Western investors buying up swaths of African farmland

Posted by Ify Aniebo On June 26, 2012 0 Comment

 Pension fund managers and hedge funds gather in London on Tuesday for a summit to discuss the next big investment opportunity: buying up swaths of African farmland.
The Agriculture Investment Summit promises guidance through the “complexities of investing in agriculture as an asset class” to benefit from “one of the greatest investments in the world”.
An estimated 70m hectares of agricultural land – or 5% of Africa – has been sold or leased to western investors since 2000, according to a public database of international land deals. British companies have bought the rights to more than 3m hectares of land in poor countries – the equivalent of almost two-thirds of the UK’s total farmland, according to the International Land Coalition.
Grain, an NGO that promotes sustainable use of world resources, estimates that investors have spent between $5bn and $15bn on farmland. They expect that investment to double by 2015.
“Farmland is a big attraction for them [pension funds and other investors],” Grain said. “They see in farmland what they call good ‘fundamentals': a clear economic pattern of supply and demand, which in this case hinges on a rising world population needing to be fed, and the resources to feed these people being finite.”
The £3,660-a-head conference at the Victoria Park Plaza hotel, in central London, promises a “unique opportunity to gain insights from an A-list of speaker faculty on how, where and why to invest in this emerging and expanding asset class”.
One of the talks at the fifth annual summit is titled: Agriculture in Africa: land grab or untapped opportunity?
A coalition of 60 international development, environment and farming charities will gather outside the hotel to demand that pension funds and other investors “stop the land grab”, which is claimed to be taking local people’s land at the fastest rate since colonial times.
Tim Rice, an adviser at ActionAid, said: “The summit organisers cheerily call this devastating trend an ‘emerging and expanding asset class’ and bill the summit as an opportunity to ‘overcome the perceived obstacles to investment’.”
But, he says, they are “glossing over” the real impact on the ground. “They are displacing farmers, up-rooting communities and food production and destroying ecosystems on a massive scale. They are increasing hunger and poverty globally. In a world where 1 billion people already go hungry, land must stay in the hands of local communities so that they can feed themselves.”
Kenneth Richter, of Friends of the Earth, claimed square-mile investors are the “key players” fuelling an industry which leads to “peasants, herders, fishers and other rural households being dispossessed of their means to feed themselves and their communities, sometimes through promises of jobs, sometimes at gun point”.
Nyikaw Ochalla, of the Anuak people in Ethiopia, said “land-grabbing” is accelerating at “a rate not seen since colonial times”.
“Land is the lifeline of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, fishing and farming communities in the Ethiopian lands targeted by land grabbing policy.”
In 2008 a quarter of Mhaga village in rural Tanzania was acquired by a British biofuels company Sun Biofuels, with the promise of financial compensation, 700 jobs, water wells, improved schools, health clinics and roads. But the company later went bust, leaving villagers not just jobless but landless as well.
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

http://africanhealthmagazine.com/2012/06/26/western-investors-buying-up-swaths-of-african-farmland/

Africa’s land and family farms up for grabs? (AfricaFiles / Seedling magazine)

Read at :
AfricaFiles

Title: Africa‚s land and family farms ˆ up for grabs?
Author: Joan Baxter
Category: Africa General
Date: 2/15/2010
Source: Seedling magazine
Source Website: http://www.grain.org; http://www.farmlandgrab.org  <http://www.africafiles.org/database/www.grain.org;%20www.farmlandgrab.org>
African Charter Article# 21: All peoples shall freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources for their exclusive interest, eliminating all forms of foreign economic exploitation.
Summary & Comment: To make African agriculture commercially as profitable as AGRA aims to do, the Gates Foundation admits it may be necessary to promote „land mobility” – in other words – remove smallholder farmers from their land. DN

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Africa’s land and family farms up for grabs?

http:///seedling/?id=666 <http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=666>

