Starvation-threatened Africans are being encouraged to eat insects by a UK aid initiative.
African caterpillars, migratory locusts and black soldier flies are on the menu under the initiative taking place in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo - but locals are rejecting the offer due to the taste and cultural norms.
Dr Alberto Fiore, the project lead who has whipped up a dish of locally farmed mopane worms, cereals, and fruits, has also created a insect-based porridge containing grains including sorghum and millets, which he reassured the Guardian is palatable.
Stop arguing a strawman, I never claimed anything about so called debt-trap diplomacy. But China is very much cooperating with corrupt local elites in destroying the environment.
And CO2 isn’t the only environmental damage. Cutting down trees for charcoal production for example might not significantly contribute to global carbon levels, but it has a massive negative effect on the local water cycle and biodiversity.
Strawman? Strawman? Asking you for evidence is not strawmanning. You are the one that has invented something, I am asking you to back it up. I have given you responses with direct links to liberal capitalist media telling you that you’re fucking wrong, it’s not even slightly socialist media! It’s fucking Bloomberg. It’s the mouthpiece of the financial elite. The very people I want to see launched into the sun.
Where is your evidence that these loans are “traps”? And if you can come up with literally any evidence to support that, where is your evidence to demonstrate that the western loans are magically better? Because that’s what this is really about “China bad, we’re better” is the essential reason that you’re even bothering to make this argument at all. Except you’re not better. You’ve been horrific for these countries for their entire existence, setting them back, couping them, destroying them economically.
Don’t forget who freed half the continent from colonialism in the first place. Communists like Nelson Mandela. Only to be subjugated post-ussr by the USA’s neo-colonialism via the IMF and the world bank.
Do you even understand what Strawman argument means? Please stop assuming that I am arguing about something which I am not even talking about.
Everyone out of their teens knows what a strawman is mate it’s very basic. Where is your justification? Where is your evidence? Stop avoiding the point and dancing around it. Talk like a normal human being that actually answers what people say.
All you are doing is repeatedly dodging. Are you going to avoid the request for evidence a third time? You’re only demonstrating that you have none.
I am not dodging at all, I don’t even really disagree with you on the topic of debt-trap diplomacy. But why do you constantly derail this discussion to a topic that no one other than you even talks about here?
It’s a classic strawman to avoid talking about the real issue which is no-questions-asked financial support to currupt regimes and elites in Africa.
Mate you are the one that brought this up. Aiming to defer blame from the western imperial core with your “everyone is doing it” response. It’s very clear what side you are batting for here.
No, not everyone is doing it, the western imperial core is doing it. The Chinese are not, and the claim that they are is nonsense.
How is that related to your pet peeve “debt-trap diplomacy” which you keep on harping about here. That is an entirely unrelated issue.
And besides, yes the Chinese are also doing it, on a massive scale. Have you actually been in any African country? If you had you would not be so obviously clueless. Greetings from Africa.
Ok I see the problem here.
Do you understand how international finance and investment works?
Better than you obviously 🤦♂️
No mate, clearly fucking not.
Why do you think it’s all foreign companies and not domestic? Because there isn’t a domestic industry, it either needs to be built, lacks pre-requisites, or other matters are a greater priority in the moment.
So what to do for a developing country? They have resources but they do not have the means to do anything with them, so they invite foreign companies to make deals for those resources. Investment in return for debt.
The devil of that debt however is in the details of the deal. The IMF and World Bank make many of these deals for the west in the global south and they have always been absolutely dogshit, but the global south having no other options always accepted them. China on the other hand makes extremely fair deals, even with countries that have no negotiating position, and as you can see from earlier links they also write off these debts all the time. Yanis for example had first hand experience dealing with China but they were incredibly reasonable, much more reasonable than he expected.
So why did I bring up debts? Because investment in natural resource extraction by foreign companies in the global south is always about some form of debt. It’s literally how finance works.
Sorry, but you don’t even know what “debt-trap diplomacy” is then… mind boggling that you are getting worked up on a strawman that you have no idea what it even means. Seriously… educate yourself before coming back and arguing about something you have obviously no f*cking clue about.