Africa Reveals Awesome Plan To Reforest The Continent

There's not too much great news coming from the Climate Change Conference, but this is definitely worth celebrating!

Here’s some rare good news from the Climate talks in Paris: African nations have pledged to restore 100 million hectares (about 386,000 square miles) of forest by 2030. The ‘AFR100’ initiative is an ambitious and unprecedented plan by more than a dozen African nations to do what they can in the face of a climate catastrophe.

“As the world forges a climate agreement in Paris, African countries — which bear the least historic responsibility for climate change — are showing leadership with ambitious pledges to restore land,” said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute in a press statement. “These African leaders are turning their words into action and making a real contribution to respond to the global threat of climate change.”

Nine financial partners and 10 technical assistance providers have pledged support for AFR100, led by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD Agency), Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and World Resources Institute (WRI).

Although they cover only 7%, tropical forests shelter more than half of the world’s plant and animal species. Africa is currently losing 10 million acres of forest per year, greatly affecting the planet’s ability to regulate climate change and putting wildlife in danger of extinction. Africa‘s Congo Basin is the second largest rainforest after the Amazon, which is why the pledge to protect it is so important.

AFR100 recognizes the benefits that forests and trees can provide in African landscapes: improved soil fertility and food security, greater availability and quality of water resources, reduced desertification, increased biodiversity, green jobs, economic growth, and increased capacity for climate change resilience and mitigation. Forest landscape restoration has the potential to improve livelihoods, especially for women.

The announcement was made during the Global Landscapes Forum at the Climate Conference in Paris. According to The World Resources Institute, countries that have agreed to join the AFR100 initiative are:

• Democratic Republic of Congo (8 million hectares)
• Ethiopia (15 million hectares)
• Kenya  (Committed, but finalizing hectare target)
• Liberia (1 million hectares)
• Madagascar (Committed, but finalizing hectare target)
• Malawi (Committed, but finalizing hectare target)
• Niger (3.2 million hectares)
• Rwanda (2 million hectares)
• Togo (Committed, but finalizing hectare target)
• Uganda (2.5 million hectares)

“Restoring our landscapes brings prosperity, security and opportunity,” said Dr. Vincent Biruta, Minister of Natural Resources in Rwanda. “With forest landscape restoration we’ve seen agricultural yields rise and farmers in our rural communities diversify their livelihoods and improve their well-being. Forest landscape restoration is not just an environmental strategy, it is an economic and social development strategy as well.”

“The scale of these new restoration commitments is unprecedented,” said Wanjira Mathai, Chair of the Green Belt Movement and daughter of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. “I have seen restoration in communities both large and small across Africa, but the promise of a continent-wide movement is truly inspiring. Restoring landscapes will empower and enrich rural communities while providing downstream benefits to those in cities. Everybody wins.”

The video above from the Jane Goodall institute explains why Africa’s forests are so important to the wellbeing of our beautiful planet, and what the organization is doing to reforest chimpanzee habitats.

Let us know your thoughts, and please share this uplifting news!

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America’s Empire in Africa That You Haven’t Heard Of

WASHINGTON D.C. — The Obama administration has overseen an unprecedented expansion of American military might on the African continent, with dozens of bases and outposts opening there since he took office.

A Nov. 17 investigation by Nick Turse, a journalist and American military scholar, found that the United States maintains at least 60 bases or military outposts throughout Africa, although not all are actively used at all times:

“Some are currently being utilized, some are held in reserve, and some may be shuttered. These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries — more than 60% of the nations on the continent — many of them corrupt, repressivestates with poor human rights records.”

Even that figure does not fully encompass America’s reach in Africa. According to Turse’s sources, the U.S. military operates “Offices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attaché Offices” in 38 African countries, while 30 others have agreed to allow U.S. forces to use their international airports as refueling centers.

Overall, Turse noted “that the U.S. military has created a network of bases that goes far beyond what AFRICOM has disclosed to the American public, let alone to Africans.”

The military is slowly lifting the veil of secrecy over its actions in Africa. Turse reported:

“For years, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only acknowledged “base” on the continent.”

