There really is no obvious connection between the two
elements in my title, but both are on my mind so we’ll see if they come
together.
Africa
first. The continent whence we all came (and not that long ago; most
archeologists now think it was a mere 50,000 years), Mommy Africa, has been the
object of colonial exploitation for centuries, so you’d think that in this
“post-colonial era” our continent of origin might be given a break. Not a
chance. Now that the slave catchers and British plantation owners and
apartheiders have been given the boot, the exploiters simply line up for the
next, slightly more subtle phase: getting title to the farmland. The
facilitators are the post-colonial governments, all desperately in need of cash
and development. The victims are, as usual, the poor farmers trying to eke out
a living on small plots they’ve always depended on for subsistence. The
villains are big multinational corporations seeking to cash in on what they see
as the next big profit-generator: food in a world moving towards mass
starvation. So the smart money is
going towards the buying up or long-term leasing of farmland in areas already
half starving themselves—sub-Saharan Africa, in countries like Sierra Leone and
Ethiopia. That it will put small farmers and their families out of business,
push millions more of these victims into large cities or refugee camps where
they will be unable to work or feed themselves and provide the next images of
babies with swollen stomachs and flies feeding on their eyes—this doesn’t seem
to bother or deter these captains of finance. Their only goal is to find the
next big cash cow, and food-growing is apparently where they think it’s at.
The
Oakland Institute (www.oaklandinstitute.org)
is at the forefront of trying to draw attention to the developing bonanza (or
catastrophe, depending on which view you take). Its website features several
articles drawing attention to what it calls the “growing global concern about
the race for prime farmland in the world’s poorest countries.” The article “Sierra
Leone: Local Resistance Grows as Investors Snap up Land,” Guardian, April 11, 2012, for example, points out that
between 2000 and 2010, the rush for land had claimed upwards of 200 million
hectares of land, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, including 17% of Sierra Leone’s
arable land. Another article reporting on a conference sponsored by the Oakland
Institute itself, filled in what kinds of commodities the new industrial
plantations grow for export: sugarcane for ethanol, crude oil palm, rubber, and
large-scale rice production. Speakers at the conference decried these
developments, pointing out that just as small farm holdings (they employ about
3.5 million people—roughly 2/3 of the population) were beginning to come back
after Sierra Leone’s long civil war, their recovery is being threatened by the
land grab. As one farmer, who has lost her cropland to the Swiss investor,
Addax Bioenergy, lamented:
“How are we going to get food security if you give all the
upland land to the investors? We beg you to listen to us….We are suffering
because we have nowhere to go. You come out from war, build a house and now
when you speak out, they lock you up.”
A landowner and member of parliament, Sheka Musa Sam,
referred to the recent lease of 6,500 hectares of land in his district by
Socfin Agricultural Company:
“There is no way we can just sit down for
50 years without getting a living. We need to come together and form a united
front. We can’t let them make us slaves on our own land. This evil thing will make
the poor people even poorer.”
What Musa Sam and others referred to were the endless
problems caused by the land deals:
the overwhelming negative impacts on women who lose
their livelihoods and food production; the effect on children’s education who
have to drop out of school because their mothers can no longer pay their school
fees; increased hunger, rising food prices and despoiled water supplies; the
devastating environmental effects of the investors’ operations; and also
concerns about the way the industrial plantations shred the social fabric of
rural communities, causing marriage breakdowns, unwanted teenage pregnancies,
increased incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, and even the loss of
self-esteem when one loses one’s self-employment.
In short, what is being reproduced in Africa are all
the ills of industrial farming and industrial development we have seen
globally.
The
Oakland Institute recently wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to
discuss the issues of the land-grab in a May 19 meeting he had with Ethiopian
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Whether the letter did any good is anyone’s guess,
but we can imagine that concern for African farmers was not nearly as high on
the U.S. priority list as keeping Ethiopia from becoming a ‘safe haven’ for
terrorists. What was probably also high on that list was making Africa equally ‘safe’
for genetically-engineered seed from the likes of Monsanto. For although this
President has direct roots in Africa, he can never forget what another
president (the great Calvin Coolidge) once memorably said:
..the chief business of the American
people is business.
