The US Is In Africa To Lock Down Its Resources

Bruce A Dixon writes in the Black Agenda Report

Since the Clinton administration, the US has provided military aid, weapons and training to 52 out of 54 African nations, ensuring that Africa, the motherland of humanity, remains the poorest and most war-torn region on earth. The US is in Africa to lock down its resources, Africa's energy, water, minerals, timber, agriculture, and biodiversity for the Western corporate elite. Strong African civil societies are, in the view of the US and its allies, bad for business, because they would mean Africans controlling their own energy, water, minerals, timber, agriculture and biodiversity.

Al Qeda, the Islamists and Tuareg rebels aren't the big problem in Mali. The big problem is that Mali's so-called democratic government discredited itself by evicting tens of thousands of farmers and their villages to grant foreign concerns long term leases on vast tracts of prime farmland and water, so Malians didn't much care when it was swept aside by another government committed to the same policies, and seem in no rush to defend that regime either. So the US stepped in, and is currently airlifting, supplying, feeding and providing gasoline to a French mechanized infantry battalion in Mali to make sure foreigners keep that Malian land and water.

The largest of the predatory land grabs in Mali is called Malibya, that's M as in mother, A as in apple Libya, google it for yourself. Malibya was a deal signed with the Khadafi government to ensure Libya's food security with a long term lease of 150 square miles of Malian territory for a vast GMO rice and cattle plantation, irrigated by a 25 mile canal that would drain vast quantities of water from the Niger River. Libya produces vast amounts of oil but little food. Now that the US and their junior partners, the French, have re-established control over Libyan oil, they need Mali's water and agriculture to make their neocolonial contraption sustainable, even if Malians and the tens of millions downriver in other countries suffer. The Pentagon, and its local tentacle AFRICOM, also require Mali for drone, mercenary and special ops bases that can directly penetrate the dozen or so African states west of Nigeria.