Mr. Timothy Geithner who is U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Mr. Bill Gates who is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly wrote an article under the title “A New Initiative to Feed the World” in the Wall Street Journal on April 21, 2010. They announced the launch on that day of a program called Global Agriculture and Food Security Program to help farmers in low-income countries grow more food. As of now, the program is a partnership between the United States, Canada, Spain, South Korea and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Placed in the hands of the World bank to host and to distribute its fund, the Program was proposed last year by the G-8 and G-20 nations. At the time, several wealthy nations pledged at least 22 billion dollars over the next three years for the fund, and the authors of the article took the opportunity to remind these nations of their pledges inviting them to begin making good on their promises.
The most Important feature of the program in my view is that it will partner with countries that have developed sound agricultural plans and that already use their own resources to invest in the most effective ways to boost crop production. Indeed, not too far from the African nations whose agriculture needs to be developed, there exist countries that have developed the best agricultural practices in the world and have thus achieved higher yields per acre than even India or China whose achievements the authors of the article are lauding. I am referring to the North African nations whose desert conditions have compelled them to make the most of the little arable land and the minimal water resources they have. For example, it was revealed not long ago that the yield in wheat per acre is almost 3 times as high in Egypt as it is in India. Thus, to partner with the North African countries and to make use of their helping hand to develop agriculture in the sub-Sahara is the best move that the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program can make.
Foremost among these North African nations is Egypt which has already begun to cooperate with many sub-Saharan countries to jointly develop some of the millions of acres that wait being turned into lush green fields. Not only that, but the Egyptians who have good relations and a myriad of cooperation agreements with their oil rich Arab neighbors have enlisted those neighbors into the effort. The latter are now contributing some of their surplus capital to develop not only sub-Saharan Africa but to further develop North Africa as well, including Egypt where private Emirati, Kuwaiti and Saudi capitals are at work in the massive Toshka project – dubbed the New Valley -- where the development of infrastructure, small, medium and large farms as well as other agribusinesses are in full swing turning the yellow sands of the Western Egyptian desert into a valley as green as the Nile Valley.
These efforts closely parallel what is envisaged for the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program where, as reported by the authors of the article, a private-sector account will be set up to achieve the same sort of success. And this is where I have views of my own to complement what the authors have articulated. But before I get into the details of what I would like to see happen, let me explain what I believe are the essential ingredients to making an endeavor such as this succeed not only initially but for the long run too.
For any project to start and to survive in Africa, three conditions must be fulfilled. First, there must be the capital. Second, there must be the know how. Third, there must be the lack of interference from destructive forces coming onto the scene from the outside. This last point is the most important of the three because if you have the first two and have interference from the outside, the capital will disappear and the know how will prove useless in the long run. Indeed, the scenario that played itself most often in sub-Saharan Africa has been that of something starting with great promise only to be sabotaged by outside forces. Billions of dollars were poured into that Continent over the decades but with time, the money ended up in the pocket of the outsiders who came to sabotage and plunder. And the African people were left with nothing but the legacy of that interference, a legacy of civil and cross border wars that ravaged the African homelands.
But how does interference happen? The answer is that interference never happens in an honest or open way. On the contrary, the evildoers who want to deceive other peoples and other nations always adopt the most devious of ways. In fact, the methods utilized to interfere in the progress of nations is becoming so sophisticated that the only way to detect them and stop them is to marshal the resources of the powerful nations because only they have the wherewithal to uncover the tricks of the well financed and well equipped evildoers; only they can put an end to them.
Contrast this reality with the aim of the Program and you will see the need to protect it as you implement it. Mr. Geithner and Mr. Gates say this: “The fund will provide … recipient countries and civil organizations, as well as donors, with a strong voice in determining where investments are made.” And this is where I see the problems originate because while the openness will be necessary, it will invite the evildoers to enter its wide open doors and do their destructive deeds unhindered. Consequently, what is needed is first, the awareness that danger will be lurking right from the start and second, strong measures to detect and fight the evildoers will need to be in place also at the start.
And while the methods used by evil are insidious, their aftermath is anything but hidden. Indeed, the modern history of Egypt has been fashioned by the struggle to combat such evil. The long held dream of the country having been to construct a dam at Aswan to save the waters of the Nile that used to flood it for a few weeks then disappear the rest of the year leaving the fields in near drought condition, the Egyptians asked the World Bank for a loan to finance the construction of the dam. America said no because someone -- most likely a little nobody – whispered in the ear of its Secretary of State that money was fungible and that the loan will only serve to free other monies which can be used to do bad things. Well, Egypt had no sizable source of money except the Suez Canal which was owned by foreign interests. And so the Egyptians nationalized the canal, a move that prompted the two former colonial powers, France and Britain to attack in an effort to retake it. And the rest is history, as they say.
