Africa's Frankenfoods, Monsanto and the Gates Foundation

Paige Aarhus
The Indypendent
Wed, 02 May 2012 19:50 UTC


In 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.

http://www.sott.net/article/245403-Africas-Frankenfoods-Monsanto-and-the-Gates-Foundation

Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push Genetically Engineered Crops on Africa

Mike Ludwig
Truthout
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:48 UTC

© Anne Wangalachi/CIMMYT
Joel Mbithi (left), farm manager of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute's Kiboko Research Station, and Yoseph Beyene, CIMMYT maize breeder, discuss experimental plots. They are developing drought tolerant top-cross hybrids as part of the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project. This is run by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) in partnership with Monsanto and CIMMYT, which supplies germplasm and expertise.
Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show of images amid descriptions of the foundation's fight against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a "Trojan horse" to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds, including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to have approved in the United States and abroad.

The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program was launched in 2008 with a $47 million grant from mega-rich philanthropists Warrant Buffet and Bill Gates. The program is supposed to help farmers in several African countries increase their yields with drought- and heat-tolerant corn varieties, but a report released last month by the African Centre for Biosafety claims WEMA is threatening Africa's food sovereignty and opening new markets for agribusiness giants like Monsanto.

The Gates Foundation claims that biotechnology, GE crops and Western agricultural methods are needed to feed the world's growing population and programs like WEMA will help end poverty and hunger in the developing world. Critics say the foundation is using its billions to shape the global food agenda and the motivations behind WEMA were recently called into question when activists discovered the Gates foundation had spent $27.6 million on 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock between April and June 2010.

Water shortages in parts of Africa and beyond have created a market for "climate ready" crops worth an estimated $2.7 billion. Leading biotech companies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow are currently racing to develop crops that will grow in drought conditions caused by climate change, and by participating in the WEMA program, Monsanto is gaining a leg up by establishing new markets and regulatory approvals for its patented transgenes in five Sub-Saharan African countries, according to the Centre's report.

Monsanto teamed up with BASF, another industrial giant, to donate technology and transgenes to WEMA and its partner organizations. Seed companies and researchers will receive the GE seed for free and small-scale farmers can plant the corn without making the royalty payments that Monsanto usually demands from farmers each season.

Monsanto is donating the seeds for now, but the company has a reputation for aggressively defending its patents. In the past, Monsanto has sued farmers for growing crops that cross-pollinated with Monsanto crops and became contaminated with the company's patented genetic codes.

In 2009, Monsanto and BASF discovered a gene in a bacterium that is believed to help plants like corn survive on less water and soon the companies developed a corn seed know as MON 87460. It remains unclear if MON 87460 will out-compete conventional drought-tolerant hybrids, but the United States Department of Agriculture could approve the corn for commercial use in the US as soon as July 11. Monsanto plans to make the seed available to American farmers by next year.

GE crops like MON 87460 can only be tested and sold in countries that, like the US, are friendly toward biotech agriculture. WEMA's target areas could add five countries to that list: South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Mozambique. The Biosafety Centre reports that WEMA's massive funding opportunities pressure politicians to pass weak biosafety laws and welcome GE crops and the agrichemical drenched growing systems that come with them. Field trials of MON 87460 and other drought-tolerant varieties are already underway in South Africa, where Monsanto already has considerable political influence. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are expected to begin field trials of WEMA corn varieties in 2011.

The agency that is implementing WEMA is the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), a pro-biotechnology group funded completely by the US government's USAID program, the United Kingdom and the Buffet and Gates foundations. The AATF is a nonprofit charity that lobbies African governments and promotes partnerships between public groups and private companies to make agricultural technology available in Africa. The Biosafety Centre accuses the AATF of essentially being a front group for the US government, allowing USAID to "meddle" in African politics by promoting weak biosafety regulation that makes it easier for American corporations to export biotechnology to African countries.

WEMA and AATF swim in a myriad alphabet soup of NGOs and nonprofits propped up by Western nations and wealthy philanthropists that promote everything from fertilizer to food crops with enhanced nutritional content as solutions to world hunger. Together, these groups are promoting a Second Green Revolution and sparking a worldwide debate over the future of food production. The Gates Foundation alone has committed $1.7 billion to the effort to date.

There was nothing "green" about the first Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. As population skyrocketed during the last century, multinationals pushed Western agriculture's fertilizers, irrigation, oil-thirsty machinery and pesticides on farmers in the developing world. Historians often point out that promoting industrial agriculture to keep developing countries well fed was crucial to the US effort to stop the spread of Soviet Communism.

