Introducing Angola Agro Action

In the spring of 2012 I hope to be graduating from Washington State University with a BS in Animal Science with a focus on Dairy Production and Management. My goal is to use this education and experience and apply it to developing dairy production among the people living around Bongo, Angola, where I was born and raised. People living in the area are among the 40 percent or more of the population of Angola living on less than $2 a day.

Many people are already involved in small scale farming along the riversides and raising chickens and goats for meat. These products are sold at local informal markets. Some of the produce ends up being bought by middle persons who have transportation resources taking the products to the local provincial capital of Huambo, an hour's drive away. This combination of farming, trading and access to more developed markets close by, makes it an ideal place to place a dairy. Using goats and cows to produce milk and create value added products we can develop a more vertically integrated system that puts everyday producers higher in the value chain.

My background: I grew up on Bongo Mission, in the Lepi area of Huambo province. My grandparents arrived in the country at the first of the year 1931. My dad was born there a year later. I was born on the mission when my dad was 30, and my younger sister two years later. The mission had a successful dairy that started with Brown Swiss heifers and bulls imported from South Africa in the mid 1940's.

Our family left Angola at the start of the civil war in 1975 when it became obvious that those involved with the Portuguese colonialization would be in jeopardy. Even though our family did not necessarily support colonializm, we did operate in cooperation of authorities and were white.

After 5 years of peace, my dad and I returned to Angola in 2007. I felt like I had returned home. On a subsequent visit in 2009 to help repair the water system on the mission I had an opportunity to work with my dad and some local volunteers. I also had the pleasure of meeting the young people and we bagan to teach each other our languages. I taught them a word of english and they would teach me the same word in Umbundu, the local bantu language. We used the Portuguese word as the intermediate. Portuguese is the official national language, but all rural children learn their own local native language  at home.

Angola has wealth in Oil and Diamond exports and a badly damaged infrasturcture. In the last 5 years the government has done a remarkable job improving the infrastucture. It has been a failure at re-building the human infrastructure, education and local level social economic situation is poor in the rural areas. In addition, the government is keen to develop huge agribuisiness projects in cooperation with the chinese and brazilians that do very little to address employment and devleopment at the local level. There is a place for Coffee, Sugarcane, wood cellulose, biofuel and such projects that diversify exports. I believe there is also a role for small farming cooperatives in business to benefit the members. This may lead to larger businesses that employ people, providing a social anchor in the community improving family access to food, education and mobility.

A bried dossier of this project at http://www.scribd.com/doc/52296702/Angola-Agro-Action-Dossier.

World Water Day 2011

A photo blog highlighting the importance of clean water in Angola and other developing coutires with poor water infrastructure. All these photos were taken in Angola druing two visits in August of 2007 and July/August 2009.

Near Dondo, girls return home with water

In Huambo, young people arrive at a well to find that it has run dry.

In Lepi, Huambo province, children return home with precious water from a clean spring outside the town

Kids fill their waterbottles at the source of a baptismal tank at Bongo Mission, Huambo province.

The Oluluvila near bongo mission, running at it's lowest during the dry season

A young man washes his motorcycle at the edge of the Oluluvila, Bongo Mission, Huambo Province.

Irrigation canal from a diversion dam on the Oluluvila near Bongo, Huambo province.

These yong boys show off their cans and bottles of water. Fortunatly, clean water is available on Bongo Mission, Huambo province.

 Workers dig around the main water line supplying Bongo Mission. My dad and I travelled to Angola to help repair the water system there in 2009.

These rocks are used as a laundry area for the locals. The rocks are worn smooth.



Neo Colonialism in Angola?

A new study from the Study and Scientific Investigation Centre of the Catholic University (Ceic/Ucan) in Luanda, Angola confirms growing alarm that China is a neocolonial power in Angola. Investigators Amália Quintão and Regina Santos show that 90% of imports from China to Angola are consumer goods and 88% of exports to China from Angola are raw materials chiefly oil and diamonds. Note contacts for investigators http://www.ceic-ucan.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20&Itemid=28

According Agence France-Presse, there is a symbiotic relationship between China and Angola. China needs Angola, and other underdeveloped african countries for energy and other raw materials and Angola needs China to help quickly re-build its infrastructure. After Saudi Arabia, Angola is China's second largest supplier of crude. On the other side of the equation, there are 50 State Owned Chinese companies and close to 400 private Chinese firms in Angola working on infrastucture projects. These projects are supposed to employ Angolan workers, who face unemployment rates around 50%. According to AFP, bilateral agreements state that 30% of workers on these projects are supposed to be Angolan, but at this time, between 50,000 and 60,000 Chinese expats are working in Angola and the agreements are not being honored. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110306/wl_africa_afp/angolachinaeconomydiplomacy

