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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Jul 21 2011 - 18:10:13 EDT
Somalia: the Real Causes of Famine
by Michel Chossudovsky
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<http://www.globalresearch.ca> Global Research, July 21, 2011
For the last twenty years, Somalia has been entangled in a "civil war"
amidst the destruction of both its rural and urban economies.
The country is now facing widespread famine. According to reports, tens of
thousands of people have died from malnutrition in the last few months. The
lives of several million people are threatened.
The mainstream media casually attributes the famine to a severe drought
without examining the broader causes.
An atmosphere of "lawlessness, gang warfare and anarchy" is also upheld as
one of the major causes behind the famine.
But who is behind the lawlessness and armed gangs?
Somalia is categorized as a "failed state", a country without a government.
But how did it become a "failed state"? There is ample evidence of foreign
intervention as well as covert support of armed militia groups. Triggering
"failed states" is an integral part of US foreign policy. It is part of a
military-intelligence agenda.
According to the UN, a situation of famine prevails in southern Bakool and
Lower Shabelle, areas in part controlled by Al Shahab, a jihadist militia
group affiliated to Al Qaeda.
Both the UN and the Obama administration had accused Al Shahab of imposing
"a ban on foreign aid agencies in its territories in 2009". What the reports
do not mention, however, is that Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (HSM)
("Movement of Striving Youth") is funded by Saudi Arabia and supported
covertly by Western intelligence agencies.
The backing of Islamic militia by Western intelligence agencies is part of a
broader historical pattern of covert support to Al Qaeda affiliated and
jihadist organizations in a number of countries, including, more recently,
Libya and Syria.
The broader question is: What outside forces triggered the destruction of
the Somali State in the early 1990s?
Somalia remained self-sufficient in food until the late 1970s despite
recurrent droughts. As of the early 1980s, its national economy was
destabilized and food agriculture was destroyed.
The process of economic dislocation preceded the onset of the civil war in
1991. Economic and social chaos resulting from IMF "economic medicine" had
set the stage for for the launching of a US sponsored "civil war".
An entire country with a rich history of commerce and economic development,
was transformed into a territory.
In a bitter irony, this open territory encompasses significant oil wealth.
Four US oil giants had already positioned themselves prior to the onset of
the Somali civil war in 1991:
Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil
companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive
concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali
countryside.
According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia
was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips
in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre
was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. ...
Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S.
military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen
dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran
East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a
former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the
U.S. corporate oil stake.
But corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies
are well positioned to pursue Somalia's most promising potential oil
reserves the moment the nation is pacified. And the State Department and
U.S. military officials acknowledge that one of those oil companies has done
more than simply sit back and hope for pece.
Conoco Inc., the only major multinational corporation to maintain a
functioning office in Mogadishu throughout the past two years of nationwide
anarchy, has been directly involved in the U.S. government's role in the
U.N.-sponsored humanitarian military effort.(Quoted in
<http://articles.latimes.com/1993-01-18/news/mn-1337_1_oil-reserves> The Oil
Factor In Somalia | COLUMN ONE : The Oil Factor in Somalia : Four American
petroleum giants had agreements with the African nation before its civil war
began. They could reap big rewards if peace is restored. - Los Angeles Times
1993)
Somalia had been a colony of Italy and Britain. In 1969, a post-colonial
government was formed under president Mohamed Siad Barre; major social
programs in health and education were implemented, rural and urban
infrastructure was developed in the course of the 1970s.
The early 1980s marks a major turning point.
The IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) was imposed on
sub-Saharan Africa. The recurrent famines of the 1980s and 1990s are in
large part the consequence of IMF-World Bank "economic medicine".
In Somalia, ten years of IMF economic medicine laid the foundations for the
transition towards a framework of economic dislocation and social chaos.
By the late 1980s, following recurrent "austerity measures" imposed by the
Washington consensus, wages in the public sector had collapsed to 3 dollars
a month.
The following article first published in 1994 in Le Monde diplomatique and
Third World Resurgence centers on the historical causes of famine in
Somalia.
