa, and cotton.
3- Commodity market speculation
If there is an event that took the world by surprise during the uprisings noticed from 2008 until 2011, it is the rapid rise in global food prices due to market speculation. In other words, the traders who speculated on the price of oil, gas or minerals have suddenly decided to speculate on agriculture commodity. What was downplayed was the benefit that African agriculture would get from these speculations. Indeed, the more the price of cereals increases the bigger will be the profits for Africa, as it has the advantages of geographical position, good weather and a good Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) and exposure to sun throughout the year. This means that you can easily 3 good harvests in Africa against 1 in Europe. That is why the food dependency by Europe on Africa is inevitable and as a result, the financial loss would be estimated in hundreds of billions of dollars per year in about 10 or 15 years.
II – HOW
4 – Getting back agricultural lands stolen by the Europeans since 1884
According to a report published by Shouwang Maitian of the Information Centre of China in Pekin on 22 April 2011, there are 270 millions of hectares of used arable lands, which account for 2.17 more the amount of the used arable lands in China. The problem is that out of this quantity, 230 millions of hectares are used for unnecessary crops such as cocoa, coffee, banana, and cotton which are not helpful to the continent. In fact, almost all agricultural lands in Africa were directly or indirectly taken over since the period of Western
occupation in 1884 which did not help any African country to emerge. If Africa wants to capitalize on the European shortfall, the first thing to do will be to get rid of all colonial crops to use only what it chooses itself without any Western interference. By using less than the majority of African lands, China can now easily feed 1.3 billions of its citizens and supply Europe with products such as soya, tomatoes, and so forth; even if in countries such as Italy it is still a taboo to acknowledge that tomato which used to be the national pride, is now imported from China. Africa should get rid of all its coffee and cocoa fields (that have the disadvantage of not using accepting any other crops simultaneously) to drive its own agricultural revolution by only growing crops it can truly control and that can be harvested every 3 months and not yearly like coffee.
III – REACTIONS OF THE PRESUMED PATIENT
In front of this announced death of European agriculture and the consequent reliance on Africa, one can sadly notice that Europe has not planned for any contingency measures to tackle this problem. In the contrary, Europe is still continuing its crazy policy of using its
groups of NGO that are funded by it to turn people’s minds from the true problem that is awaiting them:
5 – The wrong ecological war on the African forest
The African equatorial forest is an obstacle to the economic growth of countries that were conned by the dodgy talks of an ecological revolution. There are some NGOs that take this question so seriously that they managed to turn Africans from their actual problems and
therefore conviced them to waste their energy on preserving the equatorial forest. This is illustrated by the Farmland conversion of Åboland: there is actually a country that makes a living from its forest: Finland. The European Union advised Finland to preserve its forest in order to become an oxygen store for the whole continent, do you think its ecological advocates gave the same advice in Africa? Obviously not. It is astonishing to notice that it was the exact contrary that was advised. The EU funded Finland to destroy its forest and turn this space into agricultural lands, even tough with its cold weather, agriculture would not be as successful as it would be in Africa. In fact, the EU was probably right, one should only notice the extreme poverty of populations living in those forestry regions in Africa, the place is as twice as rough to the human beings than the desert. Here are the reasons:
A – Forest does not get along with agriculture. “Due to its nature, agriculture prevents trees from spreading across the land (stopping agriculture generally allows the forest to grow). In Nordic countries, the main issue here is the forest, the loss of spaces without trees” as stated at the page 58 in the 82-page report of the OECD in 2009 entitled “farmland conversion”. This statement was used to justify an EU-funded project whose goal was to destroy the forest in order to start with a new agricultural activity in Aboland, South Finland.
B – Forest does not get along with tourism. “Tourism increases the worth of lands and strengthen the competition for lands. It therefore has the advantages of multiplying income sources not related to agriculture, particularly agro tourism, and accrue the demand of local food products” as stated in the same report and including a publication “Andersson, Eklund and Lehtola, 2006”. Forest is perceived as an obstacle to tourism and the job creation: “Farmlands provide scattered prospects thereby reinforcing tourist appeal of the region, […] agriculture can help preserve the local job market” concluded the report.
In other words, those who keep organizing talks and conferences to present the benefits of preserving the African equatorial forest know too well that they are preventing many countries in the world to tackle poverty by using the natural means that they have in hand. Even worse, they go as far as funding their disciples to go and tell to African people how they like gorillas that must be saved at all costs, with such an incredible amount of hypocrisy. This is like saying that they prefer Africa with its wildlife and without its population.
C – Ideas received from poorly trained ecologists on tropical forest.
One of the lies carried by the advocates of the idea of keeping Africa poor in order to convince is to claim that Africa is a powerhouse of the world and that it supplies oxygen to Europe. Those people making these false claims forget that these old trees in forests cannot
produce more oxygen than the younger ones, this has been formally proved as an old tree like an old man cannot produce more oxygen than it consumes. Furthermore, an old tree creates a shadow around itself thereby stopping the growth of any tree underneath it, therefore older trees are actually twice useless.
D – Precious African woods, mere niche to European riches. African can starve and European humanitarians will keep telling them they should not touch the forest, as the trees that come from it are to be used by the European riches who are therefore the only ones to have a piano, a door or a wardrobe made with ebony 300 years old. But the problem is that Africa is not meant to oblige to a group of European riches.
IV- WHAT AFRICA DO THEN?
Whoever controls food will rule the world. If the new generation of African who will come to power in the next 10 or 20 years is sufficiently aware and well trained with African geostrategic, they will bet on the control of food supplies to Europe, a prey that is
finally so easy to catch, as it is its own tactics of easy gain coupled with the huge selfishness, that are its own enemies and are strategically lessening it. But before getting there, it is urgent to continue with the selective policies and cap access to lands to foreigners by preferring State-to-State cooperation and not State to private companies. And in any case, any land should not be sold, but only leased for a specific period of time that should not exceed 20 or 30 years, just enough time for local people to get rid of stupid and useless crops such as coffee and cocoa and replace them with modern crops such as cereals and grains. Copy the advanced agricultural techniques used elsewhere in order to be more productive. A priority should be given to agricultural colleges and institutions.
Any product that comes from leased farms should not be sold in the local market. Local market should be available only to local people. African population should only be fed by themselves as an opportunity to develop their creativity towards the goal of conquering the big market that is Europe.
6 – CONCLUSION
The control of Africa by Europe is observed firstly in a mental level. The control of Europe by Africa which has already started with palm oil (see previous chapter) will be efficient by winning the mental battle of African to understand that the wealth and poverty are fictitious.
All this will not have the expected effect if Africa does not complete a true African Union, a federation that will allow us to optimize our productive means and better synchronize our techniques to surround Europe with our foods with the great offer diversity. Africa is not
the only continent to be interested in this market. In Russia, everybody is betting on an eventual global warming that will increase temperature by 1 or 2 degrees, thereby turning Siberia into a granary, by beating the African offer that is too divided and not coordinated enough. The route is long and also very tough, but if Africa is united and speaks only one language, no competitor can fairly beat it as it has some big advantages over others: good weather, quantitative precipitation forecast, humidity and good land acidity (pH), can guarantee 3 harvests every year for its main crops such as cereals, fruits and vegetables.
26/12/2011
(*) Jean-Paul Pougala is a Cameroonian national, Director of the Institute of Geostrategic Studies of Geneva in Switzerland.
pougala@gmail.com, www.pougala.org