The Second Green Revolution, which is focused on Africa, seeks to solve hunger problems with education, biotechnology, high-tech breeding, and other industrial agricultural methods popular in countries like the US, Brazil and Mexico.

Africa has landed in the center of a global food debate over a central question: with the world's growing population expected to reach nine billion by 2045, how will farmers feed everyone, especially those in developing countries? The lines of the debate are drawn. The Second Green Revolutionaries are now facing off with activists and researchers who doubt the West's petroleum and technology-based agricultural systems can sustainably feed the world.

The African Centre for Biosafety and its allies often point to a report recently released by IAASTD, a research group supported by the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization, and others. IAASTD found that industrial agriculture has been successful in its goal of increasing crop yields worldwide, but has caused environmental degradation and deforestation that disproportionately affects small farmers and poorer nations. Widespread use of pesticides and fertilizer, for instance, cause dead zones in coastal areas. Massive irrigation projects now account for 70 percent of water withdrawal globally and approximately 1.6 billion people live in water-scarce basins.

Increasing crop yields is the bottom line for groups like the Gates Foundation, but the IAASTD recommends that sustainability should be the goal. The report does not rule out biotechnology, but suggests high-tech agriculture is just one tool in the toolbox. The report promotes "agroecology," which seeks to replace the chemical and biochemical inputs of industrial agriculture with resources found in the natural environment.

In March, a UN expert released a report showing that small-scale farmers could double their food production in a decade with the simple agroecological methods. The report flies in the face of the Second Green Revolutionaries.

"Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live - especially in unfavorable environments," said Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report. "Malawi, a country that launched a massive chemical fertilizer subsidy program a few years ago, is now implementing agroecology, benefiting more than 1.3 million of the poorest people, with maize yields increasing from 1 ton per hectare to 2 to 3 tons per hectare."

De Schutter said private companies like Monsanto will not invest in agroecology because it does not open new markets for agrichemicals or GE seeds, so it's up to governments and the public to support the switch to more sustainable agriculture. But with more than a billion dollars already spent, the Second Green Revolutionaries are determined to have a say in how the world grows its food, and agroecology is not on their agenda. To them, sustainability means bringing private innovation to the developing world. The Gates Foundation can donate billions to the fight against hunger, but when private companies like Monsanto stand to benefit, it makes feeding the world look like a for-profit scheme.

http://www.sott.net/article/231685-Monsanto-and-Gates-Foundation-Push-Genetically-Engineered-Crops-on-Africa

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2105:monsanto-and-gates-foundation-push-ge-crops-on-africa

Gates Foundation's Seed Agenda in Africa 'Another Form of Colonialism,' Warns Protesters

'This neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization poses a serious threat to food sovereignty and the ability of food producers and consumers to define their own food systems and policies,' says campaigners

byLauren McCauley, staff writer

Food sovereignty activists are shining a light on a closed-door meeting between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which are meeting in London on Monday with representatives of the biotechnology industry to discuss how to privatize the seed and agricultural markets of Africa.

Early Monday, protesters picketed outside the Gates Foundation's London offices holding signs that called on the foundation to "free the seeds." Some demonstrators handed out packets of open-pollinated seeds, which served as symbol of the "alternative to the corporate model promoted by USAID and BMGF." Others smashed a piñata, which they said represented the "commercial control of seed systems;" thousands of the seeds which filled the pinata spilled across the office steps. A similar protest is expected later Monday in Seattle, Washington, where BMGF is headquartered.

The meeting was convened to discuss a report put forth by Monitor-Deloitte, which was commissioned by BMGF and USAID to develop models for the commercialization of seed production in Africa, especially "early generation seed," and to identify ways in which the African governmental sectors could facilitate private involvement in African seed systems. The study was conducted in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia on maize, rice, sorghum, cowpea, common beans, cassava and sweet potato.

However, food sovereignty activists are sounding the alarm over the secret meeting. Heidi Chow, food sovereignty campaigner with Global Justice Now, which organized Monday's protest, warned that the agenda being promoted by these stakeholders will only increase corporate control over seeds.

"This is not 'aid' - it's another form of colonialism," said Chow. "We need to ensure that the control of seeds and other agricultural resources stay firmly in the hands of small farmers who feed the majority of the population in Africa, rather than allowing big agribusiness to dominate even more aspects of the food system."