This article was subsequently integrated in my book The Globalization of
Poverty and the New World Order, first edition 1997, second edition, Global
Research. Montreal, 2003
_____
Somalia: the Real Causes of Famine
by Michel Chossudovsky
First published in 1994, Third World Resurgence and Le Monde diplomatique
The IMF Intervention in the Early 1980s
Somalia was a pastoral economy based on "exchange" between nomadic herdsmen
and small agriculturalists. Nomadic pastoralists accounted for 50 percent of
the population. In the 1970s, resettlement programs led to the development
of a sizeable sector of commercial pastoralism. Livestock contributed to 80
percent of export earnings until 1983. Despite recurrent droughts, Somalia
remained virtually self-sufficient in food until the 1970s.
The IMF-World Bank intervention in the early 1980s contributed to
exacerbating the crisis of Somali agriculture. The economic reforms
undermined the fragile exchange relationship between the "nomadic economy"
and the "sedentary economy" - i.e. between pastoralists and small farmers
characterized by money transactions as well as traditional barter. A very
tight austerity program was imposed on the government largely to release the
funds required to service Somalia's debt with the Paris Club. In fact, a
large share of the external debt was held by the Washington-based financial
institutions.' According to an ILO mission report:
[T]he Fund alone among Somalia's major recipients of debt service payments,
refuses to reschedule. (...) De facto it is helping to finance an adjustment
program, one of whose major goals is to repay the IMF itself.
Towards the Destruction of Food Agriculture
The structural adjustment program reinforced Somalia's dependency on
imported grain. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, food aid increased
fifteen-fold, at the rate of 31 percent per annum.' Combined with increased
commercial imports, this influx of cheap surplus wheat and rice sold in the
domestic market led to the displacement of local producers, as well as to a
major shift in food consumption patterns to the detriment of traditional
crops (maize and sorghum). The devaluation of the Somali shilling, imposed
by the IMF in June 1981, was followed by periodic devaluations, leading to
hikes in the prices of fuel, fertilizer and farm inputs. The impact on
agricultural producers was immediate particularly in rain-fed agriculture,
as well as in the areas of irrigated farming. Urban purchasing power
declined dramatically, government extension programs were curtailed,
infrastructure collapsed, the deregulation of the grain market and the
influx of "food aid" led to the impoverishment of farming communities.'
Also, during this period, much of the best agricultural land was
appropriated by bureaucrats, army officers and merchants with connections to
the government.' Rather than promoting food production for the domestic
market, the donors were encouraging the development of so-called "high
value-added" fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and cotton for export on the best
irrigated farmland.
Collapse of the Livestock Economy
As of the early 1980s, prices for imported livestock drugs increased as a
result of the depreciation of the currency. The World Bank encouraged the
exaction of user fees for veterinarian services to the nomadic herdsmen,
including the vaccination of animals. A private market for veterinary drugs
was promoted. The functions performed by the Ministry of Livestock were
phased out, with the Veterinary Laboratory Services of the ministry to be
fully financed on a cost-recovery basis. According to the World Bank:
Veterinarian services are essential for livestock development in all areas,
and they can be provided mainly by the private sector. (... Since few
private veterinarians will choose to practice in the remote pastoral areas,
improved livestock care will also depend on "para vets" paid from drug
sales.'
The privatization of animal health was combined with the absence of
emergency animal feed during periods of drought, the commercialization of
water and the neglect of water and rangeland conservation. The results were
predictable: the herds were decimated and so were the pastoralists, who
represent 50 percent of the country's population. The "hidden objective" of
this program was to eliminate the nomadic herdsmen involved in the
traditional exchange economy. According to the World Bank, "adjustments" in
the size of the herds are, in any event, beneficial because nomadic
pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa are narrowly viewed as a cause of
environmental degradation."
The collapse in veterinarian services also indirectly served the interests
of the rich countries: in 1984, Somalian cattle exports to Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf countries plummeted as Saudi beef imports were redirected to
suppliers from Australia and the European Community. The ban on Somali
livestock imposed by Saudi Arabia was not, however, removed once the
rinderpest disease epidemic had been eliminated.
