One of our regular targets here at the site is Orientalism -- the misguided and dangerous outlook that the great Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said dissected so persuasively during his distinguished career. Said concentrated on exposing Orientalism in the Middle East. He made remarkable progress, but every time a Western politician or analyst tries to use "Islam" or "the Koran" to, say, explain the rise of Hamas, we are reminded that Said's great lifework is far from finished.
Orientalism takes a different form in sub-Saharan Africa. There, Orientalists do not emphasize the "Islamic" angle quite as much, although they do sometimes suggest that a "fault line" running across the Sahel, with an expansive "Islam" to the north and "Christianity" to the south, is a reliable guide to conflict in many countries.
But in Africa, the Orientalists are more likely to emphasize that "ancient tribal enmities" explain contemporary conflict, without necessarily adding the religious dimension.
I recently returned from the West African nation of Cote d'Ivoire, in which fighting with a strong ethnic base is still simmering. Several thousand people are already dead, and up to 1 million are refugees. I produced this fairly lengthy report for The Nation.
The mainstream Western press cites ethnic differences to explain the violence there. I found that citing ethnicity is not "wrong," but woefully incomplete.
In short, Cote d'Ivoire is dominated by millions of small cocoa planters, who grow the raw material from which our chocolate is made. Big Western multinational corporations, like the U.S. agribusinesses Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, shamelessly underpay the small Ivorian farmers for their cocoa beans. I met with these hard-working, likeable people, and I listened to their bitter complaints.
Without a reasonable income from cocoa exports, the Ivorian economy stagnates, promoting frustration, particularly among young men. Unscrupulous local politicians use ethnicity to mobilize support. Violence grows, and then explodes.
One key fact here is that these ethnic differences are not "ancient tribal hatreds." Until the world cocoa market weakened a couple of decades ago, the various ethnicities in Cote d'Ivoire got along well. The economic crisis raised the tensions.
The average well-meaning American sees a brief, confusing report on his television news, in which wild-looking young African men are riding around brandishing weapons in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire's commercial capital. Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland are never mentioned.
I recall reading articles in the 1980s lauding Cote d’Ivoire as an economic model for West Africa. Part of the upbeat story was its participation in the French-sponsored CFA franc currency area, which is at least one of the prerequisites for a stable economy.
Like Zimbabwe, how far Cote d’Ivoire has fallen from those brighter days! The price of cocoa peaked in 1977 and bottomed in 2001 (along with many other commodities) at one-fifth of its record high price.
link to futuresbuzz.com
Why, though, does Cote d’Ivoire remain an undiversified economy, overly dependent on volatilely-priced cocoa and coffee? An important reason is subsidized competition from European Community and North American agricultural policies. Subsidized grain exports from these rich countries drive African farmers out of business. Similarly, second-hand clothing exports from the US (the omnipresent T-shirts with names of US sports teams that you see in photographs of African kids) undercut African textile makers.
Brazil, with its successful WTO case against US cotton subsidies, has led the Global South in protesting subsidized competition from the rich North. But the surface has only been scratched in reforming these policies, which pile on debt in rich countries, even as they impoverish developing economies and force them into excessive reliance on monocrops with their attendant price volatility.
Archer-Daniels-Midland actually exploits both ends of this policy. ADM is a major participant in the tragic US government-sponsored ethanol scam, which burns food (corn) to make ethanol at a net energy loss — both driving up the price of food, and exacerbating the energy shortage. What subsidized grain it doesn’t uselessly burn, ADM dumps in the Third World with US export financing. And, as noted in your article, ADM’s foreign branches hoover up cocoa and coffee from Cote d’Ivoire, acting in concert with its predatory government which sees the country’s monocrops as captive revenue sources.
I could go into the manifold sins and wickedness of the Andreas clan, the rich, politically-influential Jewish family which founded ADM, but it’s beyond the scope of this jeremiad.
It’s Cote d’Ivoire’s responsibility to get its democracy back on track. But a long-term regional objective is for the Global South to renegotiate a free-trade regime which subjects it to subsidized competition from the rich North in sectors such as agriculture and textiles, in which local producers are vitally needed to diversify volatile monocrop economies.
Jim Haygood: I agree with all of your points, except the Andreas clan are not Jewish, but Midwestern Protestant Mennonites.
What does their religion matter at all when it comes to corporate farming?
