Age of Empire – Weapons of Reason WoR by Nafeez Ahmed

As the British Government ploughs into a new era of freedom from Brussels, its national security policy seems free of fresh ideas. In fact, many of its future strategies copy wholesale from Britain’s colonial past.

In early December 2016, the British government published its new Annual Report on the UK National Security Strategy adopted in 2015. The document was, in many ways, a blueprint for a new form of empire. In the name of defending national security, it unveiled Britain’s plan to build a “permanent” military presence in the Gulf to defend its access to “the flows of energy and trade in the region”; deploy more troops into Eastern Europe, near Russia’s border; and promote the sale of “defence equipment and services from UK-based suppliers to overseas partners and allies”.

But perhaps the most Orwellian element of the document was its celebration of Britain’s role in delivering economic aid to developing countries, to lift them from poverty. It announced that the government had set up a new £1.3 billion Prosperity Fund to enable the UK “to deepen relationships with countries across the globe”. The fund uses Official Development Assistance resources to promote “reforms” in support of “economic growth in development countries”. This will reduce poverty by creating “opportunities for international business, including UK companies”.

Critics point out that this is really just a euphemism for making the world safe for British corporations. The reforms tied to British aid fit well with neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy: privatisation, deregulation, and liberalisation of the economy to open it up to foreign investment, while lowering taxes and decreasing state spending.

As British historian and development expert Mark Curtis has shown in an extensive report for the NGO War on Want, such British overseas aid policies have done little to resolve poverty, but instead have carefully cultivated corporate power. To date, 101 mostly-British companies — like Shell, Glencore and Tullow Oil — now control over $1 trillion worth of Africa’s oil, gold, diamond, coal, and platinum.

Britain is hardly alone in this new imperial project. In 2012, the G8 launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, an aid programme designed to mobilise billions of pounds of money from G8 members, to promote economic policy reforms in 10 African member states.

These reforms aren’t making Africans wealthier, they’re doing the opposite: promoting corporate land grabs, displacing small farmers, and destroying lives and livelihoods. The reforms pushed by the G8 are about serving up control of local food systems to corporate agribusiness giants.

In Tanzania, for instance, restrictions on food exports are now banned, regardless of whether food is needed by Tanzanians themselves. The scheme also promotes “agricultural growth corridors” to connect “under-utilized” land to key transport hubs. In practice, such land is often used by indigenous communities.

Global capitalism’s most powerful institutions are notoriously adept at innovating ingenious ways to justify their imperial hubris. One particularly egregious case is the plight of the indigenous Sengwer people in Kenya, who are being forcibly evicted from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and Cherangany Hills.
“These reforms aren’t making Africans wealthier, they’re doing the opposite: promoting corporate land grabs, displacing small farmers, and destroying livelihoods and lives.”

The evictions have gone on piecemeal since the World Bank, in collaboration with the Kenyan government, began funding a UN conservation project there in 2007. The scheme, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), allows corporations in the developed world to purchase carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. In practice, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.

Under this scheme the World Bank’s National Resource Management Programme (NRMP) funds the Kenyan government’s Forest Service to ‘conserve’ the forest. But the latter have executed a brutal scorched earth policy, torching indigenous peoples’ homes and food stores to force them off the land.

Corporate and government land grabbing from indigenous communities is now at an all time high. A study by the Washington DC-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) finds that despite using and inhabiting up to 65% of the world’s land with a population of around 1.5 billion, indigenous peoples and local communities only have legal rights to 18% of it. In 10 out of 12 countries listed by the World Bank as fragile states, nearly 100% of land is owned by the government or private sector.

The tightening of state-corporate control of the world’s land, food and resources is an integral part of the logic of capitalism. Among its most devastating impacts is the destruction of communities. In some cases, that process of destruction has resulted in specific forms of structural and direct violence against particular social groups that was so devastating, some experts believe it comprised a form of genocide.