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Destroying the State
The restructuring of government expenditure under the supervision of the
Bretton Woods institutions also played a crucial role in destroying food
agriculture. Agricultural infrastructure collapsed and recurrent expenditure
in agriculture declined by about 85 percent in relation to the mid-1970s."
The Somali government was prevented by the IMF from mobilizing domestic
resources. Tight targets for the budget deficit were set. Moreover, the
donors increasingly provided "aid", not in the form of imports of capital
and equipment, but in the form of "food aid". The latter would in turn be
sold by the government on the local market and the proceeds of these sales
(i.e. the so-called "counterpart funds") would be used to cover the domestic
costs of development projects. As of the early 1980s, "the sale of food aid"
became the principal source of revenue for the state, thereby enabling
donors to take control of the entire budgetary process."
The economic reforms were marked by the disintegration of health and
educational programmes.'3 By 1989, expenditure on health had declined by 78
percent in relation to its 1975 level. According to World Bank figures, the
level of recurrent expenditure on education in 1989 was about US$ 4 Per
annum per primary school student down from about $ 82 in 1982. From 1981 to
1989, school enrolment declined by 41 percent (despite a sizeable increase
in the population of school age), textbooks and school materials disappeared
from the class-rooms, school buildings deteriorated and nearly a quarter of
the primary schools closed down. Teachers' salaries declined to abysmally
low levels.
The IMF-World Bank program has led the Somali economy into a vicious circle:
the decimation of the herds pushed the nomadic pastoralists into starvation
which in turn backlashes on grain producers who sold or bartered their grain
for cattle. The entire social fabric of the pastoralist economy was undone.
The collapse in foreign exchange earnings from declining cattle exports and
remittances (from Somali workers in the Gulf countries) backlashed on the
balance of payments and the state's public finances leading to the breakdown
of the government's economic and social programs.
Small farmers were displaced as a result of the dumping of subsidized US
grain on the domestic market combined with the hike in the price of farm
inputs. The impoverishment of the urban population also led to a contraction
of food consumption. In turn, state support in the irrigated areas was
frozen and production in the state farms declined. The latter were slated to
be closed down or privatized under World Bank supervision.
According to World Bank estimates, real public-sector wages in 1989 had
declined by 90 percent in relation to the mid-1970s. Average wages in the
public sector had fallen to US$ 3 a month, leading to the inevitable
disintegration of the civil administration." A program to rehabilitate civil
service wages was proposed by the World Bank (in the context of a reform of
the civil service), but this objective was to be achieved within the same
budgetary envelope by dismissing some 40 percent of public-sector employees
and eliminating salary supplements." Under this plan, the civil service
would have been reduced to a mere 25,000 employees by 1995 (in a country of
six million people). Several donors indicated keen interest in funding the
cost associated with the retrenchment of civil servants."
In the face of impending disaster, no attempt was made by the international
donor community to rehabilitate the country's economic and social
infrastructure, to restore levels of purchasing power and to rebuild the
civil service: the macro-economic adjustment measures proposed by the
creditors in the year prior to the collapse of the government of General
Siyad Barre in January 1991 (at the height of the civil war) called for a
further tightening over public spending, the restructuring of the Central
Bank, the liberalization of credit (which virtually thwarted the private
sector) and the liquidation and divestiture of most of the state
enterprises.
In 1989, debt-servicing obligations represented 194.6 percent of export
earnings. The IMF's loan was cancelled because of Somalia's outstanding
arrears. The World Bank had approved a structural adjustment loan for US$ 70
million in June 1989 which was frozen a few months later due to Somalia's
poor macro-economic performance. '7 Arrears with creditors had to be settled
before the granting of new loans and the negotiation of debt rescheduling.
Somalia was tangled in the straightjacket of debt servicing and structural
adjustment.
Famine Formation in sub-Saharan Africa: The Lessons of Somalia
Somalia's experience shows how a country can be devastated by the
simultaneous application of food "aid" and macro-economic policy. There are
many Somalias in the developing world and the economic reform package
implemented in Somalia is similar to that applied in more than 100
developing countries. But there is another significant dimension: Somalia is
a pastoralist economy, and throughout Africa both nomadic and commercial
livestock are being destroyed by the IMF-World Bank program in much the same
way as in Somalia. In this context, subsidized beef and dairy products
imported (duty free) from the European Union have led to the demise of
Africa's pastoral economy. European beef imports to West Africa have
increased seven-fold since 1984: "the low quality EC beef sells at half the
price of locally produced meat. Sahelian farmers are finding that no-one is
prepared to buy their herds"."