The Egyptians started to build the dam and this prompted the evildoers and their allies in the media to pour rivers of ink to rival the flow of the Nile, portraying the project as a failure and predicting that it will crack and crumble before it is completed or that, if completed, will cause untold damage to Egypt, to the Mediterranean Sea and eventually to the whole world. This went on and on and on not for a year or two, not even for a decade or two but for fifty long years. And some people even now still see fit to denigrate the project while some others such as the foreign minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman express the wish to bomb the dam and flood the country causing damage to Egypt equal to the biblical plagues of antiquity.
Then Libya started its own project to make use of the waters sitting under the desert, and guess what happened! Yes, the same thing as with the Aswan dam happened here too. Some Anglophone prestigious magazines even went as far as to call the project the madman lake playing on its real name, the man-made lake. And while this sort of childish behavior scared potential Western interests from participating in the billions of dollars worth of businesses that produced goods and services for the project, the Oriental companies feasted on them such as the Koreans who got the lion's share of the deals. Not only that but these companies established such a good name for themselves and for their countrymen in the Arab world that they helped other Korean companies win billions of dollars worth of deals in the oil rich Gulf states where the construction of nuclear power stations is a nascent preoccupation with a potential for growth that goes beyond anything you can imagine.
And now that Egypt, together with the other Arab countries and several Asian companies are beginning to work in Africa doing what the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program hopes to do, you have the Western media such as the BBC, PBS, CNN and several other networks talk about these projects in terms so negative, you cannot escape the conclusion that they are paving the way for evil to get in there and feed once again on the money donated by the rich which they will wash down with the blood of the Africans who will listen to them. These ill-advised Africans will fight other Africans to please the smiling reporters from the BBC, PBS, CNN and the other networks who will suggest to them, as they always do, that Black Africa was done in by the Arabs and the Asians. And the simple people of Africa will be motivated to antagonize the hand that came to help them rather than work with it, learn from it and take over when they are ready. And when the blood will start to flow on the African streets and start to flood the African fields, the producers at the headquarters of the BBC, PBS, CNN and the other networks will smile, rub their hands and sit to drink a tall glass of Bloody Mary to celebrate a job bloody well done.
So then what can the US government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation do to ascertain fending off that evil before it grows roots inside the Program they have in mind for Africa? Well, part of what these two are saying in the article is this: “The fund ... will provide recipient countries and civil organizations, as well as donors, with a strong voice in determining where investments are made.” This is well and good except for one thing, the way that evil infiltrates a country it wants to destroy is through the foreign civil organizations that team up with the local civil societies. Evil infects the organs of the body it has infiltrated and metastasizes till it can debilitate the entire body like terminal cancer. This is how the religious nuts, the pedophiles and the Liebermans of this world have entered Africa on previous occasions and this is how they will do it again. They did it as easily as if they had walked through wide open and welcoming doors that did not suspected them. And once inside, these characters gained access to all that they needed to have to sabotage everything in sight. This is what they did with every project in Africa that started with great promise and ended in disaster.
Consequently, America, the Foundation and the other participating nations must put in place an effective system of intelligence to monitor the activities of the individuals who will join the Project to make sure that they are not engaged in activities beyond what the job requires them to do. As for the private organizations, anyone that volunteers to work in Africa must first register with any of the governments involved or with the Foundation. They will fill out an application revealing the names of the individuals they will send to Africa stating in detail what each of these people will do when, where and why. Any deviation from the stated purpose will disqualify not only the individuals but the organizations that sponsor them, and will cause them to be thrown out of Africa. This is what is asked of the United Nations peace keeping forces, and nothing less should be asked of those organizations. As for any freelancer who would go to Africa and pretend to work for the Program or who sets up a parallel operation locally, he or she should be viewed with suspicion and thus be monitored by the system of intelligence described above.
The Administration and the Foundation should also go to that useless thing they call the American Congress and ask it to do something good for a change. That is, to pass a law which will make it a criminal offense if not a crime against humanity for any unregistered foreign civil organization or individual to even try to contact an African civil organization under any pretense. Such act shall be considered an attempt to create the conditions that will lead to the eruption of a civil war or a cross-border one on the Continent. The culprits will be hunted down and brought to justice where the book will be thrown at them whether or not they managed to establish contact with an African organization or succeeded in creating a disturbance. The mere attempt to do any of this will be the crime, and the characters involved will pay dearly for that.
To conclude, the only way to succeed in Africa is to protect the Continent as you build it because evil is too hungry, too alert and too much out of other options, having been kicked out of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America already. And once you have the protective system in place, the rest will be as easy as planting a field in the Spring and harvesting it in the Fall.
Good luck to you all.