The emergence of capitalism in England, for instance, was an inherently violent and repressive process. Over 400 years ago the seeds of English capitalism were sown amidst mass evictions of peasants from public lands. Formerly landed peasants, who were compelled by threat of force to paytribute to local lords, now found themselves a landless proletariat, with no choice but to sell their labour power for wages to the same people who had robbed them. This process of enclosure gradually enforced a new social condition — the dispossession of people from access to the sources, means, and technologies of production. This was, and still is, the fundamental basis of modern capitalism.

The dispossession of land inside England accelerated in tandem with the expansion of the British Empire along similar lines. Britain’s seizure of India began with the conquest of Bengal in 1757 and continued under the East India Company for more than five decades. Once the company was displaced by the British state, expansion continued, especially into Northwest India — soon followed by the scramble for Africa, and penetration of the Middle East.

In India, the British-imposed ‘free market’ led to genocidal famines involving the foreseeable and preventable deaths of large numbers of Indians. In his landmark study, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, historian Mike Davis shows how British imperial policy systematically exacerbated droughts in South Asia into massive humanitarian catastrophes.

Under British rule in India, there were millions of tonnes of grains in commercial circulation. Under ‘free market’ rules, India’s role was to export grain to Europe for the pro t of British colonial entrepreneurs, not to feed its own population. Between 1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe. “Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread,” writes Davis. Meanwhile, millions of Indian poor — more precisely, between 5.5 and 12 million people — starved to death.

As Davis concludes, famished Indians died “not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of utilitarian free trade principles.”

As the industrial revolution transformed the British domestic landscape, British imperialists designated India and Ireland as chief exporters of food and raw materials to the UK home market. Simultaneously, North America and Australia were selected as suppliers of cotton and wool for British textile production, the driving force of the industrial revolution.

In India and Ireland, the emphasis on exporting food led to genocidal famines, as local producers were deliberately denied access to millions of tonnes of grain. In North America and Australia, the intensifying demand for raw material supplies of cotton and wool led English settler-colonists into deadly confrontations with indigenous populations, in an effort to expand their control of land.

Native resistance culminated in the English colonists launching exterminatory wars in support of colonial projects. The transatlantic slave trade also escalated in direct correlation with the period of industrialisation. The escalating productivity of British industries required increased labour in North American cotton plantations to sustain growth, and slaves were the immediate answer.
“Famished Indians died in the golden age of liberal capitalism; many were murdered by the application of utilitarian free trade principles.”

Although crises in the colonies led certain forms of direct imperial rule to retract and decline, today’s global structures are in many ways far more efficient. Rather than direct military control, we have the rules of capitalism enforced under the power of lending.

International financial institutions like the US-led World Bank and IMF, and now schemes like the G8’s food security alliance, use the offer of ‘development aid’ to force impoverished former colonies to comply with the requirements of foreign investors. For the most part, compliant client states can be relied upon to deploy military and police force when indigenous peoples and local communities refuse to be subjugated.

The irony is that these policies only undermine global food production in the long run. Smallholder farmers produce nearly 70% of the world’s food on 60% of the world’s arable land. Meanwhile corporate agribusiness is degrading the soil with destructive chemical fertilisers that are heavily energy- and water-intensive. This, in turn, is increasingly undermining the rate of global food production.

Meanwhile, capitalism is still in crisis. Global economic growth is currently approaching a plateau amidst continuing population growth. Growth in the US, EU and Japan has been effectively stagnant for the last eight years, and in major powerhouses like India and China, is slowing down. Amidst a future of economic uncertainty, scientists foresee more extreme weather events triggered by climate change. One model commissioned by the US government forecasts another global food shock within the next decade. No country can insulate itself from such a crisis.

The only way forward is to shift to more sustainable forms of low- pesticide agriculture that are more cooperatively organised; overturning the rigging of the global food system rules that favour profits for corporate agribusiness over the livelihoods of small farmers; working directly to help local communities empower themselves rather than through corrupt states; supporting land rights for local people; and more local farming in service of local consumption.

The dispossessed who are likely to benefit from such changes would include not just farmers in poor countries, but you and me in the West.

This is an extract from Weapons of Reason’s fourth issue: Follow Weapons of War WoR .

Source: medium.com

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