Colonialism 2.0?

The Guardian has an article about Middle Eastern countries, South Korea and China snapping up arable land in Africa on a fairly large scale:

Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.

On the more hopeful side, Next Big Future links to an article that crunches some data about overall African poverty and notes that over the last 20 years, poverty has actually fallen fairly significantly, putting a lie to the meme that Africa is just a hole that Western nations are throwing aid money at.

After three decades of zero or negative growth, Africa began a growth spurt around 1995 that has been sustained at least to 2006. The poverty rate in 1970 was 0.398. That is, close to 40% of the entire population lived with less than one dollar a day in Africa in 1970. After a small decline during the first half of the seventies, the rate jumped to around 0.42 in 1985 and stayed more or less at that level for a decade. In 1995 there is a dramatic change in trend: the poverty rate began a decline that led to a ten percentage point reduction by 2006.

That isn’t to say things aren’t still rough, but the narrative that its the same or getting worse is a misrepresentation. Western reporting on Africa focuses on terrorism, starvation, natural disaster, and war, from what I’ve seen. It’s always useful to inoculate a culture of fear based understanding of Africa with some broader based reading.

Filed under the topic Journal on March 8th 2010 at 10:51 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.