CIA Life Expectancy in Africa
“It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture,” wrote Mark Dowie in a courageous and prescient article in Orion magazine.
Africa is a continent and most people do not get that. Why?
Our map mystique begins with the Mercator projection. At the time of its creation in the mid-sixteenth century, the world was being conquered by sea, and sailors needed a map that would accurately show direction and distance. Latitude and longitude were plotted on a straight line, as if the earth was flat, and this incorrectly sized Africa in comparison to the “civilized” world. A good example of the shortcomings of the Mercator projection map is that the island of Greenland appears to be about the same size as Africa, when the land of Kong is actually fourteen times the size of little, mis-named frozen Greenland.
In 1974, Dr. Arno Peters developed a map that puts Africa in its proper perspective with the rest of the world. Africa is visually a giant compared to Europe or North America. When Peters unveiled his map at a European conference, it created angry debate in the world press as the white world suddenly felt small compared to big, black Africa.
As the myth of a flat world finally died with Columbus and his three conquering ships, the world was proven round once and for all, and attempts to represent a three dimensional sphere on a two-dimensional surface simply would not suffice any longer.
Next came the maps offered by the National Geographic, tucked and folded inside the cover of the familiar yellow magazine—maps that point our thoughts away from present exploitation of the underprivileged world and into the romanticized yet primitive past. The archeological maps, the ancient mariner’s maps, even the modern oil map of Africa, according to the version put forth by National Geographic, are indisputably incomplete.
Finally, Hollywood gave us the mythological maps of King Kong and Indiana Jones and our undereducated population believes everything it sees in the movies.
In Central Africa, conservation organizations have been stitching together vast tracts of territory defined by the CARPE Program—the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment—as “landscapes.” These include the Maiko National Park (NP) of North Kivu (CARPE landscape No. 10) and the Kahuzi Biega National Park (CARPE landscape No. 11) that stretches from Bukavu, South Kivu, to the vast tropical forests of North Kivu.
The twelve CARPE landscapes encompass 680,300 square kilometers (68,030,000 hectares) of Central African land. From the Monte Alen-Monts de Cristal National Park (CARPE landscape No. 1) in Equatorial Guinea, to the Virungas National Park (CARPE landscape No. 12) in the Great Lakes region, the twelve “priority” biodiversity landscapes, stretching across Central Africa, are part of a vast forest of “conservation” initiatives defined by acronyms and big institutions. The Congo Basin Forest Partnership, for example, like CARPE, is connected to the Pentagon, and NASA.
This information is easy to find and does not require much brainpower.
John P. Oates (Myth and Reality in the Rainforest), not no be confused with Hall and Oates, criticizes the linkage of nature conservancy with economic development as a profound mistake, which leads to “an exercise of materialism at local, national and international levels.”
The word “sustainable” in this context means to use natural resources in a paradigm of unlimited economic growth—and to “sustain” access to them for Western interests in their ruthless global competition for disappearing resources.
The Weidemann Report
In a telling memo written in December 2004, Robert Hellyer—USAID Mission Director for DRC—wrote to the USAID Africa Bureau in Washington regarding the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), the “principal vehicle for United States participation in the Congo Basin Forest Project.”
“Of the more than 60 million people that live in the region,” Hellyer wrote, “about 22 million are located in urban areas. At present rates of population growth, the region is expected to contain 150 million people by the year 2025. Population density is on the whole quite low, with a regional average of 14 persons per square kilometer. ” (100 hectares) Do the scary math and you get .14 persons per hectare as the regional average in Central Africa—and Central Africa is where the big conservation land grab is happening. Do the math and there is a whopping 7.14 hectares per person in Central Africa! That is more hectares per person than the US average of 3.1!