Over the years many Big Ideas have been imposed on Africa from outside. The latest is that the region should sell or lease millions of hectares of land to foreign investors, who will bring resources and up-to-date technology. None of the blueprints has worked, and African farmers have become increasingly impoverished. It is time for Africans to turn to their own histories, knowledge and resources.
In the early 1990s, when I was living in northern Ghana, an elderly woman farmer decided that I needed some education. In a rather long lecture, she detailed the devastating effects that the Green Revolution ˆ the first one, which outside experts and donors launched in Africa in the 1960s and 70s ˆ had had on farmers‚ crops, soils, trees and lives. She said that the imported seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and tractors, the instructions to plant row after row of imported hybrid maize and cut down precious trees that protected the soils and nourished the people ˆ even the invaluable shea nut trees ˆ had ruined the diverse, productive farming systems that had always sustained her people.
When she finished, she cocked an eye at me and asked, with a cagey grin, „Why do you bring your mistakes here?‰ By „you‰ I think she meant the people ˆ foreigners and Africans in their employ ˆ who tramp all over the continent implementing big development ideas. These great schemes are generally concocted even higher up the decision-making chain in distant world financial capitals, often by free-market economists, bankers and billionaire philanthropists who wouldn‚t know a shea nut from a peanut.
At the time, I had no answer to her question. But now, two decades later, I think I do. It‚s taken years of patient teaching by African farmers from Zambia to Uganda, from Kenya to Cameroon and Mali. And, most recently, it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups, and activists who work to protect Africa‚s genetic heritage, farmers‚ rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. These knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable, at least for those who design and make them.
Not, however, for the average African farming family or even the average African whose interests, they would have us believe, are being served by the big plans for progress and development. There have been many such schemes over the years, nearly all of them promoting the unfettered free market and the re-regulation of the private sector; that is, the regulations that curtailed their cowboy capitalism had to be lassoed and put down so that new ones to protect their profitable stampede over the public sector could be put in place.
Hence all those years of structural adjustment programmes in Africa, poverty reduction or alleviation schemes, the first Green Revolution and liberalised trade that cranked open Africa‚s doors to the dumping on the continent of cheap imports and subsidised foodstuffs, which stifled African industries and undermined African farmers who, the same free-market gurus paradoxically said, should not be subsidised.
Triple whammy
These monetarist schemes have helped to make Africa poorer and ever more dependent on foreign donor and investor capital, and thus more vulnerable to still more of the Big Ideas and never-ending plans to profit from Africa while pretending to develop it. So that now, even as Africans struggle to confront the triple whammy of the global food crisis, the financial crisis and climate change ˆ all offspring of the unfettered free-market financial system ˆ the same big planners are at it again with more of the same mistakes disguised as solutions for Africa.
These days, they‚re blowing a perfectly awful storm all the way across Africa, this one designed to strike right at the heart of the continent ˆ its farms and the families and communities that work them, who account for 70 per cent of Africa‚s population. If left to blow itself out, African farmers may find themselves, one day in the not-so-distant future, without land to cultivate, their social structures and communities destroyed. They may find themselves without seed to call their own to share with each other. The crop varieties their forefathers had developed will have been „improved‰ and then privatised by foreigners who claim exclusive rights over their use.
Crucial water catchment areas and vast tracts of woodland needed to combat climate change will have been converted to vast water- and fossil-fuel-guzzling industrial plantations for food and agrofuels, all run by giant agribusinesses and foreign investors, absent landlords and bosses who may never in their lavish lives have soiled their soft hands in a farm field.
The latest Big Idea is for massive „foreign direct investment‰ (FDI) in Africa, and especially African agriculture, by countries, donors, financial institutions, corporations, everyone who‚s anyone in the upper echelons of the world‚s financial architecture, anyone awash with capital on the look-out for high returns. The spin on FDI is that it offers Africa wondrous „opportunities‰, a „winˆwin‰ situation, the only way to eradicate hunger and poverty. And just to make sure there‚s absolutely nothing impeding the onslaught of investment, so-called donor nations, working in cahoots with their corporate partners, international financial institutions and development banks, are busy helping African governments to „harmonise‰ laws across the continent to „improve the legal framework for business‰, to set up „one-stop shops‰ for investors, to „secure‰ landholdings by privatising them, and to open the doors for genetically modified (GM) crops and for the patenting of crop and tree varieties.
Across the continent, presidents are toeing the line, going along with the spin, pleading for still more foreign investment, literally putting their countries up for auction. The Tony Blair Foundation, and indeed the former British prime minister himself, invited rich and powerful investors to a meeting of the special Consultative Group on Sierra Leone in November 2009, at which the impoverished West African nation was, in essence, offering up its resources on a silver platter to foreign investors interested in land, diamonds, bauxite ∑ whatever the war-ravaged country still has left to sell. Apparently, however, the investors didn‚t need to come to Sierra Leone to stake out their claims; rather than hold the Great Sierra Leone Sale in Freetown, the Tony Blair Foundation decided to host it in London.
School of neoliberal dogma
As if there were no tomorrow, African leaders, well schooled in the neoliberal dogma of the World Bank and Wall Street, are welcoming the land-grabbing „investors‰ who are flocking to Africa to acquire vast tracts of land to produce food crops or agrofuels, depending on which would be most profitable at any given moment in the market. Some are just speculators, plain and simple, grabbing chunks of Africa as an investment, the new favourite hedge fund.
It is almost impossible to know just how much of Africa has been sold or leased out in the past two years because the deals are shrouded in secrecy and happening at such a pace that GRAIN works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab website.[1] More than US$100 billion has been mobilised in the past two years for investing in land, the trick being, according to one analyst „not to harvest food but to harvest money‰.[2] There are estimates that in this period, 30 million hectares (an area the size of Senegal and Benin together) have been grabbed, in at least 28 countries in Africa.[3] Ethiopia is offering more than a million hectares of what it calls „virgin‰ land to foreign investors.
Almost a third of Mozambique is, quite literally, up for grabs. It was just such a land investment deal between the South Korean company, Daewoo, and the former president of Madagascar, which would have accorded Daewoo about half of the country‚s arable land for industrial monoculture ˆ production of food and agrofuels for export to Korea ˆ that contributed to the political turbulence and the overthrow of President Ravalomanana, and the apparent cancellation of that particular deal. There is sure to be more political turbulence and conflict, neither of which Africa needs, as Africans realise what is happening to their land and farms.
Along with the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land out from under their own people, those running the show at the global level include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is busy reforming landownership laws in its member countries and proud to be doing so, as I found out in their Benin office.
Such privatisation threatens to destroy traditional communal approaches to land ownership in Africa, but it will make it easier to sell or lease land to foreign investors. Jacques Diouf, Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), originally called the land-grabbing a system of „neo-colonialism‰,[4] but since then the FAO appears to have joined the ranks of the World Bank et al., who support the land-grabbing and are working towards a „framework‰ that will promote „responsible‰ investment to make it a „winˆwin‰ situation.[5] Which means, of course, that there will be lots of fancy rhetoric, lofty promises, high-level meetings and conferences, and business will continue as usual. Africans loseˆlose, investors winˆwin.
Investors never have been, are not, and never will be in the business of helping hungry Africans to feed themselves and to solve the problem of food insecurity, which has been so aggravated by earlier Big Ideas to liberalise trade and revolutionise agriculture. The offshore farming of food or of agrofuels for export, or just as investment, is big business. For profit.
The greenwash factor
GRAIN and COPAGEN say that those grabbing Africa‚s farmland are as diverse as they are numerous. They note the complicity of African governments and say that some African „barons‰ are also snapping up land. Some grabbers are countries anxious to secure their own future food supplies, such as China, India, Japan and other Asian countries, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States and Libya. Other land-grabbers are buying and leasing vast tracts of land in Africa as a lucrative investment, or, as one analyst puts it, „an asset like gold, only better‰.[6]
Among them are multinational agribusinesses, and investment houses, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, that cater to the super-rich. Others getting in on the new land rush are energy and mining companies, who greenwash their fuel-guzzling industrial plantation schemes in an attempt to cash in on public goodwill to try to tackle climate change with large-scale production of agrofuels from food crops such as palm oil, sugarcane and maize, or non-food crops such as jatropha. All of these require enormous amounts of water ˆ and fossil fuels that cause climate change ˆ to produce. And this on land that should be in the hands of farming families.
Ah yes, Africa‚s farm families
Those are the people for whom there is another Very Big Idea going on. It‚s the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which claims to be working in smallholder farmers‚ interests by „catalysing‰ a green revolution in Africa. Yes, another one. AGRA‚s Green Revolution Number Two is being bankrolled primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, which bankrolled Green Revolution Number One. But it has roped in many major development banks, UN agencies and the CGIAR (among others) for the massive undertaking of revolutionising African agriculture.
AGRA is run by several people with close ties to the biotech monster, Monsanto, and, just like Green Revolution Number One, it recommends „modern‰ technological solutions such as imported fertilisers and purchased seeds. While it denies that GM crops are necessarily involved, the Gates Foundation has also offered US$5.4 million to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a US institute funded heavily by Monsanto, to expedite the acceptance by African governments of GM crops for field testing.[7] One does want to ask the worshippers of modern technology and proponents of industrial models of commercial agriculture and agribusiness why, when these are supposedly so productive, they are so heavily subsidised in Europe and the US.
To render African agriculture commercially profitable, as AGRA aims to do, the Gates Foundation admits (not publicly, but in a leaked document) that it may eventually be necessary to promote „land mobility‰, doublespeak for smallholder farmers being removed from their land.[8]
AGRA closes the gates
Before it set out to re-invent the African farm,:

