The Congo is capable of feeding nine billion people every year.
Yet every year, the Congo imports food.
And 28 million people are currently faced with acute hunger.
How is that even possible?
I recently had Paul Pumphrey on The Browder File Show on WPFW. Paul is co-founder of Friends of the Congo, and he shared some knowledge that every conscious person needs to hear:
The Congo sits on enough agricultural wealth to feed the entire planet and have some left over.
It has the second-largest rainforest on Earth.
Its river could power the entire African continent for 30 years without burning a single drop of oil.
And it produces 70% of the world’s cobalt—the mineral that makes every piece of modern technology possible.
Without Congolese cobalt, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
So why is the world’s richest country importing food?
They want you to believe it’s simply down to incompetence and corruption.
But the truth is, this situation has been created by design.
When Frantz Fanon wrote “The fate of us all is at stake in the Congo”, he was telling us that the Democratic Republic of the Congo sits at the center of a global system designed not to develop Africa, but to exploit its riches.
And if we’re going to understand why the Congo remains in chains while the world grows fat off its resources, we need to ask ourselves:
What kind of people deliberately starve a nation that could feed the world?
The Congo is blessed, or as Paul said, “blessed and cursed”, by some of the most valuable resources on the planet.
So why is this country, with all this God-given wealth, importing food?
50% of enslaved Africans were stolen from the Congo Basin.
The Congo has been under siege for centuries, first its people were stolen, then its minerals.
To understand why, we have to go back to where this theft was made legal.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, European nations met in Berlin specifically to divide up Africa, and at the center of their conspiracy was the Congo. At this conference, they gave the Congo to King Leopold II of Belgium as his private property.
For 23 years, from 1885 to 1908, this man ran the Congo like his personal plantation. And he was responsible for the murder of an estimated 10 million African men, women, and children. That’s more than the six million killed in the Holocaust, but you’ll still find statues of King Leopold in Europe today.
Leopold made over $1 billion in today’s currency by forcing Congolese people to extract wild rubber.
And his biggest customer was The United States. We needed it for the Ford Motor Company and the automobile industry. So when people talk about what King Leopold did, they need to understand that the United States was the motivation behind it all.
Belgium had no great need for massive amounts of rubber. But American industry did.
And if you didn’t meet your quota they would go to your village and cut off a limb from one of your family members as “incentive” never to miss your quota again. I’ve seen photographs of men, women, and children with stumps where their hands used to be.
This is the foundation upon which our modern world was built.
Foreign powers come into Africa, extract the minerals, transport them around the world, process them, and make billions of dollars off the riches mined from African soil.
80% of the cobalt extracted from the Congo is refined in China then sold within computer chips to American tech companies.
Congolese people are working in dangerous conditions for pennies while tech companies in Silicon Valley become trillion-dollar enterprises.
Before World War II, Africa supplied most of Europe’s food.
But after the war, when European nations had to rebuild and bring their soldiers home from the colonies. At this point they made a deliberate decision to make African countries dependent on Europe, the United States, and Canada for food.
Paul explained how The United States has used its control over the Congolese government to ensure that the people were there to dig out minerals for international companies, not to develop their own country or process the agriculture that could feed nine billion people.
This creates a cycle of dependency. When countries can’t feed themselves, food becomes a weapon. The United States and Europe use food to force governments to sell their resources at dirt-cheap prices. The wealth then gets transferred from Africa to Europe, The United States and China.
Paul told us about his meeting with a U.S. ambassador in Haiti in 1995.
This ambassador was in Congo-Brazzaville when there was a coup.
He went to Liberia when there was a coup.
Then to South Africa right before Nelson Mandela became president, where he got the white regime to spend all the money in the budget so Mandela would have to borrow from international banks. These banks then put restrictions on what Mandela could do as president.
Then to Nigeria during another coup.
Then to Haiti.
Then to the Congo again in 1998 during an attempted military coup.
The same ambassador retired from the State Department four days after Laurent Kabila, president of the Congo, was killed on January 16, 2001. Paul doesn’t believe in coincidences, and neither do I.
In the 1960s, the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of an independent Congo.
They dismembered his body, and dissolved it in acid so there would be no grave site for people to honor his memory. But before they did that, they extracted one of his teeth and took it back to Belgium like a trophy. Like when they used to lynch our ancestors and cut off their body parts for souvenirs.
It took international pressure, but last year, Belgium finally returned that tooth to the Congo.
The kind of information Paul Pumphrey shared with us is not available in your college textbooks or your evening news.
This is the education that Carter G. Woodson said we need to counter the miseducation we’ve received.
We cannot be free while the Congo is enslaved. Our liberation is tied to their liberation. This is not the moment to rest. We have to be on point for the rest of our lives, for the benefit of the two and three generations coming behind us.
Support organizations like Friends of the Congo. Visit their website and watch their documentary “Crisis in the Congo” on YouTube.
Support stations like WPFW that create space for these critical conversations.
Because the fate of us all is at stake in the Congo.
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You can watch the full show with Paul here:
Thanks for reading
Anthony Browder
Founder of IKG
P.S Join Me for My Final Tours to Kemet
July 7th and December 14th, 2026 mark my last Egypt study tours after 39 years.
This is your final opportunity to walk where your ancestors walked, see what they built, and understand why they preserved this knowledge for you.
If you want more information on the tours, I have put together a video which explains everything:
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