Mojo_PeiPei

I don't know where to start with this but I think its a good topic to discuss.

What is a good solution, what can be done? I would wonder how many people have died from Disease,famine, and warfare there in the last century. You have places like Sudan, Congo, Liberia, and Somalia. Do these people not get it? I don't want to sound racist but did they all miss something? I guess that is what happens when you give 20th century weapons to people stuck in the stone age. Conflict diamonds, genocide, famine, Aids, Ebola, human rights atrocities. I guess the big question at hand... is it all a lost cause?

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To win a war you must serve no master but your ambition.

Macheath

I agree this is a good topic to discuss and the best way to discuss it is to stop thinking of Africa as one single "cause" that should be thrown in the "too hard" basket.

You've listed a few different factors that could be pulled apart and looked at in a wider economic and historical context. We can break these issues down and see how they relate to each other and the whole Africa problem; make this thread a clearinghouse for our links and ideas.

Here's a start, Conflict diamonds:

<A HREF="http://www.stanford.edu/class/e297c/war_peace/africa_struggles_with_slavery_colonialism_and_hiv_aids/lcrenshaw.html">In the context of the world diamond market and the DeBeers monopoly.</A>
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<A HREF="http://www.commondreams.org/views/061200-102.htm">Does the west buy conflict diamonds?</A>
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<A HREF="http://www.professionaljeweler.com/archives/news/2001/110601story.html">Conflict diamonds linked to Al Quaeda</A>
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<A HREF="http://freedom.house.gov/news/statements/d50-diamond.asp">'Clean Diamond Act' languishes in Congress</A>
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<A HREF="http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/c7ca0eaf6c79faae852567af003c69ca/74ff3abc22a0a4ed85256d1600584c5a?OpenDocument">Act signed into law on April 25, 2003.</A>
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<A HREF="http://www.worlddiamondcouncil.com/clean_diamond_trade_act.htm">The Clean Diamond Trade Act (HR 2722)</A>

This is just a brief outline of sources on the web for one single issue but it gives me a sense that the only solution to think of the things that can be done rather than what can't be done.

In this case it was suspected that the nature of the global diamond market was a big factor in the issue of 'conflict diamonds'. The US Government (America buys 65% of all retail diamonds) was in a position to pass legislation, just had been done against the South African apartheid regime. This legislation has now been passed and we will see what comes of it.

Phaenx

Nothing! There is nothing of interest to us there, let them fight it out themselves. It would be worth it to go in there and stop all the killing going on, but then liberals would accuse dubya of bullying another small country again and there would be marches, and debates, and trouble. Screw them.

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"I went shopping last night at like 1am. The place was empty and this old woman just making polite conversation said to me, 'where is everyone??' I replied, 'In bed, same place you and I should be!' Took me ten minutes to figure out why she gave me a dirty look." --Some guy

Dragonlich

Yes it is a lost continent, because the main cause of the problems can never be addressed: nature and geography.

Africa is too hot, which allows deadly diseases to spread like wildfire. The heat also makes it impracticle to work a "normal" 8-hour day. This has always been so. Africa has deadly human-eating animals running around. Africa hasn't got enough good soil to feed a large population, and the population is only going up. This will always lead to conflict and strive. Couple this with ancient superstitions, and age-old rivalries, and you end up with a nice mixture of murder and human rights atrocities.

The big question is whether AIDS will kill enough to make the land able to support the population again.

Mojo_PeiPei

Its fucked up but true. I guess we have to approach it like a fire that is blazing... let it burn itself out.

__________________
To win a war you must serve no master but your ambition.

Pacifier

The Problem in Africa is, that the nations there are not "naturally" grown. They were forced together by the western nation, they formed colonies that won't fit together. Second the population were kept dumb (no education) so they had trouble to form a goverment, and today they are trapped in all the violence.

A good article about the Congo:
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/12860/1.html

BTW: there wouldn't be marches againt an involvment if the arguments for the involvment were good. But bush would surely use the argument "they have WMDs" again to bomb the crap out of those nation and then have no plan to rebuild them (see afghanistan). Plus he will only "liberate" those nations that has something of value for him.

