Corporations Descend on Africa to Securitize Natural Resources for Profit

Click to Enlarge

Susanne Posel, Contributor
Activist Post

Corporations are infiltrating Africa to profit from the land.

An $11 million dollar project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Coca-Cola Corporation are employing 50,000 Kenyan and Ugandan smallholders to produce fruit for Minute Maid, a subsidiary for Coca-Cola.

Mutli-national corporations are descending on Africa to utilize their land in the hopes that crop yields will boost their profit margins.

Efforts like the Gitau’s banana project, which produces varied crops, have invested in improved transportation while exploiting small-scale farmers in a blueprint plan to revolutionize Africa’s unused arable land.

“Africa is now the last frontier in terms of arable land,” said James Nyoro, the Rockefeller Foundation’s managing director for Africa. “With the population growing to 9 billion, the rest of the world will have to depend upon Africa to feed it.”

“I have no doubt whatsoever that Africa can feed itself and that Africa can be a major contributor to world food security,” Namanga Ngongi, the former president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

Researchers for the British Geological Survey (BGS) and the University of London have uncovered underground aquifers of water in Africa that are 100 times the amount found on the surface of the continent; and have written a paper in the Environmental Research Letters journal. The created a detailed map of the underground water.

This discovery could be the largest attempt at water privatization.

Corporations like Coca-Cola and Nestle, through third-party corporation True Alaska, have taken excessive amounts of water from water-starved communities, only to bottle it and sell it back to them. Once these corporations purchase the mineral rights to land they own, they turn their privately-owned “city water” into bottled Dasani. The price consumers pay is equivalent to 1000 times its actual worth.

In the 1990s, the World Bank required numerous impoverished countries (like Africa) to privatize their water supplies as a condition of economic assistance.

Andrew Mitchell, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for International Development is delighted by this find. “This is an important discovery. This research, which the British Government has funded, could have a profound effect on some of the world’s poorest people.”

As Africa struggles with internal conflict caused by nations like the US who want to securitize their natural resources, multi-national corporations are using this opportunity to make money from a tragic situation.

Costs to Africa’s government will be substantial while these corporations aggressively employ marketing strategies within this developing nation.

Their purpose is to use corporatism to extract Africa’s natural resources.

Susanne Posel is the Chief Editor of Occupy Corporatism. Our alternative news site is dedicated to reporting the news as it actually happens; not as it is spun by the corporately funded mainstream media. You can find us on our Facebook page .