Dear Editor,
Someone drew my attention to an article published in the London Guardian on August 26 last. The contents are instructive given the raging debate on the EPA.
The author, George Monbiot, references Mike Davis’s book Late Victorian Holocausts in which he cites the example of Lord Lytton overseeing the export to England of a record 6.4M hundredweight of wheat while there was famine in India in the 1870s. He claims that a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab and he takes the form of the European Trade Commissioner. He says that Peter Mandelson’s office hopes to impose a treaty that will permit Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest people in Africa.
The example he cites is Senegal in which seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people comes from fish.
The EU has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can no longer meet European demand. The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the Government of Senegal, granting British fleets access to its waters. Muscled out by European trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumbling; the number of boats run by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.
He refers to a recent report by ActionAid showing that fishing families that once ate three times a day are now eating only once or twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The same thing has happened in all the West African countries with which the EU has maintained fisheries agreements. In return for wretched amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been looted.
The Government of Senegal knows this, and in 2006 it refused to renew its fishing agreement with the EU.
In details eerily reminiscent of our experience with the EPA he goes on to say that Mandelson’s office is trying to negotiate Economic Partnership Agreements with African countries that were supposed to have been concluded by the end of last year, but many countries, including Senegal, have refused to sign. The agreements insist that European companies have the right both to establish themselves freely on African soil, and to receive national treatment.
Again, mirroring some of the concerns expressed by our own academics and luminaries he points out that this means that the host country is not allowed to discriminate between its own businesses and European companies. Senegal would be forbidden to ensure that its fish are used to sustain its own industry and to feed its own people.
This is one instance of the food colonialism that is again coming to govern the relations between rich and poor counties. As global food supplies tighten, rich consumers are pushed into competition with the hungry.
He concludes that where once they used gunboats and sepoys, the rich nations now use cheque books and lawyers to seize food from the hungry that the scramble for resources has begun, that the rich world’s governments will protect themselves from the political cost of shortages, even if it means that other people must starve.
Sir Shridath Ramphal has implored the Caribbean to return the debt we owe Africa by not signing the EPA until their concerns are addressed. He has pointed out that when they had nothing to lose by going it alone, they had solidarity with the Caribbean.
It looks as if without solidarity not just with Africa but among ourselves in the Caribbean we are knowingly entertaining a Trojan horse.
Or shall we call this game ‘Trojan-horse trading’?
Yours faithfully,
F Collins