But sadly due to the current situation they have to sell their resources at low prieces so there is no need for the western nation to "liberate" those nations.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

Sparhawk

The problem is that no one gives a shit, and they use bullshit arguments to justify their not-giving-a-shit, instead of the real reason, a sub-concious racism that even they probably aren't aware of.

We freed 20 million iraqis, and found some mass graves, whoop-de-doo. Multiply that number by 20, and you'll still not be tapping the surface of the carnage going on in Africa right now.

__________________
"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

Dragonlich

Sparhawk, I do hope you're not talking about me... To be honest, I don't give a rat's arse about Africa. However, every single point I made is true. Africa cannot get as wealthy as Europe, perhaps not even as wealthy as South-America. Most countries/tribal areas there simply don't have the climate and geography for that.

Of course, Western influences don't help one bit; Catholics saying birth control is bad fucks up generation after generation of poor, uneducated kids, western countries exporting cheap agricultural stuff fucks up local farmers, who are then encouraged to use artificial fertilizer that eventually turns the ground into concrete, etc...

Now, are there solutions to Africa's problems? Well... for one thing, we need to stop the population explosion. Second, we need to stop AIDS from spreading too much, by any means necessary. Then, we need to allow/force local farmers to grow food - it can be done: Zimbabwe did fine until Mugabe kicked out the big white farmers. Even if we solve most immediate problems, and encourage food production, we'll still get the occasional famine and epidemic; it's inevitable in that climate. Just don't expect Africa to develop heavy industry, or get anywhere near wealthy enough to allow luxuries like in the West.

Perhaps the best thing for Africa would be for the rest of the world to stop cuddling them to death, and leave them alone for a few decades (and that includes not trading with them at all).

Macheath

Wha?! Are you saying we should stop undermining their economies with our ridiculously oversubsidised agricultural imports. What a novel idea...

Africa's scar gets angrier
At Evian, the world's rich nations missed a golden opportunity to back fair trade

George Monbiot
Tuesday June 3, 2003
The Guardian

Perhaps the defining moment of Tony Blair's premiership was the speech that he gave to the Labour party conference in October 2001. In June, his party had returned to office with a monumental majority. In September, two planes were flown into the World Trade Centre in New York. The speech appeared to mark his transition from the insecure, focus-group junkie of Labour's first term to a visionary and a statesman, determined to change the world.

The most memorable passage was his declaration on Africa. "The state of Africa," he told us, "is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier." This being so, I would respectfully ask our visionary prime minister to explain what the hell he thinks he is doing in France.

A few weeks ago, President Chirac did something unprecedented. The head of the state which had formerly prevented any real change to Europe's farm subsidy regime suddenly gave ground. He wanted to show that the G8 summit he is hosting in Evian, which concludes today, would offer something other than just the usual spectacle of the rich and powerful deciding how they would make themselves still richer and more powerful. He approached the US government to suggest that Europe would stop subsidising its exports of food to Africa if America did the same.

His offer was significant, not only because it represented a major policy reversal for France, but also because it provided an opportunity to abandon the perpetual agricultural arms race between the European Union and the US, in which each side seeks to out-subsidise the other.

Our farm subsidies, as Tony Blair has pointed out, are a disaster for the developing world, and particularly for Africa. Farming accounts for some 70% of employment on that continent, and most of the farmers there are desperately poor. Part of the reason is that they are unfairly undercut by the subsidised products dumped on their markets by exporters from the US and the EU. Chirac's proposals addressed only part of the problem, but they could have begun the process of dismantling the system which does so much harm to our pockets, our environment and the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.

We might, then, have expected Tony Blair, who created a major diplomatic incident last year when he rightly savaged Chirac for refusing to budge, to have welcomed the lost and heavily subsidised sheep into the free-market fold. But our prime minister, instead, has single-handedly destroyed the French initiative. The reason will by now be familiar. George Bush, who receives substantial political support from US agro-industrialists, grain exporters and pesticide manufacturers, was not prepared to make the concessions required to match Chirac's offer. Had the EU, and in particular the member which claims to act as a bridge across the Atlantic, supported France, the moral pressure on Bush may well have become irresistible. But as soon as Blair made it clear that he would not back Chirac's plan, the initiative was dead.

