Why is AAPDEP Necessary?
With an abundance of agricultural, mineral, oil and other wealth, Africa is the richest continent on Earth! Nevertheless, African people world wide - from Brooklyn to Brazil, Guinea to Guyana - are forced to live in abject poverty. This imposed poverty is rooted in an attack on Africa that manifested itself as the forced dispersal and enslavement of African people, colonialism and current day neo-colonialism. As a result of this attack, African people everywhere have been separated from our resources and each other while our land, labor and vast natural wealth are being used to build Europe, the US and other imperialist nations.
According to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) 2002 Annual Report on Integration in Africa, 90% of the continent’s resources are systematically expropriated leaving a mere 10% of Africa’s “trade” occurring internally. That Africa’s resources continue to enhance the economies of former colonial rulers instead of contributing to economic stability within Africa itself can be seen in the examples of Senegal and Gambia and Tunisia and Cameroon. Although Senegal literally surrounds Gambia, trade between the two countries is minimal. The majority of Senegal's resources are routed to France, while those of the Gambia mainly enrich the UK. Exports from Tunisia and Cameroon often find their way to warehouses in France before being redirected to each other’s market shelves.
This same phenomenon can be seen in the expropriation of Africa’s intellectual resources as well. Though African people everywhere suffer from a lack of nutrition, decent health care, clean water, housing and the other necessities of life, the most skilled sector of the African population - African scientists, engineers, health care professionals and others - often use their skills to ensure that health and development abound in imperialist countries at the expense of the health and development of African communities everywhere, even African communities within the imperialist centers themselves. For example, according to Africa News of April 2, 2003, there are reportedly more Sierra Leonean doctors living in Chicago (U.S.) than in all of Sierra Leone, where the lack of appropriate healthcare contributes to one of the highest infant (158 out of 1000 live births) and maternal mortality (1800 deaths out of 100,000 births) rates in the world. At the same time, African children in the city of Chicago itself, are twice as likely as white children to die before the age of one.