In a blog post, Chow further explained:

For generations, small farmers have been able to save and swap seeds. This vital practice enables farmers to keep a wide range of seeds which helps maintain biodiversity and helps them to adapt to climate change and protect from plant disease. However, this system of seed saving is under threat by corporations who want to take more control over seeds. Big seed companies are keen to grow their market share of commercial seeds in Africa and alongside philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation and aid donors, they are discussing new ways to increase their market penetration of commercial seeds and displacing farmers own seed systems.

Corporate-produced hybrid seeds often produce higher yields when first planted, but the second generation seeds will produce low yields and unpredictable crop traits, making them unsuitable for saving and storing. This means that instead of saving seeds from their own crops, farmers who use hybrid seeds become completely dependent on the seed companies that sell them.

Further, many of the seeds produced by these biotechnology giants are sold alongside chemical fertilizer and pesticides, manufactured by the very same companies, the use of which often leads to widespread environmental destruction and other health problems.

As others noted, while the meeting attendees included representatives from the World Bank and Syngenta, the world’s third biggest seed and biotechnology company, no farmers or farming organizations were represented at the talks.

"Seeds are vital for our food system and our small farmers have always been able to save and swap seeds freely," Ali-Masmadi Jehu-Appiah, chair of Food Sovereignty Ghana, said in a press statement. "Now our seed systems are increasingly under threat by corporations who are looking to take more control over seeds in their pursuit of profit. This meeting will push this corporate agenda to hand more control away from our small farmers and into the hands of big seed companies."

Reporting on the Monitor-Deloitte study, Ian Fitzpatrick, a food sovereignty researcher for Global Justice Now, said that documents circulated ahead of the meeting revealed a neo-liberal agenda "laid bare."

Fitzpatrick writes:

The report recommends that in countries where demand for patented seeds is weaker (i.e. where farmers are using their own seed saving networks), public-private partnerships should be developed so that private companies are protected from ‘investment risk’. It also recommends that that NGOs and aid donors should encourage governments to introduce intellectual property rights for seed breeders and help to persuade farmers to buy commercial, patented seeds rather than relying on their own traditional varieties.

Finally, in line with the broader neoliberal agenda of agribusiness companies across the world, the report suggests that governments should remove regulations (like export restrictions) so that the seed sector is opened up to the global market.

"This neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization, currently promoted in almost every sphere of human activity—from food production to health and education—poses a serious threat to food sovereignty and the ability of food producers and consumers to define their own food systems and policies," Fitzpatrick adds.

AGRA Watch, a program of the grassroots group Community Alliance for Social Justice, notes that the BMGF-USAID commercial seed agenda further "extends U.S. foreign policy into Africa on behalf of corporate interests."

Phil Bereano, food sovereignty campaigner with AGRA Watch and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington added: "This is an extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years—working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion? It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination."

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/03/23/gates-foundations-seed-agenda-africa-another-form-colonialism-warns-protesters

Behind the Mask of Altruism: Imperialism, Monsanto and the Gates Foundation in Africa

By Colin Todhunter
Global Research, October 16, 2014

Since 2006, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to the tune of almost $420 million. Activists from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia recently attended the US-Africa Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit in Seattle to argue that the Foundation’s strategy for agriculture in Africa is a flawed attempt to impose industrial agriculture at the expense of more ecologically sound approaches.

Daniel Maingi works with small farmers in Kenya and belongs to the organization Growth Partners for Africa. The Seattle Times reported him as saying that while the goal of helping African farmers is laudable, the ‘green revolution’ approach is based on Western-style agriculture, with its reliance on fertilizer, weed killers and single crops, such as corn [1].

Maingi was born on a farm in eastern Kenya and studied agriculture from a young age. He remembers a time when his family would grow and eat a diversity of crops, such as mung beans, green grams, pigeon peas, and a variety of fruits now considered ‘wild’.

Following the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s and a green revolution meant to boost agricultural efficiency, the foods of his childhood have been replaced with maize, maize, and more maize.

The Seattle Globalist reported him as saying:

“In the morning, you make porridge from maize and send the kids to school. For lunch, boiled maize and a few green beans. In the evening, ugali, [a staple dough-like maize dish, served with meat]… [today] it’s a monoculture diet, being driven by the food system – it’s an injustice.” [2]

As much of Africa is so dry, it’s not suited for thirsty crops, and heavy use of fertilizer kills worms and microbes important for soil health. Maingi argued that the model of farming in the West is not appropriate for farming in most of Africa and that the West should invest in indigenous knowledge and agro-ecology.

