How Europe and America Contribute to the Nightmare of Africa
By: Victor Lensora
I’m just briefly going to explain one of the ways that the E.U. and the U.S. help make Africa poorer and put many African farmers out of jobs.
Basically, in brief, in Europe and America the government massively subsidises the production of agricultural foods and other agricultural commodities. An example of this was the Mark 1 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) introduced into Europe that worked on a “paid to produce” scheme; this meaning, that the more you produced, the more the government would subsidise you, as a result huge surpluses were produced!
In turn, this means that supply of agricultural commodities in the US and the EU are much greater than demand, and so they have large amounts of surpluses in these commodities, to solve this problem, they then “dump” these products on the African market, selling them at a below production cost price, and so undercut the African farmers. This obviously means that the African farmers cannot compete with these low cost products and therefore are forced out of their business, and forced further into poverty as the Westerners repatriate money that should have been going to the African farmers!
This along with Multi National grain companies (MNC’s) taking over the local farmers markets in Africa, effectively taking the money out of Africa back into the more economically developed countries (MEDC’s) makes this even harder on the poor farmers and therefore Africa, all helping to slow down Africa’s industrialisation. They are essentially contributing to what is already a horrific situation in Africa
So next time you hear about how the EU is generously selling food for low prices to Africa, take another, closer look, see how it affects the farmers over in Africa who are getting put out of work, and how at the same time, the EU and the US are gaining by getting rid of unwanted food! Always remember there are deeper economic knock on effects to what seem simple events!
Victor Lensora - Owner of the New, Controversial Blog that has been causing a stir with its unusual and often controversial takes on life. It’s a must to read: http://controversial-times.blogspot.com/