The experience of Somalia shows that famine in the late 20th century is not
a consequence of a shortage of food. On the contrary, famines are spurred on
as a result of a global oversupply of grain staples. Since the 1980s, grain
markets have been deregulated under the supervision of the World Bank and US
grain surpluses are used systematically as in the case of Somalia to destroy
the peasantry and destabilize national food agriculture. The latter becomes,
under these circumstances, far more vulnerable to the vagaries of drought
and environmental degradation.
Throughout the continent, the pattern of "sectoral adjustment" in
agriculture under the custody of the Bretton Woods institutions has been
unequivocally towards the destruction of food security. Dependency vis-à-vis
the world market has been reinforced, "food aid" to sub-Saharan Africa
increased by more than seven times since 1974 and commercial grain imports
more than doubled. Grain imports for sub-Saharan Africa expanded from 3.72
million tons in 1974 to 8.47 million tons in 1993. Food aid increased from
910,000 tons in 1974 to 6.64 million tons in l993.
"Food aid", however, was no longer earmarked for the drought-stricken
countries of the Sahelian belt; it was also channeled into countries which
were, until recently, more or less self-sufficient in food. Zimbabwe (once
considered the bread basket of Southern Africa) was severely affected by the
famine and drought which swept Southern Africa in 1992. The country
experienced a drop of 90 percent in its maize crop, located largely in less
productive lands." Yet, ironically, at the height of the drought, tobacco
for export (supported by modem irrigation, credit, research, etc.)
registered a bumper harvest. While "the famine forces the population to eat
termites", much of the export earnings from Zimbabwe's tobacco harvest were
used to service the external debt.
Under the structural adjustment program, farmers have increasingly abandoned
traditional food crops; in Malawi, which was once a net food exporter, maize
production declined by 40 percent in 1992 while tobacco output doubled
between 1986 and 1993. One hundred and fifty thousand hectares of the best
land was allocated to tobacco .2' Throughout the 1980s, severe austerity
measures were imposed on African governments and expenditures on rural
development drastically curtailed, leading to the collapse of agricultural
infrastructure. Under the World Bank program, water was to become a
commodity to be sold on a cost-recovery basis to impoverished farmers. Due
to lack of funds, the state was obliged to withdraw from the management and
conservation of water resources. Water points and boreholes dried up due to
lack of maintenance, or were privatized by local merchants and rich farmers.
In the semi-arid regions, this commercialization of water and irrigation
leads to the collapse of food security and famine.
Concluding Remarks
While "external" climatic variables play a role in triggering off a famine
and heightening the social impact of drought, famines in the age of
globalization are man-made. They are not the consequence of a scarcity of
food but of a structure of global oversupply which undermines food security
and destroys national food agriculture. Tightly regulated and controlled by
international agri-business, this oversupply is ultimately conducive to the
stagnation of both production and consumption of essential food staples and
the impoverishment of farmers throughout the world. Moreover, in the era of
globalization, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program bears a
direct relationship to the process of famine formation because it
systematically undermines all categories of economic activity, whether urban
or rural, which do not directly serve the interests of the global market
system.
(for footnotes see Chapter in the Globalization of Poverty)
_____
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The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order
by Michel Chossudovsky
<http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/GofP.html> Order Online Here
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<http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/SHOPCA3.jpg>
http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/SHOPCA3.jpg
<http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/SHOPCA3.jpg> In this new and
expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author
outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and
the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages
racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as
his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a
globalization of poverty.
This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued
critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving
financially and economically.
In this new enlarged edition –which includes ten new chapters and a new
introduction-- the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in
Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise
of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate
downsizing and trade liberalisation.
<http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ONE311A.html> Michel Chossudovsky is
Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the
Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically
acclaimed website <http://www.globalresearch.ca/> www.globalresearch.ca .