Growth Partners Africa works with farmers to enrich the soil with manure and other organic material, to use less water and to grow a variety of crops, including some that would be considered weeds on an industrial farm. For Maingi, food sovereignty in Africa means reverting back to a way of farming and eating that pre-dates major investment from the West.

Mariam Mayet of the African Centre for Biosafety in South Africa says that many countries are subsidizing farmers to buy fertilizer as part of the chemical-industrial model of agriculture, but that takes money away from public crop-breeding programmes that provide improved seeds to farmers at low cost.

Seattle times quoted her as saying:

“It’s a system designed to benefit agribusinesses and not small-scale farmers.”

She added that so many institutions, from African governments to the World Bank, have ‘embraced’ the ‘green revolution’ that alternative farming methods are getting short shrift.

Elizabeth Mpofu, of La Via Campesina, grows a variety of crops in Zimbabwe. During a recent drought, neighbours who relied on chemical fertilizer lost most of their crops. She reaped a bounty of sorghum, corn, and millet using what are called agro-ecological methods: natural pest control, organic fertilizer, and locally adapted crops.

Anna Goren of The Seattle Globalist reported that panelists at the Summit discussed the loss of traditional diets and ways of life and were also concerned about theincreased reliance on expensive inputs and the dramatic drop in price of crops. This has resulted in poverty for the small farmer.

Goren quoted Daniel Maingi as saying:

“What the World Bank has done, the International Monetary fund, what AGRA and Bill Gates are doing, it’s actually pretty wrong. The farmer himself should not be starving”.

He added that what AGRA is doing is “out of sync with the natural process” by bringing in imported seeds, which are not adapted to the land and require excessive fertilizer and pesticides.

Maingi has every right to be concerned. While small farms produce most of the world’s food, recent reports show they face being displaced from their land and are experiencing unnecessary hardship [3,4].

AGRA is part of a global trend that is being driven by big agritech that seeks to eradicate the small farmer and undermine local economies and food sovereignty by subjecting countries to the vagaries of rigged global markets [5,6].

Giant agritech corporations like Monsanto with their patented seeds and associated chemical inputs are working to ensure a shift away from diversified agriculture that guarantees balanced local food production, the protection of people’s livelihoods and environmental sustainability.

Small farmers are being displaced and are struggling to preserve their indigenous seeds and traditional knowledge of farming systems. Agritech corporations are being allowed to shape government policy by being granted a strategic role in trade negotiations [7].

They are increasingly setting the policy/knowledge framework by being allowed to fund and determine the nature of research carried out in public universities and institutes [8]. They continue to propagate the myth that they have the answer to global hunger and poverty, despite evidence that they do not [9,10].

The Gates Foundation, Monsanto and Western governments are placing African agriculture it in the hands of big agritech for private profit and strategic control under the pretext of helping the poor [11].

Of course there is another major concern pertaining to the motives of the Gates Foundation and Monsanto in Africa and elsewhere; that of depopulation [12,13].

These two entities are not just linked together through their involvement in Agra. The Gates Foundation has substantial shares in Monsanto [14]. With Monsanto’s active backing from the US State Department [15] and the Gates Foundation’s links with USAID [16], together they comprise a formidable geopolitical strategic force.

Given that the Gates Foundation is about to be hauled through the Indian legal system for its vaccination programme in that country [17] and Monsanto has a decades’ long track record of deception and criminality [18], it is important for everyone (not least the mainstream corporate media) to question why agriculture is being handed over to such entities.

“… take capitalism and business out of farming in Africa. The West should invest in indigenous knowledge and agro-ecology, education and infrastructure and stand in solidarity with the food sovereignty movement.” Daniel Maingi, Growth Partners for Africa.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/behind-the-mask-of-altruism-imperialism-monsanto-and-the-gates-foundation-in-africa/5408242

US Agencies, Gates Foundation, and Monsanto Trying to Force Unwilling African Nations to Accept Expensive and Insufficiently Tested GMO

By Friends of the Earth
Global Research, March 19, 2015
Friends of the Earth 25 February 2015


JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – US agencies, funders such as the Gates Foundation, and agribusiness giant Monsanto are trying to force unwilling African nations to accept expensive and insufficiently tested Genetically Modified (GM) foods and crops, according to a new report released today. [1]

“The US, the world’s top producer of GM crops, is seeking new markets for American GM crops in Africa. The US administration’s strategy consists of assisting African nations to produce biosafety laws that promote agribusiness interests instead of protecting Africans from the potential threats of GM crops,” said Haidee Swanby from the African Centre for Biosafety, which authored the report commissioned by Friends of the Earth International.

