Memo to Attenborough: Capitalism, not human beings, is the earth’s 'plague'

TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s programmes are usually fascinating and informative but when it comes to his views on population control, he is talking rubbish. Reactionary rubbish at that.

“Human beings are a plague on the earth,” Attenborough says in an interview with the Radio Times. If we don’t limit “the frightening explosion in human numbers, the natural world will do it for us”.

Attenborough (president of the Malthusian Optimum Population Trust) calls for urgent measures to cut population growth in developing countries: “We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves…”

But Ethiopia is actually a classic example of why this is absolute nonsense. If the calories grown in Ethiopia stayed in Ethiopia then there would be no problem feeding the whole population. But the government’s economic plan is dependent on forcing its own citizens off the land and handing it over to global agribusiness to grow crops for export.

Ethiopia has had a consistently high annual growth in GDP throughout the last two decades. In 2011, it was 7%, compared to an overall global growth rate of 3.9% in the same year, and most of this expansion is accounted for by agriculture.

The government has a 10-year plan to double the size of the economy, and this means doubling industrial agriculture and agricultural products such as refined sugar and leather. This is to be achieved by selling or leasing millions of acres of land to global agri-businesses.

The removal of a planned total of 1.5 million rural families to new "model" villages in four regions, including approximately 45,000 households in Gambella province, is well underway. Claims that people are going voluntarily and that jobs and services are waiting for them are a pack of lies.

One group of refugees from Gambella is taking legal action against the British Department for International Development. Britain is one of the biggest contributors to the Protection of Basic Services (PBS) programme which pays for corrupt officials and soldiers and infrastructure for the clearances.

The legal action, undertaken by British law firm Leigh Day, is being launched from the world’s biggest refugee camp at Dadaab in northern Kenya where Ethiopians fled after reaching the “model villages” to find there was nothing there.

The World Bank endorses the Ethiopian government’s desire to get people out of what it calls “overpopulated rural settings”, but it admits that in spite of all this recent growth “the absolute number of poor is almost the same as 15 years ago and a significant proportion of the population remains just above the poverty line and vulnerable to shocks”.

It is true that population of Ethiopia is growing at around 2.1% per year, but that rate of growth is slowing. The fertility rate, i.e. the average number of births per woman, is still relatively high at 5.7, but this is also slowing. The rate of births always increases when early deaths from wars, disease or famine increases. It slows when things are more stable but it takes time for that social change to take hold.

As more and more land is cleared of people or of trees and jungle, and subjected to the intensive farming practices of the global chemical corporations, so desertification and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase. Famine and hunger also rises, as we have seen.

If there was a fair distribution of food, care and support, health and education in Ethiopia and all the countries of the world, and if the people owned the land they farm, there would be no problem feeding people. This approach would also protect the eco-system because it would be sustainable.

People are not the problem, Sir David, global capitalism and its relentless drive for “growth” is. I hope you will be making a programme about that soon!

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Profit hunger driving world famine

The unchecked surge in the power of global agri-business is bringing the world to the brink of an unprecedented famine. At a world summit on food and agriculture which ended in Rome yesterday, the onus was placed firmly on the governments of developing nations to deliver food security to their people. The G8 countries did not even bother to send representatives.

If they had been there, they might have had to explain why it is that governments in developing countries are consistently unable to feed their populations, even when they are doing everything they can to follow the capitalist, free market development model proposed by the G8, World Bank and IMF.

Take Ethiopia, which is once again in the midst of a famine, in spite of a dramatic economic surge which has transformed the country’s economy. Over the past few years infrastructure development and industry have expanded dramatically. The nostrum is that this kind of profit-driven growth will in the end benefit the population as a whole – and yet people go on starving.

This is the country where the Blue Nile rises, and fertile land is plentiful. The government is now exploiting it according to the capitalist growth model. There is a booming government-backed industry growing flowers for export, with extensive irrigation and application of nitrates. And 300,000 acres of fertile land were sold to an Indian corporation this year for around $1 dollar an acre.

GRAIN, an organisation which campaigns with small farmers has exposed this global land grab. "We're seeing over 40 million hectares of prime farm land being taken over by financial investors and rich states. We're talking about $100 billion that's being mobilised. Essentially financial investors have seen that in the food crisis there's money to be made in farmland and they're buying it up very cheap," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN.

The issue faced by the peoples of the world is not food shortages, but the intense commodification of food and land which is taking place alongside changes brought about by climate change.

Countries which have previously been able to feed their populations, such as Uganda and Paraguay, are now facing hunger. China is buying up land in other countries to try and deal with their own food shortages, caused by climate change and by the capitalist model of development now dominating the Chinese economy.

The food processing industry threatens the existence of farming even in wealthy countries such as the US and Britain. Farmers are no longer producing food, but raw materials which the global food industries process into “alue added” commodities, expanding the potential for profit. For an excellent example of how this process is being presented to people click here to see the latest McCain advert.

The raw materials producers – we call them farmers – are consistently driven down on price, and the global corporations stand between them and their potential market, ensuring that we have to buy our food from supermarkets and not from the producer.

Now this has been extended to the point where the food processing businesses are simply cutting farmers out of the process altogether and taking over the land, so that every scrap of profit goes their way. And the industrial methods they use are creating deserts and intensifying climate change.

While people in developing countries suffer from famine, their exported calories are being consumed in the west, in the form of cheap, high-fat, high-calorie diets, leading to a massive health crisis.

The movement for local food and grow-your-own may be on the right track in addressing an aspect of the problem, but it is viable only in small patches and does nothing to assist people who have no land, no economic resources and no power. That is concentrated in the hands of a handful of agri-corporations and client governments. How to overturn this obscene staten of affairs is what we need to address to prevent a global famine.

Penny Cole
Environment editor