Planet, People and Profit: Strike a Balance (ePub)

This is a book about social and environmental decay in African rural landscapes endowed with natural resources. The authors present evidence based research from Cameroon-Chad, Lesotho, Niger Delta, Nigeria, East Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Ghana to illustrate how the planet, people and profit, so far, has failed to strike a balance and provide rec-ommendations based on findings the way forward. Many of the arguments focus on the local as well rnational political economy in which resources are extracted and exported and the impact on social and environment life and landscape in rural Africa. Automatic operation of the market and market actors' philanthropy to help communities' impoverished rural folk sounded old fashioned or resemble neo-colonialism was arbitrated.Term CSR, came into being whereby rural African people were theoretically able to get satisfaction as they drank toxic water as long as the companies were paying them back in kind under these companies' respective voluntary CSR interventions. The problem is that commercial soceities were created with multinational corporations in the lead. States found it hard to reverse or slow down the process at least until they could get a hang of it. Open market policies continue to remain resistent to such challenges despite mounting critique from many cor-ners. FDI is the buzzword and the saviour that alleviates Af-rica's poverty. Although a broader consensus has emerged within and outside of Africa and other developing countries about fundamental defects in the economic model and free market principles through which large multinationals conduct business, raw materials continue to flow from poor countries to rich countries with very little challenge. All this proves that the present way of doing business in Africa. Trade pacts need to be reopened in order to bring forth changes. This has become even more important now with the Red Capitalism. BRICS, (Brazil, Russia, India, Chi-na and South Africa), CIVETS (Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Trukey) are others who want to benefit from natural resources while African resources are still remain a cheap sale. This is not to say BRICS is as bad as the conventional actors in the West. The question is whether African lions ever will be ready to pick up and march alone with these actors or whether they will allow, yet again, someone else to pluck fruits from Africa's endowed re-sources.