Richard Reeve, the director of the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group, a London-based security think tank, told Turse that the U.S. is using AFRICOM as a “laboratory” where it can experiment with “a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces”:

“Apart from Djibouti, there’s no significant stockpiling of troops, equipment, or even aircraft.  There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases… so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary.”

After years of denials, the Pentagon has slowly begun admitting to the existence of some of its outposts, with a 2015 Pentagon list now including three “cooperative security locations,” ranging from a medical research facility in Egypt to a seaport in Kenya, and AFRICOM commander Gen. David Rodriguez admitted to the existence of 11 such sites in a May interview with military news publication Stars & Stripes.

This newfound transparency is likely a prelude to even more military expansion in Africa and elsewhere. On Thursday, The New York Times reported on a Pentagon plan to expand U.S. military might in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, under the pretext of defending against Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the group also known as the Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL) and other forms of Islamic extremism. Under the proposal, submitted originally by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, the military would create “hub” bases on three continents by expanding existing bases and cooperative security locations, then using those hubs to create yet more outposts throughout surrounding areas. Pentagon officials told the Times that, “[t]he hubs would range in size from about 500 American troops to 5,000 personnel, and the likely cost would be ‘several million dollars’ a year, mostly in personnel expenses.”

In his examination of the plan, Shadowproof’s Dan Wright questioned “whether or not support for such adventurism can be found in a nation whose population is exhausted and frustrated by a decade of military blunders and failure.”

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This article (America’s Empire in Africa That You Haven’t Heard Of) originally appeared on MintPressNews.com and was used with permission. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

Celeb Bono Partners with Monsanto, G8, to Biowreck Africa

What in the world happened to Bono?

Last year, at the G8 Summit held at Camp David, President Obama met with private industry and African heads of state to launch the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit.

And Bono, of the rock group U2, is out shilling for Monsanto on this one.

It's phase 2 of the Green Revolution. Tanzania, Ghana, and Ethiopia are the first to fall for the deception, with Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso and other African nations lining up for the "Grow Africa Partnership," under Obama's "Global Agricultural Development" plan.
In Obama Pitches India Model of GM Genocide to Africa, Scott Creighton writes:

But African civil society wants no part of this latest Monsanto aligned 'public private partnership.' Whatever will the progressives do now that their flawless hero has teamed up with their most hated nemesis to exploit an entire continent like they did to India not that long ago?

With a commitment of $3 billion, Obama plans to 'partner up' with mega-multinationals like Monsanto, Diageo, Dupont, Cargill, Vodafone, Walmart, Pepsico, Prudential, Syngenta International, and Swiss Re because, as one USAID representative says 'There are things that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and developing seeds and fertilizers.'

Of course, that's an outrageous lie. Private citizens have been building their own silos for centuries. But it's true that only the biowreck engineers will foist patented seeds and toxic chemicals on Africa.

Creighton continues:

Bono says that there has to be a 'public private partnership' in order to get this done and that they are going to be using the ideas of the African people and farmers. Really? This is what the African farmers say to that...

'We request that: – governments, FAO, the G8, the World Bank and the GAFSP reconsider their promotion of Public/Private Partnerships which, as they are now conceived, are not suitable instruments to support the family farms which are the very basis of African food security and sovereignty.' African Civil Society Organizations

I wonder if that could be any clearer. They don't WANT the public private partnerships involved in this process.... It's not enough that huge mega-corporations are bleeding the nations of Africa dry by sucking the valuable mineral resources out of their hills. No. As Bono says about the development in Africa:

'They're future consumers for the United States. The president is talking business. This is good. It's a whole new development paradigm today. The old donor/recipient relationship... it's over.'

Volatility chimed in:

The history of corporate agriculture and its 'Green Revolution' is a perfect example of the unfulfilled promises, and therefore proven lies, of corporatism. What was the Green Revolution? With a huge one-off injection of fossil fuels, and building upon ten thousand years of agronomy, corporate agriculture temporarily increased yields within the monoculture framework.