So, thanks to our conscience-stricken prime minister, and his statesmanlike habit of doing whatever Bush tells him to, Africa is now well and truly stuffed. Every trade distortion Blair once promised to address remains in place. Several of the food crises from which that continent is now suffering are directly exacerbated by the plight of its own farmers.

The underlying problem is that the rich nations set the global trade rules. The current world trade agreement was supposed to have prevented the EU and the US from subsidising their exports to developing nations. But, as the development agency Oxfam has shown, the agreement contains so many loopholes that it permits the two big players simply to call their export subsidies by a different name.

So, for example, the EU has, in several farm sectors, stopped paying farmers according to the amount they produce (which is classified by the World Trade Organisation as a "trade-distorting" subsidy) and started instead to give them direct grants, based on the amount of land they own and how much they produced there in the past. The effect on the prices of the crops they grow is almost identical, but the new subsidies are now classified as "non-distorting".

The US has applied the same formula, and added a couple of tricks of its own. One of these is called "export credit": the state reduces the cost of US exports by providing cheap insurance for the exporters. These credits, against which Chirac was hoping to trade the European subsidies, are worth some $7.7bn (£4.7bn) to US grain sellers. In combination with other ruses, they ensure that American exporters can undercut the world price for wheat and maize by between 10% and 16%, and the world price for cotton by 40%.

But the ugliest of its hidden export subsidies is its use of aid as a means of penetrating the markets of poorer nations. While the other major donors provide food aid in the form of money, which the World Food Programme can use to buy supplies in local markets, thus helping indigenous farmers while feeding the starving, the US insists on sending its own produce. This programme, the government states with breathtaking frankness, is "designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities".

The result is that the major recipients are not the nations in greatest need, but the nations which can, again in the words of the US department of agriculture, "demonstrate the potential to become commercial markets" for US farm products. This is why, for example, the Philippines currently receives more US food aid than Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe put together, all of which, unlike the Philippines, are currently suffering from serious food shortages. In a way, this is a blessing for Africa: if the US dumped as much of its produce on the nations that need it as it does on the nations that don't, it would destroy their fragile agricultural economy.

But US policy also ensures that food aid is delivered just when it is needed least. Oxfam has produced a graph plotting the amount of wheat given to developing nations by the US against world prices. When the price falls (in other words, when there is a global surplus and poor nations can buy food cheaply) the volume of "aid" rises. This is as clear a demonstration of agricultural dumping as you could ask for. The very programme which is meant to help the poor is in fact undermining them. It casts an interesting light on Bob Geldof's astonishing claim last week that Bush has become the champion of the poor.

So, when faced with a choice between saving Africa and saving George Bush from a mild diplomatic embarrassment, Blair has, as we could have predicted, done as his master bids. The scar on the conscience of the world has just become deeper and angrier.

The_Dude

i agree w/ pacifier. i like to blame all this on the old colonizers.

those bastards carved countries according to their pleasement, not accorind to tribal/cultural/linguistic lines.

so, we have groups of people w/ nothing in common, no unity bunched into a country. so, they fight each other.

i really think they should redraw the country lines there, draw them so people in a country share some kind of unity. yes, i know this is a far-fetched idea.

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

Pacifier

Not sure about that, a lot af contries down there have a fair amout of resources. The Problem right now it that there are only western industries that are using them, there is no african industrie. So the western are sucking the wealth out of africa. They are making money with african resources but the money goes to the west, and africa has nothing.
the old colonization is gone, but it is replaced with an industrial colonisation.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

geep

Once again the world stands by and does nothing while innocents fall prey to vicious killers with a selfish agenda. What is the answer? Know full well in your hearts that people will die no matter what happens. If we are to make strides to improve our post Cold War world, what we need to do now is quit arguing over the philosophies of left and right and act as a single voice against tyranny and genocide. While we wait, innocent people die.

Sparhawk

Hoo-ah!

__________________
"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work."

Deke

Pacifier has a good point. And it's not just the Congo or the diamond regions--Thomas Pakenham wrote a marvelous book about what our European allies did to Africa a century ago (and for which they're still paying dearly) called "The Scramble for Africa." It's a great read (for a history book).