• Did AGRA revisit liberalised trade policies that have suppressed prices for African produce and hurt Africa‚s farmers?
• Did it examine the economic dogma imposed on Africa that destroyed agricultural extension programmes and reduced government spending on agricultural investment, research and infrastructure?
• Did it do its homework and take stock of the countless studies of the myriad advantages of resilient, holistic, small-scale farms that rely on the sharing of local seed varieties and traditional knowledge and crop/tree diversity and that reduce risks?
• Did it examine ways to promote and improve these environmentally sustainable systems? Did it pay more than lip service to the landmark study, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), carried out by dozens of scientists over many years and initiated by the World Bank itself, which in April 2009 concluded that agro-ecological agriculture by smallholder farmers was the best solution of all?
• The answer to all of these questions is: No.
  

More importantly, did AGRA even engage with Africa‚s farmers and involve them in its big plans? Not according to Simon Mwamba of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers‚ Forum. Speaking at a dialogue on AGRA organised by Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mwamba quipped, „You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what colour do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!‰[9]
The experts and billionaires with Big Ideas that are bound to profit multinational agribusinesses, foreign investors, hunger-profiteers and greenwashers ˆ all of whom masquerade as Africa‚s saviours and mentors ˆ have already drawn budget lines and battle lines in Africa‚s soils, without bothering to inform Africa‚s farmers of the intended fate of their land and their livelihoods. By any stretch of the imagination, it‚s hardly a fair fight. On one side, many of the richest and most powerful people, institutions and nations on earth, working in alliance with African governments that toe the line.
On the other hand, some of the poorest people on earth, African farmers‚ associations and coalitions such as COPAGEN, and NGOs such as GRAIN, Friends of the Earth in Africa and the African Biosafety Network, who are struggling to inform African governments about the high stakes of these schemes that threaten not just their food and seed sovereignty, but the sovereignty of their land and even African nations themselves.
These groups would like African leaders to stop believing that wads of foreign cash and Big Ideas are the solution for the continent, and look instead to their own histories, knowledge and resources to promote family farming systems that offer a range of social, economic and environmental advantages over all those imported notions and plans spawned by free-market dogma and riding tsunamis of foreign capital. Put forward as solutions even though ˆ as I learned all those years ago ˆ they are often just very big and very dangerous mistakes for Africa.
See:

