While the world is looking ahead at food shortages, agribusiness, food distributors, and retailers see this as another opportunity for profit and plunder in Africa using a strategy that will only bring more poverty, dependency, and ecological damage to the continent.
The ‘experts’ at the World Bank meeting spoke of boosting ‘the productivity of Africa’s farm sector, creating jobs, improving livelihoods and alleviating poverty’. You’d swear that they were kind, compassionate people sincerely interested in the welfare of Africa’s family farmers and food security on the continent. Until, that is, you examine who they are and what it is they really have in mind for African agriculture.