The fact that a drought is devastating southern Africa and that millions of workers and peasants face starvation is not due to a "natural disaster." It is a man-made social disaster, caused by the normal way in which the capitalist profit system works.

Adequate irrigation, improved agricultural productivity, measures to halt the advance of the desert, food and water storage facilities, access to land and aid for small farmers--all these would provide protection from natural calamities.

But countries in Africa, like those throughout the semicolonial world, face two related problems. Their economies have been warped and underdeveloped by centuries of colonial and imperialist plunder, leading to much lower levels of agricultural productivity than in the most industrialized nations. And a small handful of billionaire families--in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and elsewhere--are the ones that monopolize markets, set prices, and control distribution, at the expense of the semicolonial world.

Is famine caused by population growth outstripping food supply? No. Despite periodic droughts, floods, and other problems, food production worldwide has climbed at a rate 25 percent above that of population since 1960. But food is a commodity, and decisions on its production and distribution are designed to enrich the owners of imperialist corporations, not to meet the needs of millions. Likewise, the health crises and lack of drinkable water, sewage systems, and access to electricity facing workers and peasants in Africa are perpetuated by imperialist oppression.

The vast bulk of the wealth produced by workers and farmers in Africa--including the extraction of mineral riches and the bounties of land and sea--is simply transferred to the bank accounts of the imperialist rulers. A major vehicle for sucking the wealth out of the oppressed nations is debt bondage--the payment of billions of dollars in interest on increasingly unpayable loans foisted on their pliant governments by the banks of Wall Street and elsewhere.

Washington’s predatory, protectionist trade policies add to the impact of the greater productivity of labor and agriculture in the United States, which enables agribusiness and other corporations to undersell producers in the so-called Third World.

On top of all this, "foreign aid"--always with strings attached--is designed to promote not development but dependence on imports and more indebtedness.

Finance capital enforces its system of pillage and plunder with military force. Today, Washington is moving toward war in the Middle East to establish its supremacy over the region’s vast oil and gas reserves. And the U.S. and French rulers have sent hundreds of troops to Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) under the pretext of protecting lives.

This is what imperialism increasingly has to offer toiling humanity: war, economic catastrophe, and famine.

The means to end these relations of exploitation and brutality lie in the hands of the workers and peasants of Africa, acting in concert with fellow toilers around the world. Their capacity to do so is seen in the continent’s rich history of anti-imperialist and popular struggles, from the post–World War II anticolonial revolutions to the overthrow of apartheid rule.

Thomas Sankara, the principal leader of the popular revolutionary government in the West African country of Burkina Faso in 1983–87, addressed the drought caused by the advancing Saharan desert. The battle against the encroachment of the desert is "above all a struggle against imperialism," he explained.

To address these life-and-death questions, the peasants and workers of Burkina had to make a popular revolution, take political power, and wage a fight to free themselves from imperialist domination. The revolutionary government led by Sankara mobilized the population to expand literacy; nationalize the land; plant trees; improve agricultural techniques; build housing, roads, dams, and reservoirs; and advance the involvement of women in political life.

Working people around the world can join with the struggles of workers and farmers in Africa. Our most important contribution is to demand that Washington and other governments cancel Africa’s foreign debt and remove all their tariffs or other protectionist weapons against Third World countries; and to oppose all imperialist military intervention.
 
 
Related article:
Imperialist plunder of Africa deepens impact of drought  
 
 
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