1. http://www.farmlandgrab.org <http://www.farmlandgrab.org/>
2. http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212
3. Patrick Piro, „La course aux terres ne faiblit pas‰, Politis, No. 1029, 17 September 2009.
4. Javier Blas, „UN warns of food neo-colonialism‰,  Financial Times, 19 August 2008.
5. Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, „Promoting responsible international investment in agriculture‰, 29 September 2009: http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/fishery/agriculture/investment.html
6. Chris Mayer, „This asset is like gold, only better‰, DailyWealth, 4 October 2009: http://www.stockhouse.com/Columnists/2009/Oct/4/This-asset-is-like-gold,-only-better
7. Friends of the Earth (FOE) Ghana; Togo; Nigeria; Cameroon; Sierra Leone; Tunisia; Swaziland; South Africa; Mauritius, AGRA & Monsanto & Gates, Green Washing and Poor Washing, 6 April 2009:
8. http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/agra-monsanto-gates-green-washing-poor-washing/
9. Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck, „Ending Africa‚s Hunger‰, The Nation, 21 September 2009:
10. http://crossedcrocodiles.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/agra-monsanto-gates-green-washing-poor-washing/
11. Ibid.
    

*Joan Baxter is a Canadian journalist and writer who has been reporting on Africa
for over two decades.

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http://www.eraction.org/publications/SayNotoGMOinAfrica.pdf

http://www.eraction.org/publications/SayNotoGMOinAfrica.pdf

AFRICA MUST NOT USE BIOTECHNOLOGY IN FOOD PRODUCTION

Re: AFRICA MUST USE BIOTECHNOLOGY TO MAXIMISE FOOD

PRODUCTION

We the undersigned representing civil society groups are concerned about recent statements that emanated from the first Pan African Biotechnology Stewardship Conference held in Accra, Ghana on the 1^st of December 2011, which called on Africans to use biotechnology to provide “poor farmers with healthier, more bountiful crops to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa".

The high profile conference which was on the theme “Africa In Search Of Safe and High Quality Biotech Crops” was graced by experts in Biotechnology from around the world, who unanimously endorsed the use of gm crops for providing “poor farmers with healthier, more bountiful crops to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa."

At the said meeting, Deputy Executive Director of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, Ramadjita Tabo, was quoted as saying that the sole aim of of the Agricultural Biotechnology Biosafety Policy Platform was to build the capacity of Africans “for the deployment of biotechnology”, and that

“ This capacity strengthening covers both genetically modified and non-GM approaches.”

1

Professor Adewale Adekunle, Director of Forum for Agriculture Research in Africa (FARA) Unit, which deals with partnership, in his closing remarks stated that, to meet the food security needs, African countries need to rely on biotechnology and stewardship. 

2

We are disappointed that an unproven and unsafe technology is being hoisted on Africa simply because of the unfortunate continual characterization of Africa as a chronically hungry continent.

It is important to understand that, the agricultural fortunes of the continent have been adversely impacted mainly by externally generated neo-liberal policies. Our agricultural systems are threatened by industries that seek to control our food and our livelihoods by destroying our agricultural systems. The move towards intensified, chemical based agriculture is set to undermine the predominant family based agro-ecological food production on the continent.

The promotion and introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) with intellectual property rights over seeds represents a serious threat to African farmers rights to reproduce,

1 AFRICA MUST USE BIOTECHNOLOGY TO MAXIMISE FOOD PRODUCTION???

SOURCE: Ghana News Agency, Ghana (GNA), DATE: 01.1

2.2011

URL:

http://www.ghana.gov.gh/index.php?option=com_conten

t&view=article&id=9459:africa-must-

use-biotechnology-to-maximise-food-production-&cati

d=28:general-news&Itemid=162

2

ibid

save and share seeds. It also threatens to erode seed diversity represents new forms of stealing, as all industrial seeds are taken from seeds cultivated, developed and preserved through thousands of years of selection and breeding by our people.

We express total disgust at the manner by which the burden for solutions to every crisis faced by the North is shifted unto Africa. For example, with the climate change and energy crises the burden has been inequitably placed on the continent through land grabs for agro-fuels production as well as the unfair sentencing of Africa to adapt to climate impacts that she did not create.

While the world is advancing towards stricter control of GMOs, it is a different situation in Africa where our leaders are covertly or ignorantly

colluding with multinational agribusinesses to colonize our food systems as well as give out our arable lands through dubious land grabbing greements.

We note that recently many countries have been taking steps to secure their agriculture from pollution through modern biotechnology and to secure

the safety of national food systems. We give examples here.

