Mennonite
Central
Committee

Economic Globalization of the Horn of Africa

By Fatima Jibrell, Executive Director, Horn of Africa Relief and Development Organization

Because African political leaders, in general, have delegated their economic planning to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, they no longer have the power to protect their citizens or environment from being exploited by the First World.

People living in rural pastoral, agro, and coastal village communities, as well as the poor urban slum dwellers, have no clue of the magnitude of power and decision-making over their lives – and the lives of their future generations — that mega-profit-making companies of the so-called developed world have been given. The traditional care takers of the land are losing their rights to their natural resources as multi-national corporations devour the forests, wildlife, and oceans leaving behind a wasteland for the local people to survive on.

Companies make agreements not with the people but with the disempowered and downgraded African political leaders. Thus profit may be made from African natural resources and human resources by producing things like flowers, pineapples, coffee, tea, cocoa, and bananas for the taste buds of Europeans and Americans.

However, African countries keep getting the corn and wheat surpluses of Europe and USA. . . . These surpluses many times are contaminated with chemicals . . . . In Africa, importation of food for basic requirements was limited. Communities used to farm and produce for their own food intake and sell the surplus to cities to exchange for items not produced by the family. . . . But global systems belong to the "developed" world. These systems do not recognize nor validate the African self-reliant systems. In fact they discredit . . . and undermine them.

For example, the Dole Company growing pineapples in Kenya generally employs as "human resources" women between the ages of 20 to 40, the peek of their reproductive, as well as productive, years. These workers are struggling hard to get virtual slave labor systems to improve for them. They complain about:

• Poor or no protection from extreme temperatures
• Exposure of harmful chemicals to people, water systems and soil
• Depletion of soil growing capacity by intensive and chemical assisted farming
• Very low wages
• Long hours standing
• No or extremely limited benefits
• Firing women workers or demoting them after prime years of strength

Somalia

In Somalia, which has the longest coast in Africa, marine resources are illegally fished, marine reefs unsettled and fishing boats scrape the sea floor with illegal scrapping equipments. Illegal fishing fleets also clean their ships by our coasts, leaving great expanses of tar and other wastes coming to shore. After such environmentally harmful practices, the fish they collect are labeled European, Japanese or whatever, and then sold at high process in the international markets.

Slavery was also about profit for the then developing world, providing free human resources. Profit makers of today do not claim ownership of individuals, but they are busy making fast profits by exploiting and destroying the natural and human resources in a very cruel and greedy manner.