We helplessly witness the tragedy of the shipwrecks in our southern seas, and learn with concern how policymakers intend to respond to the emergency with military and repressive means, whose only effect will, if anything, be to isolate refugees in territories as dangerous as the waters of their coveted hope of salvation.
The few pundits and politicians who have dared to consider the causes of the exodus from the African continent to Europe have dwelt on one unequivocal fact, the flight from areas of conflict. Conflicts with respect to which, among other things, Western forces have played a propulsive or conniving role, as in Syria and Libya. But no one, as the opening of Expo 2015 in Milan approaches, seems to have the courage to address the primary cause of African peoples’ despair. Although this is not a new tragedy, reaping millions of victims already forgotten, in 2011, in the Horn of Africa. Hunger and Undernutrition, in once fertile lands but shaken in recent years by climatic phenomena-which have brought droughts and drying up-and anthropogenic phenomena, such as land robbery, so-called ‘land grabbing.
Land robbery
The populations of 13 African countries have suffered the violent removal of more than 20 million hectares of arable land at the urging of foreign investors, accounting for 55.5 percent of the land robbed in the entire planet since 2000 (source WorldWatch Institute, State of the World 2015).
The right to food – also mentioned in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 25), and reaffirmed in subsequent international conventions – has given way to speculation by investors based in countries where agriculture is flourishing, such as the United States (which is credited with primacy in ‘land grabbing,’ with operations on 6.9 million hectares, same source), Malaysia and Indonesia (3.6 and 2.9 million hectares, respectively).
Early African ‘targets’ of investments on huge expanses of land ‘as if they were free of people and things,’ vice versa, include South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia. It is perhaps no coincidence that the vast majority of migrants crossing the Maghreb come from the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa (source UNHCR). Nor that their unfortunate odysseys often move from refugee camps in Congo, Sudan, Uganda, Somalia, as well as those located in Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Kenya, Ethiopia (ibid.).
The role of palm oil: our petition 
The petition launched in late 2014 by Great Italian Food Trade, aimed at opposing the use of palm oil in food production, stems precisely from the analysis of this phenomenon. Since a significant proportion of the raped land is subject to deforestation functional to mono-intensive oil palm cultivation-with food and bio-fuel destiny-it was believed necessary to raise awareness about the true cost of such production, to humanity and the planet. In the hope that large industrial and distribution groups may in turn share this concern, replace tropical oil with others closer to our agricultural and production traditions, and thus escape the vicious circle of a demand – still growing – whose satisfaction postulates barbarism and ecocide.
A humanitarian cordon
To return to the main topic, the idea of stemming the desperation now aggregating on the North African shores by merely sealing off the borders of the old continent seems wholly unrealistic and irresponsible. The cost of innocent victims can only increase, exacerbating the instability of countries already severely stressed by a number of factors, political and economic. A non-military but humanitarian cordon, such as that proposed by the Community of Sant’Egidio and Médecins Sans Frontières will certainly be able to reduce the pressure and pre-arrange the due reception of asylum seekers in all European countries, according to their respective populations and population densities. New measures will have to be agreed upon in this regard as soon as possible to prevent imminent carnage.
But at the same time, policymakers will need to address-with equal urgency-the issues of the right to food and land, food sovereignty and support for local small-scale agricultural production. Recall the first of the so-called ‘Millennium Development Goals,’ the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty, which the 189 member states of the United Nations (now 193) had pledged to achieve precisely in 2015. Let us also recall the Guidelines for the Responsible Management of Lands, Forests and Watersheds adopted by the ‘Committee on World Food Security’ (FAO) in 2012, which none of the signatory countries have so far seen fit to enforce with binding regulations, the only possibly useful way to curb land robbery.
European international cooperation, for that matter, has been deprived of public resources, leaving room for private initiatives that are unsupervised and sometimes oriented toward experiments of dubious purpose and utility (such as the million-dollar project of the ‘Bill & Melinda Gates’ Foundation to introduce GMO bananas in central Africa).
A plunge into reality would require today to consider a new model of cooperation, trilateral, apt to foster South-South aid-that is, from the protagonists of the new world economic order, starting with China, to the Developing Countries-to which the useful participatory contribution of European and Italian NGOs in particular should be added. Their many decades of experience in helping people in many African countries can in fact facilitate relationships with local communities, which must share and participate in programs in order to achieve concrete autonomy. Finally, let’s not forget the value of Italian ‘know-how’ in the research and application of eco-sustainable agricultural practices, which the international scientific community has finally recognized as the way forward.
(Dario Dongo)