Which forms a nice segue into the second topic at
hand: the business of Princess making. This is the preoccupation of Berkeley
writer Peggy Orenstein—who calls it the Princess Industrial Complex. Her recent
book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter,
suggests the idea. What Orenstein, herself the mother of a young girl, has
found over several years is that American girls are everywhere bombarded with a
self-image that seems cute and harmless on the surface, but in reality masks
its own kind of grab: a grab for the minds of children and the dollars of
parents so eager to indulge their daughters in the fantasy that they are innocent
royals, as to be blind to the gross commercialism in which they are partaking
and to the underlying dynamics of this fantasy. In a recent article on the
subject, “Dodging Disney in the Delivery Room,” (NPR, Feb. 9, 2011) Orenstein quotes
from a NY Times report that
“Disney has begun sending sales reps into 580 hospitals
nationwide. The reps are offering new moms, within
hours of giving birth, a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit for their babies if they
sign up for e-mail alerts from DisneyBaby.com. The idea is to encourage
mothers to infuse their infants with brand loyalty as if it is mother's milk.”
Yes. You read that right: now, not even the delivery
room is safe from the predatory sales pitches of corporate America. This sales “push”
is meant to do two things: first, to duplicate the success among preschool
girls of the Disney Princess line, hyped up in 2000 to earn a staggering $4
billion annually from a product line numbering no less than 26,000 items! And
second, to rectify what Disney execs noticed as a gap in their sales: little
girls were not becoming consumers until preschool, “resulting in a good three years of potential revenue loss.” If Disney could get expectant mothers thinking
about Disney outfits in the delivery room or earlier, it would be, according to
one Disney exec, a “home run.” No wonder. The Advertising Educational
Foundation sees 1-year-old infants as an “informed, influential and compelling
audience,” able at 12 months to recognize brands and be “strongly influenced”
by advertising! Orenstein rightly counters this, pointing out that “studies
show that children under 8 years old can’t distinguish between ads and
entertainment. Until then, they don’t fully comprehend that advertising is trying
to sell them something…” But tell
that to the predatory bastards in the executive suites and the ad agencies.
Orenstein
has a lot more to say about the perils of the Princess Industrial Complex,
specifically that beneath the cute pink that is pushed upon girls everywhere,
even in supermarkets, there is a cultural demand: you are what you look like,
what people who look at you think of you. Therefore, what you look like as a
girl, as a princess in cute pink dresses, and later as a teen and woman
obsessed with appearance, should be your constant, your sole preoccupation in
life. Nevermind your ability to run and jump, nevermind your ability to read or
calculate or think, nevermind your ability to carve out your own, decent path
in life. You are, you better be, a clean, pretty and pink object, period. Orenstein
also points out what is less obvious: that beneath this preoccupation with pink
innocence lies a parental fear of their daughters growing up, of adulthood, of
adult sexuality. It’s of course a mixed message because on the one hand, girls
are being schooled to think of themselves as pretty and desirable, but on the
other are being schooled in maintaining an impossible innocence. The same dual appeal,
of course, lies at the heart of the Disney world in general: a mania to
represent historical eras, but stripped of all threat and dirt and reality, rendered
innocent and clean as they may exist in fantasy, but never in reality. And the
rubes just love it.
What
can never be forgotten, though, is the main objective here: making money off
innocence or the promise of innocence, making a profit from the impulse to
escape reality and dwell in the land of Cinderella (her wicked stepmother and
sisters cleansed of the reality of the original fairy tale) and the handsome
prince who will come to rescue her.
Think
about it next time you are tempted to buy a princess-themed present for the
delightful little girl in your life. And about how perhaps, just perhaps, the African
land grab and the American princess grab are cut from the same cloth after all.
Lawrence DiStasi
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