Why does it matter for who can or can’t enter (let alone live in) Israel?
Thank you both for illuminating the Cote d’Ivoire violence. Would you explain further how diversification of crops would substantially protect poor countries? When the bottom falls out of the world market, the poorest are hit hardest. To the extent that third world countries are dependent on the markets of rich countries, African food producing countries will remain vulnerable to our economic crises.
How does diversification help?
Elliot: You raise an excellent question. At present, third world countries rely on a fairly narrow range of agricultural exports, which tend to rise or fall more or less together. So diversification would be only a small part of the solution.
Third world nations that rely on oil or minerals are better off these days, largely due to increased demand from China — (a nation which, by the way, is growing despite ignoring nearly every World Bank/International Monetary Fund orthodoxy of the 1980s and ’90s). But in most cases the earnings from oil, copper and so on accrue to a fairly small elite, which also over time increases political unrest.
Original third world thinkers like Walden Bello and Ha-Joon Chang advocate relying less on exports, more on producing for local or regional consumption.
My own view is that there is no easy answer. Some leftists point out rightly that the third world grew faster from 1950-1980, when it relied on a bigger role for government (Nasserism in Egypt, for instance). But these same leftists forget to add that those models started to fail, which made room for the nefarious World Bank/IMF/Washington Consensus.
Some humility is in order. The present orthodoxy is failing — in Cote d’Ivoire at this moment, with awful consequences — but no one that I know of has come up with a clear alternative.
At a bare mimimum, though, we should pay fairer prices to the people who actually produce our cocoa, coffee, bananas, and cotton.
Why would large corporations, many of them international, and international hedge funds a la Soros et al, agree to pay fairer prices to the laborers in the vineyards around the world? How’s the minimum wage doing in the USA?
China — (a nation which, by the way, is growing despite ignoring nearly every World Bank/International Monetary Fund orthodoxy of the 1980s and ’90s)
I had to laugh when I read this. I got a half-degree in political science with a focus on international economics, and it was downright flabbergasting to compare the WB/IMF models (and their effects) to the “Asian tigers,” which all did EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of what the WB/IMF was telling the Third World to do. And the results speak for themselves. Either the WB/IMF are some of the most evil MFers on earth, or they are some of the stupidest MFers on earth. (And MF in this case does not stand for “Monetary Fund.”)
Thanks for the illuminating article. I really appreciate summaries of important events from people in the know, people I trust.
Not mutually exclusive, Ms. Olsen.
Also, it’s important to realize that the World Bank and the IMF are not motivated by elevating the quality of life and strength of economy in “undeveloped” (i.e. colonially abused) countries any more than private health insurance companies in the US are motivated by seeing that their patients get all of their medical ailments addressed and cared for.
Elliot, one of the best films about single crop dependence is film about Senegal nuts.
link to youtube.com
and TED case studies about Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire, Marocco, ect are short and very much to the point:
link to www1.american.edu
Eva: Thank you so much for the links. I’ll be looking at them later.
James and Eva, thanks. Many developing countries export basic staples while the local population starves. It seems that the theorists’ idea of growing for the local economy would restore Cote d’Ivoire to a state of agricultural autarky. Not surprisingly, the TED piece (that Eva posted) shows that Cote d’Ivoire’ cash cocoa industry was started by European colonists.
As long as Third World countries are growing food for us they will be subject to the abuses that Citizen mentioned and the protectionism described in Eva’s first link (informative and entertaining!).
The weakest always get the shaft and Africa is so conveniently out of sight.
the farmers should organize. i understand what you said about the buyers going out to small farms but it doesn’t make sense they wouldn’t use some of those graduates to spread out and make contacts directly w/others in the industry and sell directly. it should be criminal to cheat people like this.
whose ‘they’? in a country this size without a history of ethnic strife this took some serious mobilization. if that kind of mobilization could be applied to positive solutions/ventures imagine the outcome. where are their community leaders?
I’m as usual late with a comment; damn this time difference!
Thanks, James, I loved the Nation article.
Another example is the town of Jos, in central Nigeria, where Western media endlessly talks about the violence between Christians and Muslims. This is sort-of true, but misses a lot of the point. Recently, climate change has been drying up pasture lands, which is forcing animal herders closer and closer to farming communities. Here their herds often destroy crops. Now it happens to be the case that the farming community is mostly Christian from the Berom ethnic group while the herders are mostly Muslims of the Fulanis ethnic group. As conditions become harder for the Muslim herders, they’re trying to move into Jos, without work or money or anything. The mostly Christian town then resents having to share.