1.   Benin Republic has maintained a moratorium on GMOs over the past 10 years.

2.   Peruapproved the law banning GM production for 10 years.

3.   The Mexican States of Tlaxcala and Michoacán each passed legislation banning the planting of genetically modified corn to protect natural plants from further contamination of transgenes. China said GMO is not a priority, stemming from public debate and outcry over the safety of GMO food

4.   In the United States: California counties of Mendocino, Trinity and Marin have successfully banned GM crops.

5.   In New Zealand: No GM foods are grown.

6.   In Germany: There is a ban on the cultivation or sale of GMO maize.

7.   Peru approves law banning GM production for 10 years http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2011/11/perus-congress-approves-10-year-gmo-ban/Two Mexican States ban GM corn! http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/03/0 GM in China 'not a priority' http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/23/china-agriculture-

idUSTOE71M04V20110223

8.   In Ireland: All GM crops were banned for cultivation in 2009, and there is a labeling system for foods containing GM to ensure that such foods are identified as such.

9.   In Austria, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Luxembourg there are bans on the cultivation and sale of GMOs.

10.               In France: Monsanto's MON810 GM corn had been approved but its cultivation was forbidden in 2008. There is widespread public mistrust of GMOs that has been successful in keeping GM crops out of the country.

11.               Madeira the autonomous Portugese island requested a country-wide ban on genetically modified crops last year and was permitted to do so by the European Union (EU).

12.               12.Switzerland banned all GM crops, animals, and plants on its fields and farms in a public referendum in 2005, but the initial ban was for only five years. The ban has since been extended through 2013.

There are several other examples.

It is clear that the Genetic engineering is a technology in search of a market. Experts in Biotechnology from around the world” and lobbyists from the genetic engineering (GE) industry are pushing the notion that Africa’s only choice is between hunger and GE crops. This is patently false and is merely an arm-twisting effort that African farmers and peoples’ must resist. Hunger can be avoided without growing and eating GE crops. Studies have shown that the claim that genetically engineered (GE) crops have a higher yield than natural varieties is virtually a myth. It is also not true that GE crops lead to reduction in the use of pesticides and other agro chemicals. Neither is it true that the way to overcome nutritional deficiencies must be through techno fixes. 6 The so-called nutritional fortification of crops is simply market grabbing exercises as better quality and more nutrious traditional varieties exist.

For these reasons we ask our governments and peoples as a matter of urgency to support ecological-friendly farming which nurtures our soil, cultivates diversity and supplies our families with safe and nutritious food. Ecological agriculture also helps to combat climate change.

We therefore resolve as follows:

1.That there are no successes stories to tell about GMOs other than tales of woes. Africans must not be used as guinea pigs for unverified technologies and the continent must no longer be used as a dumping ground for the products of the biotech companies.

6

Nnimmo Bassey:

Playing politics with genetically modified organism

s

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Money/Busines

s/Energy/5635474-

183/oil_politics_playing_politics_with_genetically.

csp

2. That production of GMOs is not only a threat to biosafety; it also poses great danger to biodiversity which is at the base of sustainability of life. 3.We call for a local and global paradigm-shift towards Food Sovereignty: food production and consumption that are fundamentally based upon local contextual considerations. Small-scale farmers, pastoralists, fisher-folk, indigenous peoples and others have defined a food system based on the human Right to adequate Food and food production policies that increase democracy in localized food systems and ensure maximisation of sustainable natural resource use.

In 2008, after three years of solid work, over 400 scientists, 30 governments from developed and developing countries, as well as 30 civil society organizations, concluded work under the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). About 60 countries endorsed the report at a meeting in Johannesburg in April of that year. The report concluded that modern biotechnology would have very limited contribution to the feeding of the world in the foreseeable future. That report is an excellent blue print for action by African governments rather than getting tied to the apron-strings of speculators and neo-colonial powers whose objective is to exploit subjugate and destroy food production systems on the African continent

===============================

Genetically modified (GM) crops. (illustration: Melvyn Calderon/Greenpeace)

Africa's Frankenfoods

By Paige Aarhus, Indypendent

09 June 12

n the sprawling hills of the Kangundo district in Kenya’s Eastern Province, just a few hours outside of capital city Nairobi, Fred Kiambaa has been farming the same small, steep plot of land for more than 20 years.

Born and raised just outside Kathiini Village in Kangundo, Kiambaa knows the ups and downs of agriculture in this semi-arid region. He walks up a set of switchbacks to Kangundo’s plateaus to tend his fields each morning and seldom travels further than a few miles from his plot.

Right now, all that remains of his maize crop are rows of dry husks. Harvest season finished just two weeks ago, and the haul was meager this time around.

“Water is the big problem, it’s always water. We have many boreholes, but when there is no rain, it’s still difficult,” he said.

Kiambaa and his wife, Mary, only harvested 440 pounds of maize this season, compared to their usual 2,200. They have six children, meaning there will be many lean months before the next harvest, and worse: Though March is Kenya’s rainiest month, it’s been mostly dry so far.

“The rain surely is not coming well this year. Rain is the key. We can only pray,” he said.

Wonder Crops?

Farmers like Kiambaa are central to a push to deploy genetically modified (GM) technology within Kenya. In recent years, donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have invested millions of dollars into researching, developing and promoting GM technology, including drought-resistant maize, within the country - and have found a great deal of success in doing so through partnerships with local NGOs and government bodies.

The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), a semi-autonomous government research institution, recently announced that after years of trials, genetically modified drought-resistant maize seeds will be available to Kenyan farmers within the next five years. Trial GM drought-resistant cotton crops are already growing in Kidoko, 240 miles southeast of Nairobi.

