There is a single country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has enough arable land to feed the entire rest of the Continent with food left to spare. Africa is the most resource rich land mass on the planet. Western nations (and increasingly China) have thrived off of the stolen natural and human resources of Africa for Centuries. From the extraction of coltan (a metallic mineral which allows cell phone batteries to retain a charge), to the displacement of Africa’s best prepared minds (brain drain) through Western neo/colonialism; from the guinea pig testing ground for pharmaceutical companies, to the dumping ground for weapons manufactures; from the illegal fishing off the Somali coast, to the unethical influence peddling of Uncle Tom African leaders, Africa is exploited, and that, unabated and without interruption.

Foreign nations, US colleges (Harvard, Vanderbilt, and many others), and private corporations are partnering with so-called African leaders in parasitic relationships to lease or buy vast areas (more than twice the size of Montana and counting) of the most fertile farmland throughout the African Continent. This land is being used to grow food and ship it back to their respective countries. Nikhil Aziz, executive director of Grassroots International, a human rights and international development organization that supports community-led sustainable development projects, sums it up this way:

African land is being sought in 90-year leases either to grow food crops for export to those countries with scarce arable land or to grow fuel crops like jatropha and palm oil for ethanol, even as almost 300 million Africans are hungry. Or, the land is sometimes being snapped up simply for speculative purposes.

We must come to understand that, technically, there is no actual food shortage in Africa. The Continent is producing sufficient quantities of food, even in the midst of drought stricken regions. But the food is not used to feed Africans. This is why we need to complete the revolutionary struggles that began so many years ago by the likes of Cabral, Biko, and Lumumba. Africa is not yet free.

What we find is that many of the nations which experience food shortages actually produce large amounts of food on land which they’ve either leased or sold to foreign nations or US and Indian corporations. The shocking irony is that many of these African countries have come to rely on food aid imports from Western NGOs at the precise moment that they’re exporting food grown on their own soil for other wealthier nations — indeed, some of the very same nations which run those NGO’s. It’s quite appalling!

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eta: source vox union