So originally the conflict isn’t really about religion or ethnicity at all, it’s about poverty as a result of climate change. Since rich countries refuse to do something substantial about climate change, these people’s circumstances are likely to get worse. But because the Western corporate media cannot report this as fighting between the victims of greed-driven climate change, they have to report it as fighting between Muslims and Christians, or alternatively between Berom and Fulanis. In Western societies we call the same phenomenon the great threat of imigration that might destroy our wealth and way of life.
Thank, Leigh. That’s my experience too of international coverage of the Nigerian conflict. I suppose it’s convenient to use religious markers as shorthand but, in my experience, the BBC et al don’t unpack beyond that. One is left with the sense that this is a religious war.
The religious narrative is played up in spades in I/P coverage. Suggesting that if only the Israelis and Palestinians all became Unitarian Universalists, the whole problem would cease to exist.
“Follow the money” is always good advice in politics (and diplomacy and war). Bribes and bribe-substitutes (campaign contributions, CIA support for parties and candidates, etc.) are of particular importance.
Might there be a way for producer countries (of commodities such as cocoa) to form a distribution co-operative (cartel) to protect growers, perhaps by limiting production? OPEC tried it. How do companies like ADM get into the picture, underpaying for commodities?
pabelmont: Peter Robbins, who has written a superior book called Stolen Fruit, has been trying for years to encourage third world countries to do exactly what you suggest.
OPEC tried it and the United States has declared various open and covert wars on various governments, some of them democratic. To be fair, that needs to be addressed somehow, because it will just keep happening otherwise.
Everyone reduces to infighting whether foreign or domestic, third world or first world, when they are exploited like this. Sometimes it is done by the people themselves because of frustration and survival, sometimes it is because it is aggravated directly and indirectly by the colonial – neocolonialism process. It happens all over the world when people think they can do what they please with impunity, and it is protected by the powerful by both market process and local elite (which has been created). To try to say there is a difference between the early activity of the IMF et al. and today is absolute nonsense, the process only adjusts in minor sense and it is always to the detriment and eventual destruction of the people –
WORLD BANK FAMINE NIGER
Repeat this about a thousand times.
Several points are in order. First, “Orientalism” in its generic form is simply the ideological system portraying “the other” as we need him to be in order to justify that which we intend on doing for other reasons. It is a means of shaping the reality perception of the target audience in a manner favorable to achieving elite objectives. This is the primary function of the media.
Second, Third World nations have been induced by colonialism and neo-colonialism to develop export oriented economies involving primary products/minerals which feed the advanced economies of the First World nations. They also provide markets for First World manufactures and food. The international system of trade established by global finance, the world bank, and the IMF has made the Third World dependent upon the First World for survival, with both food and fuel controlled by global cartels. The recent rise in grain prices as a result of speculation in the futures market has dramatically impacted hunger and starvation, and is a primary impetus for increases in Third World strife and rebellion. To the greatest degree possible, Third World countries need to transition to local autonomy and self-sufficiency, and away from the control of the global market where the strong dominate the weak. Right now, these nations are extremely vulnerable in the likely event of a global financial collapse.
Finally, the video that VR linked to regarding the World Bank (an agency of empire) influence and famine in Niger is just one example of the consequences of imperial policies and structural adjustment. For those who haven’t been paying attention, please be advised that IMF type structural adjustment policies are currently being implemented in the US at an accelerated pace. Estimates are that there are an average of 10 million excess deaths per year worldwide as a consequence of World Bank/IMF policies. I would expect that number to grow significantly. As globalization is consolidated, empire intervenes more frequently to achieve its power seeking objectives. PR aside, empire doesn’t do humanitarianism.
It’s true, as Keith says, that WB/IMF policies are now being developed in the US congress and implemented in the battle over how to fund the US trickle-down system; Iceland very recently had to vote on this sort of thing writ larger; and Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc are already being given the full business–too, Bretton Woods2 is now in the making, coming along soon to a theatre near you.
If you get a chance and would like to know what Orientalism in the sense of how it was applied to African studies, how debasing it is listen to this link with a lecture from Dr. Ivan Van Sertima – professor od African Studies at Rutgers University –
ORIENTALISM