He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been
translated into more than 20 languages.
Published in 11 languages. More than 120,000 copies sold Worldwide.
In these unprecedented economic times, the world is experiencing as a whole
what most of the non-Industrialized world has experienced over the past
several decades. Michel Chossudovsky takes the reader through a nuanced
examination of the intricacies of the global political-economic landscape
and the power players within it; specifically, looking at how the World Bank
and IMF have been the greatest purveyors of poverty around the world,
despite their rhetorical claims to the opposite. These institutions,
representing the powerful Western nations and the financial interests that
dominate them, spread social apartheid around the world, exploiting both the
people and the resources of the vast majority of the world's population. As
Chossudovsky examines in this updated edition, often the programs of these
International Financial Instittutions go hand-in-hand with covert military
and intelligence operations undertaken by powerful Western nations with an
objective to destabilize, control, destroy and dominate nations and people,
such as in the cases of Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
To understand what role these international organizations play today, being
pushed to the front lines and given unprecedented power and scope as ever
before to manage the Global Economic Crisis, one must understand from whence
they came. This book provides a detailed, exploratory, readable and
multi-faceted examination of these institutions and actors as agents of the
'New World Order,' for which they advance the 'Globalization of Poverty.'
<http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/GofP.html> Order Online Here
"In its entirety, the book can and should be read by all with an interest in
world peace and the causes of poverty." Frances Hutchinson, The Ecologist
"This concise, provocative book reveals the negative effects of imposed
economic structural reform, privatization, deregulation and competition. It
deserves to be read carefully and widely." Choice, American Library
Association (ALA)
"The current system, Chossudovsky argues, is one of capital creation through
destruction. The author confronts head on the links between civil violence,
social and environmental stress, with the modalities of market expansion."
Michele Stoddard, Covert Action Quarterly
"This detailed study by an economics insider shows the consequences of
"reforms" in various parts of the world, reveals a clear pattern of callous
neocolonialism. Definitely red-pill material." Richard K. Moore, Whole
Earth.
"As Michel Chossudovsky, author of The Globalisation of Poverty, has pointed
out, an entirely undemocratic world body "has been casually installed in
Geneva, empowered under international law with the mandate to 'police'
country level economic and social policies". This amounts to a "repeal of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights", providing "legitimacy to trade
practices which border on criminality [including] the patenting of human
life forms". John Pilger, New Statesman.
"More than just an austerity program, Chossudovsky believes the conditions
the IMF demands of countries - with little choice but to accept - are
draconian...He also believes the IMF is getting its direction from the
wealthy Wall Street investment banks which act as informal policy advisers
and more formally, help structure and deliver bailout packages. "There are
powerful financial actors behind this," he says. While Chossudovsky, author
of The Globalization Of Poverty, is careful not to suggest a conspiracy, he
says large multinational corporations and investment houses benefit from the
chaos in countries like South Korea and Indonesia once their currencies are
devalued." Laura Eggertson, The Toronto Star
"Michel Chossudovsky is one of the leading intellectuals of the antiwar
movement, perhaps the best, as I find he works his tail off in documenting
the material he presents and is rigorous in his analysis." Jude Wanniski,
Polyconomics.
"Chossudovsky gives us a clear analysis of how the International Monetary
Fund has well served this corporate plan. He gives us case studies of the
''restructuring'' and subsequent impoverishment of the people in countries
like Somalia, Peru and Russia. He lays out the blueprint for the rest of the
world." Briarpatch
"... I recommend to all interested in our political and financial future,
unemployed or in work, to buy or borrow, one of the most informative books
on the consequences of global poverty, written by Michel Chossudovsky." Stan
Kent, Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph
"University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky calls our era a global
''cheap labour economy''. The underlying problem is only made worse by
IMF-sponsored reforms that impoverish millions of people. Economic Justice
Report
"Michel Chossudovsky, offers in his book The Globalisation of Poverty an
impressive presentation of the destructive effects macroeconomic
restructuring has had on Yugoslavia and its 24 million people." Paul
Surlis, National Catholic Reporter
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