Researchers and lobbyists argue that in a country so frequently stricken by food shortages, scientific advancements can put food into hungry bellies. Drought-resistant seeds and vitamin-enriched crops could be agricultural game changers, they say.

But serious concerns about viability, corporate dependency and health effects linger - even while leading research firms and NGOs do their best to smooth them over.

Agriculture dominates Kenya’s economy, although more than 80 percent of its land is too dry and infertile for efficient cultivation. Kenya is the second largest seed consumer in sub-Saharan Africa, and Nairobi is a well-known hub for agricultural research. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, farming is the largest contributor to Kenya’s gross domestic product, and 75 percent of Kenyans made their living by farming in 2006.

Half of the country’s total agricultural output is non-marketed subsistence production - meaning farms like Kiambaa’s, where nothing is sold and everything is consumed.

On top of that, the country is still reeling from the worst drought in half a century, which affected an estimated 13 million people across the Horn of Africa in 2011. Kenya is home to the world’s largest refugee camp, housing 450,000 Somalis fleeing violence and famine, increasing the pressure to deal with food security challenges.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga recently called on parliament to assist the estimated 4.8 million Kenyans, in a country of about 40 million, who still rely on government food supports, as analysts predict that this year’s rainy season will be insufficient to guarantee food security.

“The situation is not good... Arid and semi-arid regions have not recovered from the drought,” Odinga said.

At the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), a massive NGO working on GM research and development in partnership with KARI, Regulatory Affairs Manager Dr. Francis Nang’ayo says GM crops are “substantially equivalent” to non-genetically modified foods and should be embraced as a solution to persistent drought and hunger.

In 2008, the AATF received a $47 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This partnership involved the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and American seed giant Monsanto.

In 2005, the Water-Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program became one of the first main partners in a program aimed at developing drought-resistant maize for small-scale African farmers. Monsanto promised to provide seeds for free. The Gates Foundation claimed at the time that biotechnology and GM crops would help end poverty and food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Gates Foundation had invested $27.6 million in Monsanto shares.

Donors had been investing millions in KARI for decades in an effort to develop seeds that would produce pest- and disease-resistant plants and produce higher yields. Monsanto promised results, with the goal of distributing its seeds to small-scale farmers across Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.

Since then WEMA’s African partners have made major strides in bringing GM crops to Kenya, most notably when KARI announced in March that it is set to introduce genetically modified maize to farmers’ fields by 2017. Until 2008, South Africa had been the only country using GM technology. Now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Mali, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Ghana are researching GM seeds and growing trial crops of cotton, maize and sorghum.

“Five years ago it was only South Africa that had a clear policy. Since then a number of countries have put their acts together by publishing policies on GM technology laws. In Kenya we’re moving on to create institutional mechanisms,” said Dr. Nang’ayo.

Deeply Divided

But Nang’ayo and his team face several challenges. Popular opinion on the technology is deeply divided in Kenya, in large part due to suspicions about the giant foreign corporations that control it.

Monsanto-patented seeds are usually costly, which has led to numerous accusations of exploitation and contemporary colonialism. But how long will these particular strains of seeds last? What are the guarantees? Critics fear dependence on corporate fertilizers and pesticides, the emergence of super-weeds and pests that can no longer repel GM varieties, and terminator seeds that only last for one planting season.

At Seattle’s AGRA Watch, a project of the Community Alliance for Global Justice, director Heather Day said there aren’t enough questions being asked about introducing GM technology to developing countries.

“Our campaign started because of our concern about the Gates Foundation’s influence on agriculture and the lack of transparency and accountability. We also have ecological concerns, in terms of food sovereignty and farmers’ ability to control their food system. We need to be concerned about the industrialization of the agricultural system,” she said.

AGRA Watch’s objective is to monitor and question the Gates Foundation’s push for a “green revolution” in Africa.

Monsanto has promised an indefinite supply of royalty-free seeds for this project, but Day said the pitfalls have the potential to devastate the continent’s agriculture.

“Genetically modified crops actually haven’t been that successful,” Day said. “We’ve seen massive crop failure in South Africa, and farmers there couldn’t get financial remedies or compensation for their losses. There’s genetic resistance and super-pests, these things are happening now, and it’s not surprising. It’s what you would expect from an ecological standpoint.”

The horror stories are real - in India, for example, farmers who purchased Bollgard I cotton seeds from 2007 to 2009 wound up spending four times the price of regular seeds, and paying dearly for it. It was believed that Monsanto’s patented GM seeds would be resistant to pink bollworms, which were destroying cotton crops across swaths of India, but by 2010 Monsanto officials were forced to admit that the seed had failed and a newer breed of far more aggressive pests had emerged. The solution? Bollgard II, an even stronger GM cotton seed.

As of December 2011, Monsanto was actively promoting the latest Bollgard III cotton seed, stronger than ever before. Pesticide spending in India skyrocketed between 2007 and 2009, forcing thousands of farmers into crushing debt, and hundreds more into giving up their land. Some media outlets later drew a connection between the Bollgard debacle and a rash of suicides across farms that had purchased the seeds.