The Chinese dont trust the Angolans to employ them or even to take care of projects once completed and Angolans are increasingly unsure about the Chinese. Last year the Wall Street Journal reported on cooling relationships between everyday Angolans and Chinese laborers in their country; including reports of violence against Chinese workers. The sustainability of this scheme of redevelopment is questionable. There are already facilities like schools, hospitals and such that are built but needing professionals to staff them. Angola lost a generation to war. Many educated Angolan's moved abroad during the war and have not returned.

This is not true of all. I know of two doctors, a businessman and a lawyer who are Angolan born and have returned to Angola to work. These expatriates returning have alot of adjustment to do. In speaking with one he told me that conditions in Luanda are frightfully expensive and can be unsafe, but you have to be in Luanda to do business. Mobile phone coverage continues to expand as does fast internet access, soon Angola may be a good place to do business outside the capital. The projects being built right now by Chinese companies, using Chinese Loans and Chinese laborers go a long way to make it possible, but one wonders at what cost. Can Angola sustain this kind of development with only one export and a workforce that is not trained to build and maintain its own infrastructure.

Celebrating International Womens' Day

In Angola, like in much of the world, women are the most important link in the food chain. from planting, weeding, irrigation to harvesting and marketing to preparing the food at home.

Celebrating Angola through poetry

Ocopocopo

You bloom fragile pink
out of concrete red earth

Your frilly fringe
so easily bruised

You cannot be picked

You must remain, die
where you were born

---

Unspeakable

Speaking of you
longing to say what cannot be

Gathering from the thick bubbling pirrão
pulling from the bleating goats
chickens darting under mothers’ wing.

Ripping from the mourning dove
falling into the ravine next to the olohengo tree.

Hiding under the rocks of Elundi
cascading down the path to Catoto
spilling into dust, awkwardly

The unspeakable

---

Copyright notice: the preceeding is original work copyrighted 2011 by Carolyn Parsons, all rights reserved

Blood on our hands

Complicity of the Seventh-day Adventist church in the death of David Kato Kisule

With the memories of the shooting in Arizona still in our minds and the calls to tone down the political rhetoric and replace it with civility; there comes an example of how rhetoric kills.

On January 26, David Kato was brutally murdered in his home, the apparent victim of a beating with a hammer. The violent and personal nature of his death suggests an unusually deep hatred. This hatred was stoked by a Ugandan Paper called Rolling Stone which has been running pictures and sometimes locations of GLBT activists in Uganda. Most recently the paper published the names of 200 Ugandans who are perceived to be gay or transgendered under the headline “Hang them: They are after our kids” http://www.gaelick.com/2011/01/blogger-interviews-editor-who-outed-200-ugandans/13756/

The US State department, the white house; governments worldwide, but most importantly GLBT, HIV/AIDS and social development groups have unanimously condemned David’s murder. Some groups and individuals also lining up to condemn the practice of killing GLBT people are those who in the past have rallied against GLBT groups, activists and sexual minorities in Uganda.

Last year three anti-gay Christian leaders went to Uganda to hold seminars on the “Homosexual Agenda” These were Scott Lively, founder of an anti-gay group Watchman of the Walls (Listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group). Caleb Brundage, a sexual reorientation therapist who’s bizarre techniques have been shown on CNN and include hitting a pillow with a racket while shouting “mom, mom, why did you do this to me?” And Don Schmierer, a director of Exodus International, an arm of Focus on the Family that seeks to reorient GLBT young people to heterosexuality. http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/03/06/us-anti-gay-leaders-hold-seminar-in-uganda/

They need to distance themselves from the murder because they have been seen as complicit in stoking the indigenous hate with new rhetoric and calls to action. The American evangelicals were in Uganda under the support of a powerful interdenominational group called the Inter-religious Counil of Uganda. Among the leadership of this organization is the president of the Seventh-day Adventist union of Uganda. http://www.ircu.or.ug/aboutus/wwa.html#teb.

