“As millions of civilians in conflict-scarred nations teeter on the brink of starvation, famine is a very real and dangerous possibility,” World Food Project (WFP) chief David Beasley told the United Nations Security Council, according to the UN News on April 21.
The UN News article stated that, “Beasley painted a grim picture of 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse, coupled with an additional 130 million on the edge of starvation prompted by Coronavirus.”
In a CNN news report from April 21, Beasley was quoted predicting to the UN that there is, “a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself.”
Luwezi Kinshasa, Secretary General of the African Socialist International (ASI), an organization which is working for the liberation of Africa and African people around the world, denounced Beasley’s dire predictions of famine.
“We are clear that the United Nations and the World Food Program are tools of U.S. imperialist control over Africa and African people everywhere,” Secretary General Luwezi declared.
“These are alarmist calls from the white power bourgeoisie which is always announcing upcoming famines geared to devastate a targeted group of colonized nations across the world so the colonial masters and their neocolonial henchmen can maintain their profit margins at our expense,” he stated.
“African people do not need a handout or aid from the UN or other imperialist charities or non-governmental organizations! We need the total liberation of our Africa and African people everywhere with reparations—the return of the value of our stolen wealth, labor, land and resources!”
Hunger, famine and starvation are created by colonialism. They were created by Europe’s assault on Africa and the colonial domination of the planet.
Our suffering is maintained by U.S. imperialism’s continued worldwide colonial control that is sucking the blood out of our continent and our people.
Africa had no problem feeding our people until we were kidnapped, raped and pillaged by white power and forced to feed the white colonizers and not ourselves.
African people invented agriculture and farming thousands of years before Europe had even discovered fire. We brought the science of agriculture to the world.
Colonialism has forced us to grow crops that destroy the soil and are sent to Europe for their consumption and profit while we starve. We are forced to grow food for others that is not the staples of our African diet.
This is why the African People’s Socialist Party has named COVID-19 the colonialvirus. It is used by imperialism to justify deepening colonial conditions on African people.
The African Socialist International is organizing throughout Africa, the U.S., Europe and wherever African people have been forcibly dispersed throughout the world.
ASI is the organization of all the African People’s Socialist Party organizations in countries throughout the world.
Our sole aim is to free African people under the leadership of the African working class and to bring about the imminent collapse of the imperialist social system by the oppressed peoples of the world under the banner of African Internationalism.
Colonial famine is manufactured by the colonizers
As the article “The Profits of Famine” by Mike Davis on the Food First website noted, “Famine does not arise spontaneously with the failure of a harvest season; rather it is the outcome of a system that places greater importance upon the market than upon those going hungry.”
Al Jazeera reported on April 1, 2019, for example, that the 1943 “famine” and starvation of three million Bengal people under the colonial domination of Britain was a deliberate genocidal act caused by imperialist policies of Britain and its prime minister Winston Churchill, and not by drought or dry soil.
“Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers,” explained Indian politician Shashi Tharoor. “Churchill has the blood of millions on his hands whom the British prefer to forget,” the Al Jazeera article reported.
“This is what imperialism does to Africa on a regular basis,” ASI Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa stated. “This is why power in the hands of the African working class is a matter of life and death for us.
“We reject any explanation that uses climate change or locust invasions in east Africa, conflict, drought, economic recession, decline in aid, collapse in oil prices etc., to justify food famines.
“These manifestations of predatory imperialism are the basis of our evidence to charge the white ruling class with genocide through conscious policies designed to starve African people and other oppressed peoples on planet,” Secretary General Luwezi emphasized.
At the same time as imperialism manufactures “famine” and starvation for us, $160 billion dollars of food is wasted every year in the U.S. alone, according to The New York Times on Dec. 20, 2017.
During the COVID-19 lockdown in the U.S., millions of pounds of beans and cabbage were destroyed by farmers to protect profit margins. Millions of gallons of milk is being dumped and “each week, the chicken processor Sanderson Farms destroys 750,000 unhatched eggs, or 5.5 percent of its total production, sending them to a rendering plant to be turned into pet food,” The New York Times reported on April 11.
This was not because of lack of sales but to increase profits.
During the lockdown period, profits skyrocketed for U.S. grocery stores such as Walmart, whose sales increased by 20 percent during the month of March, according to The Wall Street Journal on April 3.
The African People’s Socialist Party is very clear that this is not a crisis caused by COVID-19. It is a crisis of the parasitic capitalist mode of production built on the assault on Africa, the enslavement of African people, the genocide of the Indigenous people and the colonization of the majority of humanity.
COVID-19 crisis has deepened the longstanding crisis of imperialism brought about by the resistance of oppressed people to U.S. imperialism.
African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela calls this time of the deepening crisis of imperialism, the “uneasy equilibrium, the struggle between the past and the future.”
The theory of African Internationalism teaches that colonialism is a parasite that forcibly links the colonizer and the colonized for the economic development of the colonizer nation and society at the expense of the colonized nation and society.
The colonizer and the colonized form a union of opposites that is maintained by the colonial apparatus of violence known as the state.
It is this relationship that allows COVID-19, masses of locusts, drought, flooding, recession and all the other natural or artificial phenomena to hurt us as colonized peoples.
There is enough food to feed every single colonized African on planet but African people must have the political and economic power over our own lives and state to keep imperialism from ever harming and profiting from an African person ever again
We built and fed Europe for six hundred years. Now it is time to liberate Africa and feed, clothe and house ourselves.
Join the APSP today at apspuhuru.org
All power to the African working class!