Land Grabs

Kenya is a country where land-grabbing is all too common, be it on the coast to make way for new tourist resorts, or in Nairobi, where slum demolitions left hundreds homeless when the government bulldozed several apartment buildings to reclaim an area near the Moi Air Base.

Farmers here are skeptical of risking everything for a few seasons of higher yields. In Kangundo, Kiambaa said he would try GM technology if it was a matter of life or death - but he is wary.

Kiambaa uses the Katumani breed of maize, a widely available seed that is reasonably drought-tolerant and affordable. Higher yields are tempting, of course, but Kiambaa said he doesn’t want to chance his livelihood on a foreign corporation. While his family has been on the land for decades now, Kiambaa said they didn’t get to farm it until British colonialists returned it to local farmers. He pointed out trees that line the steep hillside, planted by the British.

“It’s because of Mzungus that we have charcoal,” he said, smiling wryly.

After the last harvest, Kiambaa can’t even afford to use Kenya’s standard DAP fertilizer, which costs 59 cents per pound. Instead, he has a lone cow tied to a post in his fields.

“This provides the fertilizer we need. We can’t afford anything else. The maize yield could have been much better, but we know our plants will grow each year. It is better we keep it the way it is. My family has been on this land for 100 years. We have always survived,” he said.

At the National Biosafety Authority (NBA), CEO Willy Tonui claims media hysteria and inaccurate reporting are to blame for resistance to GM technology, arguing the NBA maintains stringent guidelines about GM seeds in Kenya. Referring to the plans to allow GM maize seeds in by 2017, Tonui said, “The National Biosafety Authority does not have the mandate to introduce GM maize or any other crop into Kenya. We only review applications that are submitted to the authority. To date, the authority has not received any application on commercial release of GM maize or any other crop.”

Anne Maina, advocacy coordinator for the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), a coalition of 65 Kenyan farming organizations, said that’s not a good enough answer.

“Who’s controlling the industry?” she asked. “If you are going to talk to the National Biosafety Authority, they’ll tell you the information is available, but there is a confidential business information clause where whoever is controlling the industry is not held accountable. The level of secrecy and lack of transparency is unacceptable.”

Farmers’ Needs

The ABN has actively lobbied the government since 2004 to crack down on GM technology slowly filtering into Kenya, with some measure of success. A 2009 Biosafety Act required all GM imports to pass stringent government standards before entering the country.

Maina recognizes the uphill battle she’s facing.

“Our public research institutions must shift their focus back to farmers’ needs,” she told The Indypendent, “rather than support the agenda of agribusiness, which is to colonize our food and seed chain. We believe that the patenting of seed is deeply unethical and dangerous.”

Joan Baxter is a journalist who has spent years reporting on climate change and agriculture in Africa. Reporting now from Sierra Leone, Baxter was quick to point out that even if a farmer chooses not to use GM technology, it won’t guarantee crop safety.

“Farmers are always at risk of contamination from GM seeds. That has been shown in North America. The farmers [in Africa] may lose their own seeds, perhaps be given GM seeds for a year or two, then have to purchase them and be stuck in the trap and in debt,” she said.

Like Maina, Baxter sees a problem in how GM technology is being marketed, and slowly introduced, into African countries, under the guise of ending famine. With climate change becoming an increasingly influential factor in the GM debate, Baxter said companies claiming to help are only looking for profit.

“Basically this is disaster capitalism. The disaster of hunger and drought, climate change and policy-related, is now a profit opportunity for Monsanto and Syngenta. The Gates Foundation buying shares in Monsanto tells you what the real agenda is: To get GMOs in Africa,” she said.

In 2010, NBA’s CEO resigned after it was revealed that 280,000 tonnes of GM maize had found its way into Kenya from South Africa through the Port of Mombasa.

Farmers mobilized en masse after the Dreyfus scandal (named for the South African company responsible for shipping the seeds) was revealed, marching on Parliament to demand an end to secret imports. After the most recent GM announcement, however, there were no protests. The long rains that would ensure a good yield haven’t come. The drought may continue.

Added to the potential problems with GM technology are health risks-the strains of maize that were illegally imported in 2010 had been deemed unsafe for children and the elderly. Maina also worries about animal feeding trials that showed damage to liver, kidney and pancreas, effects on fertility, and stomach bleeding in livestock that has consumed GM feed. A more recent study carried out on pregnant women in Canada found genetically modified insecticidal proteins in their blood streams and in that of their unborn children, despite assurances from scientists that it wasn’t possible.

The political scandal that erupted after 2010’s illegal imports brought GM technology into the forefront of Kenyan public debate, but last year’s massive drought has shifted public and political discourse. The ABN doesn’t have a $47 million grant to keep it going, and the pressures it faces from politicians and corporations, now waging their own propaganda war, are overwhelming.

GM Treadmill

At the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health in Toronto, researchers recently released a report titled “Factors in the adoption and development of agro-biotechnology in sub-Saharan Africa.” The report, which was financed by a grant by the Gates Foundation, came to the conclusion that “poor communication is affecting agbiotech adoption,” and that “widespread dissemination of information at the grassroots level and can spread misinformation and create extensive public concern and distrust for agbiotech initiatives.”

Lead researcher Obidimma Ezezika declined to comment on Monsanto’s involvement with GM technology, and denied that his team was creating corporate propaganda.