But, in the Green Revolution, writes Volatility:

The soil is stripped of all nutrition and zombified by ever-increasing applications of synthetic fertilizer. Monoculture is ever more dependent on the increasing application of ever more toxic herbicides and pesticides. Deployment of GMOs escalates these vulnerabilities. Factory farms can exist only with ever increasing use of antibiotics. All these systems are extremely tenuous, vulnerable, not robust, not resilient. They're all guaranteed to collapse. Hermetic monoculture, and industrial agriculture as such, is one big hothouse flower which requires perfect conditions to survive....

[T]he Green Revolution was a scam to use cheap fossil fuels to increase monocrop yield, drive tens of millions off the land, and use the stolen land and food to render food temporarily artificially cheap for Western consumerism.

Like with Monsanto's Bt cotton deployed in India, at first yields improved and farmers profited. Now, however, according to a leaked Advisory from the Minister of Agriculture obtained by the Hindustan Times last month:

Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton.... In fact cost of cotton cultivation has jumped...due to rising costs of pesticides. Total Bt cotton production in the last five years has reduced.

The Advisory definitively links farmer suicides to debt-enslavement enabled by the synthetic food model spawned by Monsanto, Dupont and other ecocidal corporations: "The spate of farmer suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton farmers."

That's not all the harm wrought by the petrochemical synthetic ag industry, as this 2012 superweed map by the University of Wisconsin shows:

Over half of US states are now plagued by agrochemically-induced superweeds.  An industry sponsored study of pesticide use predicts that by 2016, nearly a billion pounds of these toxic chemicals will be poured on US soils.

Insects have also developed resistance. As reported last August, “The Western rootworm beetle – one of the most serious threats to corn – has developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt-corn, and entire crops are being lost.”

In March, two dozen corn entomologists warned regulators that the only way to defeat growing insect resistance to genetically modified corn is to plant non-GMO seed. “Increasing pesticide use or buffer zone size will not solve the growing problem of rootworm resistance to corn genetically modified.”
But if that doesn’t deter African farmers, these petrochemicals have also been linked to human birth defects. Where “Roundup Ready soy is being cultivated on a massive scale,” reports Dr. Mercola, “widespread reports exist of immediate illness defects from massive glyphosate spraying operations.”
In fact, “Monsanto, Philip Morris and other U.S. tobacco giants knowingly poisoned Argentinean tobacco farmers with pesticides,” reports Courthouse News Service, “causing ‘devastating birth defects’ in their children, dozens of workers claim in court.”

The Bt toxin used to engineer cotton and corn also kills human kidney cells, reports Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji, and the drift from aerial application of Roundup prompted the Mississippi Rice Council to sound a national alarm over genetic damage to natural rice, calling for severely restricted aerial application.

 Newly emergent pathogens have appeared, reports Dr. Don M. Huber, a plant pathologist who coordinates the Emergent Diseases and Pathogens committee of the American Phytopathological Society, as part of the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System. Last year, his team discovered a “self-replicating, micro-fungal virus-sized organism which may be causing spontaneous abortions in livestock, sudden death syndrome in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy, and wilt in Monsanto’s RR corn.”

Huber’s warning to the USDA to halt GM crop approvals, and specifically, genetically modified alfalfa, was not only ignored, but two months ago, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack hastened the approval process for genetically engineered crops.

“The new rules will cut the time needed to approve biotech crops in half,” reports Dr. Mercola, “from an average of three years, to about 13 months for new versions of already existing crop technologies, and about 16 months for brand new technologies.”

Obama’s Global Agricultural Development plan conspires with multinational corporations to foist these ecological and human health costs onto the public while siphoning the profits. As Creighton says, “Socialized costs, privatized profits. All in the name doing good and saving the people of Africa.”

Let’s hope these “public/private partnerships” are met with firm resistance by African farmers, as supported by this Declaration from a group of African civil society organizations.  The last thing Planet Earth and all its organisms need is more toxic industrial chemicals.

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By Rady Ananda via Activist Post

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