The IRCU has a legitimate mission of encouraging peace among diverse religious communities in Uganda, fighting HIV/AIDS among others. In 2006 the group received a $15 Million grant from USAID to fight HIV/AIDS. But there is an uglier side. In 2009 lawmaker David Bahati announced a bill which initially called for the death penalty against anyone who practices homosexuality. The bill eventually was re-written to remove the death penalty but it is still a powerfully anti-gay proposal. Last year, after the relationship between David Bahati and the IRCU was uncovered, the group clarified their Position in a press release. Part of the statement is to disavow any connection with the legislation the statement contains support for outing GLBT activists http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/526/532/712436. Quoting from the document

“7. We the Council of Presidents of the Inter – Religious Council of Uganda, therefore, advise government, and all well-meaning groups and individuals to take remedial measures against this evil that has crept into our society by: a. Exposing the people and organizations funding homosexuality in the country; b. Providing enough information on recruitment and funding to the public in the interest of transparency and accountability;”

The document is signed by among Two others, Pr. Dr. John Kakembo, President, Seventh-day Adventist Uganda; Union/ Member IRCU Council of Presidents

The message could not be clearer; the IRCU supports the outing of GLBT activists in Uganda knowing well the many death threats and violence committed in the past against GLBT activists who had been outed in the Ugandan media. The member churches of the IRCU including the Seventh-day Adventist, have blood on their hands for the murder of David Kato Kisule, and by extension each of us that are connected to the church.

The US State of the Union Address and international issues

There was a glaring absence of discussion by president Obama during the State of the Union address last night. It was in foreign policy, indeed any international involvement of the United States save a few words.

It was good to hear that the United States provided support for the South Sudan independance vote, a real victory for democracy in the area. Regardless of the outcome, the independance vote is just the beginning. If the United States, European Union and other developed countries don't provide additional aid in governance, infrasturcture, food security civil structures and defense should the referendum vote succeed, it could all fail. The other alternative is that China could provide much of the help that the newly formed South Sudan may need.

What is wrong with that? China works under different rules in Africa. According to Anthony Germain writing for CBC news "In Africa, Chinese businesses pitch deals in construction, mining, drilling and other sectors that come with no strings attached.

Unlike with western businesses, there are no demands for transparency, human rights or democracy. There is no pause to consider the environmental impact. Chinese pitches fall on receptive ears, and a flurry of multi-billion dollar agreements between China and African nations are being signed every month." http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/03/29/f-china-in-africa.html.

In a continent with unemployment rates that are sometimes unknown, and where known tend to be high, Chinese firms are among the worst employers according to  Erin Conway-Smith writing in the Global Post. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa/090727/chinese-bad-employers-africa.

When traveling to Angola in 2007 with my father to visit the land of our birth after 32 years away, we witnessed something that blew my mind and colors my views on Chinese involvement in rebuilding Angola after a 27 year civil war. We connected in Addis Ababa for the final leg into Luanda. When we boarded the plane, it was already full of passengers. The flight was the last leg of a Beijing-Luanda flight and the plane was full of Chinese laborers. Though unemployment is extremely high, 40% according to some estimates, the Chinese companies with contracts to rebuild infrastructure are importing practically all their labor.

When driving from Huambo to Bongo Mission, where my dad and I grew up, we passed by fenced in areas with guards at the gate and signs in Chinese. We were explained that these were Chinese projects and that the workers live in tents, eat Chinese food prepared by Chinese cooks and the workers were seldom seen outside the camps except when they were on the job. Down the road, was a road building project contracted to Obrecht, the Brazilian multinational. Here we saw what looked to be Brazilian, Portuguese and local laborers. Our hosts confirmed that there was a mix of labor and the imported workers lived in town. Obrecht seemed to be helping the local economy, their workers were putting money back into the local economy whereas the Chinese companies and laborers were generally not.

Today, the major Chinese infrastructure project, the rebuilding of the railroads is winding down, but the Chinese continue to invest and win contracts for large infrastructure and development projects. Of course, American, Portuguese and Brazilian companies are signing contracts, such as the imfamous HBR for building a badly needed refinery in Lobito.

I would like Americans and our government to know that there is a new form of colonialism in Africa. Many nations in Africa are going from European countries exploiting them for their natureal resources to Chinese government and companies along with other corporate giants around the world doing the same. It is a more subtle but powerful form of colonialism; corporate colonialism.

My hope is that development entities, like the USAID, the UN development organizations, and NGO's work to develop value added revenue streams in African communities. That corporate development does not rob the people of enjoying the fruits of their labor, a well paying job, a chance to produce and sell goods. Many models of small hold agriculture will work in places like Angola, where people are already used to selling their own agricultural products at local village markets. But I believe that small businesses should also develop locally to sustain revenues, create opportunities and employ people.