“I think it is important to actively and soberly engage in the debate by offering facts to the policy makers, media and public on ag-biotech which will dispel fears and anxieties,” he told The Indypendent.

The mounting evidence, health questions and political scandals all mean Kenya would be wisest to take a step back before jumping on board the GM train, says Maina.

“Our key concern is that the development of insecticides and pesticides is primarily the emergence of companies getting farmers to buy highly toxic chemicals, which they will become totally dependent on. We don’t yet know the extent of the health risks posed, nor how we are expected to trust companies that have a record of putting small farmers out of business. It is time for sober second thought,” she said.

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Seeds of a Controversy

Genetically modified foods were first introduced on a commercial basis in the United States in the mid-1990s. The new technology made it possible to splice desirable qualities from one species into another - such as inserting the gene that keeps a flounder from freezing in cold water into a tomato for longer cold temperature storage. The usage of GM crops in the United States grew rapidly in the following years with minimal public debate. Today, more than 70 percent of the food in supermarkets have GM derivatives, including virtually all processed foods. However, GM food continues to be controversial in other parts of the world, especially in Europe and Africa. Here are some of the reasons why:

Human Health: The process of genetic engineering can introduce dangerous new allergens and toxins into foods, such as when Starlink, a gene-altered animal feed corn containing a potential allergen, was found in corn chips and taco shells. Questions have also been raised about the potential impact of gene transfer from GM foods to cells of the body or to bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

PATENTED SEEDS: Farmers have saved harvested seeds for replanting since the dawn of human agriculture 11,000 years ago. But farmers who carry on this practice with GM crops can be charged with violating intellectual property rights in much the same way that people who share music files online without paying can be hauled into court. Biotech giant Monsanto has also explored the use of Terminator technology that would render harvested seeds sterile and unusable. To date, this technology has not been commercialized due to intense opposition around the world.

Contamination of non-GM crops: As the planting of genetically modified crops become more widespread, the number of incidents in which their pollen contaminates traditional or organic varieties increases. Such contamination can cost organic growers their certification and their consumers access to non-GM food. It can also lead to a lawsuit from corporations like Monsanto, which aggressively litigates against farmers whose fields have been contaminated claiming - of all things - patent infringement. Many non-GM farmers will refrain from growing certain crops in order to avoid the risk of being sued. The problems associated with crop contamination could get worse - for both humans and wildlife - as biotech companies prepare a second generation of GM crops that will produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.

INCREASED PESTICIDE USAGE: Many of Monsanto’s GM crops are designed to withstand much higher doses of Roundup, Monsanto’s top-selling herbicide. A study by the Organic Center found that the planting of GM crops in the United States from 1996 to 2008 increased the average use of active ingredient pesticides by a quarter pound per planted acre, or a total of 318.4 million pounds over the time of the study. The largest increases in pesticides occurred in 2007 and 2008 as heavy usage of Roundup spawned Roundup-resistant weeds.

Cost: From higher seed prices to increased pesticide and fertilizer usage, planting GM crops is more expensive and favors agribusinesses that can operate on large economies of scale. For small farmers in the Global South, the extra expenses can quickly lead to crushing debt burdens and loss of their land, especially when GM crops don’t deliver their expected results.

UNFORSEEN CONSEQUENCES: After 4.5 billion years of natural evolution, the advent of genetically modified organisms represents a “second genesis” in which the planet is being repopulated by commercially patented lifeforms, says Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Biotech Century. The potential long-term impact of these laboratory creations - from the emergence of new super-pests to the loss of genetic diversity in the natural world - is not known yet. For many skeptics, that is reason enough to proceed with caution.
- JOHN TARLETON

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Carving Up Africa, Again

Small farmers in Kenya and its African neighbors worry that the extra costs associated with using genetically modified crops will bury them in debt and force them to give up their land. If that happens, there will be many buyers ready to seize the opportunity.
The British food aid organization Oxfam reports that over the past decade 561 million acres of land in the Global South and the former Soviet Bloc have been sold, leased or licensed largely in Africa and to international investors. It’s an area larger than Alaska and Texas combined. The trend has accelerated since 2008 when food prices spiked around the world and Western investors fled from the U.S. property market.
Asian and Middle Eastern countries have bought up large tracts of land in Africa to ensure their future food supply. Western investors, meanwhile, are turning to Africa to boost biofuel production by planting vast swaths of sugar cane and palm oil. In many cases, investors see their taxes waived by host governments and are allowed to produce entirely for export. Examples of land grabs include:

• China purchased 250,000 acres of agricultural land in Zimbabwe in 2008 and is investing $800 million in Mozambique to modernize rice production for export.

• In 2008 Philippe Heilburg, a former commodities trader at AIG, leased 988,000 acres in the south of Sudan from a local warlord. Since South Sudan became its own country last year, Heilburg has leased another 740,000 acres. Heilburg’s goal is to convert the land into an agricultural plantation.
• From 2006 to 2010, 22,000 Ugandans in the Kiboga and Mubende districts were violently displaced from their forest homes by local security forces after a British timber company acquired title to the land they had been farming for decades.

“The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking,” Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute told the (UK) Guardian. “The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.”
- J.T.

 http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/11832-africas-frankenfoods