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Ungrateful Bastard

lurkette

I think Bush has a good idea on this one - transparency and accountability in IMF and World Bank aid. A good deal of the money from "foreign aid" and foreign-aid sponsored resource deals goes straight into the pockets of the dictators and cronies ruling these countries. Corruption is a HUGE problem.

I don't have any problem with using military force to remove these people and to monitor the situations. I just think it ought to come from the UN and not from the US alone. One, shares the cost and the risk; two, you get multiple perspectives instead of one country's ideas; three, it would send a powerful message of unity, that the world will not stand by while this happens. Four, be nice if the rest of us (particularly Europe but even the US's hands aren't clean on this) helped straighten out the mess we've helped create.

Probably won't happen, but it'd be nice if it could.

__________________
"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

- Anatole France

The_Dude

nigeria has a shitload of oil, but the revenues dont even come close to reachin the common folk.

it gets sucked up by the high level bureaucracy (the federal govt, since it's the right of the central govt to negotiate w/ oil companies)

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

geep

O.K. so I couldn't get you going on the emotional stuff.

I agree that a lot of the money that flows to thes areas ends up in the hands of the dictators and their cronies. We need to get more of the resources to the populations of these countries. Maybe freezing some bank accounts would help. Hiring western firms to go into these countries and improve their infrastructure would go a long way to helping the populations, also.

Pacifier

nope, thats whats going on there right now. The western firms are getting the money (OK, some goes to the corrupt leaders), the african nation are getting sucked dry, the people don't get anything.
We need to help them to establish their own industry, therefore the money keep inland and can be used for the african people. Sure you need to get rid of the corrupt dictators first.

That is also the reason why i don't like the WordBank so much, they are acting in favour of the western industries, they are not really helping the african nation on a longer term. they only offer short sighted solutions.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

The_Dude

they all need leadership that has legibility among their citizens.

that's the first thing they need.

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

porkpie

I think that we, the west, would need to give up so much, just to give the third world even a little bit of equality. Mankind is greedy, we don't want to give up anything. And as greedy as mankind is in general, you can double that regarding Bushy.

Say our taxes went up another 50% and the extra money was used for a world-wide welfare system, would the situation improve? Or would we/they be no better off? Corruption is rampant, no natural resources, no industry that's not controlled by the west, and millions of under-educated living, breathing people with nowhere to turn.

Thousands of people die in the Congo, it enters the western consciousness for a few minutes, then after a commercial we're back to our distractions of terror alerts, Mike Tyson and severe weather in --------.

No one wants to care about Africa, because the powers that be have deemed it so.

lurkette

I think part of the reason nobody wants to care about Africa is because the problem is so complex and so varied depending on which country/region you're talking about. "The Problem" is not monolithic. And it's going to take lots of time - maybe generations. Any outside-imposed changes are going to be temporary at best, resented at worst. Looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, these countries need a lot of basics met before they can worry about government, including safe homes, clean water, nutritious food, universal education, birth control for women who want it, and sustainable resources. One thing, besides the IMF accountability I mentioned, that would help immensely is an end to Western countries' agricultural subsidies for their own farmers. We provide subsidies that allow our farmers to sell products at a price so low that it pushes developing countries out of the market as producers. And yes, that's going to hurt.

Part of me thinks we'll never see an end to this problem, but I also think there has to be some way to sort things out. We're witnessing the aftermath of a number of transitions from colonial power, and it may take a while before things simply stabilize on their own. But I don't think it'll happen without Western intervention, and without sacrifice on the part of the 25% of the people in industrialized nations who have the highest standards of living and the highest rates of consumption.

__________________
"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

- Anatole France

Dragonlich

What might be interesting: many former colonies had excellent transportation systems, railways in particular. Decades of neglect removed that asset almost everywhere.

Why would it be different if we were to invest now?

The_Dude

india is an example of that.

brit's left behind one of the best rail system on earth and it's still in use (stuff is falling apart, but it's still working).

indian railways is also the world's largest employer

__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

magic_hat

dragonlich has a point when touching on the environment. it is true that many things cannot be done to battle the natural surroundings....i feel it is very hard for foriegn nations to intervene when we really have no idea what people want.... sure they want to live disease free and be prosperous....but thats also what WE want, and society has been fucked up because of our general selfishness....the people that created the nation we live in had forced their people to come here and farm and reap no benefits..