The new report also exposes how agribusiness giant Monsanto influences biosafety legislation in African countries, gains regulatory approval for its product, and clears the path for products such as GM maize (corn).

Only four African countries -South Africa, Egypt, Burkina Faso and Sudan- have released GM crops commercially but the issue of genetically modified maize is deeply controversial, given that maize is the staple food of millions of Africans.

Unlike Europe and other regions where strong biosafety laws have been in place for years, most African countries still lack such laws. Only seven African countries currently have functional biosafety frameworks in place.

“African governments must protect their citizens and our rights must be respected. We deserve the same level of biosafety protection that European citizens enjoy,” said Mariann Bassey Orovwuje from Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

Globally, markets for GM crops have been severely curbed by biosafety laws and regulations in the past decade, and GM foods and crops have been rejected outright by consumers in many countries, especially in Europe.

“South African farmers have more than 16 years’ experience cultivating GM maize, soya and cotton, but the promise that GM crops would address food security has not been fulfilled. Indeed, South Africa’s food security is reportedly declining with almost half the nation currently categorised as food insecure even though South Africa exports maize,” said Haidee Swanby from the African Centre for Biosafety.

“The South African experience confirms that GM crops can only bring financial benefits for a small number of well-resourced farmers. The vast majority of African farmers are small farmers who cannot afford to adopt expensive crops which need polluting inputs such as synthetic fertilisers and chemicals to perform effectively,” she added.

From February 24-27, 2015, Friends of the Earth delegates [attended] the International Forum for Agroecology at the Nyéléni Center in Sélingué, Mali [2]

The organisations attending the forum, which represent millions of small scale food producers, believe that genetically modified crops are part of the problem, not the solution, to the hunger, climate, and biodiversity crises we are facing globally. They also believe that agroecology and food sovereignty are the key to address these crises. [3]

In March 2011 the UN Special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, released a report, “Agro-ecology and the right to food”, which demonstrates that agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty.

The report challenged technological, industrial farming methods including patented seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified crops. [4]

Agro-ecological production models, small scale food producers free to plant and exchange seeds, and strong local markets have been recognized as the best way to feed people and protect the planet. [5]

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Mariann Bassey Orovwuje, Friends of the Earth Nigeria: +234 703 44 95 940 or mariann@eraction.org

Haidee Swanby, African Centre for Biosafety, +27(0)82 459 8548 or haidee@acbio.org.za

Notes

[1] The new report, “who benefits from gm crops? the expansion of agribusiness interests in Africa through biosafety policy” is embargoed until 23 February 2015 but available for preview by members of the media at
http://www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Who-benefits-report-2015.pdf

[2] The forum is hosted by Coordination Nationale des Organisations Paysannes du Mali (CNOP); International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), La Via Campesina (LVC), More and Better (MaB), Movimiento Agroecológico de América Latina y el Caribe (MAELA), Réseau des organisations paysannes et de producteurs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA) , World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers (WFF), World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), and World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP).

[3] According to the final declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty, held in 2007 in Sélingué, Mali, “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”

[4] For more information read the 2011 UN report ‘Agro-ecology and the right to food’ athttp://www.srfood.org/en/report-agroecology-and-the-right-to-food

[5] In April 2008 a study by 400 multi-disciplinary scientists and several international organisations known as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) concluded that agro-ecology, local trade and supporting small farmers is the best way forward to combat hunger and poverty. For more information about the assessment see http://www.unep.org/dewa/Assessments/Ecosystems/IAASTD/tabid/105853/Default.aspx

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Since genetically modified organisms may have adverse effects on human and environmental health, a global agreement known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which came into force in September 2003, was developed to ensure “adequate safe use, handling and transfer” of GM organisms.

Regulatory frameworks are necessary for the commercialisation of GM crops but, depending on how the framework is crafted, they can either promote the introduction of GM organisms with minimal safety assessment (the approach promoted by the US administration and lobby), or promote rigorous safety assessment and the protection of the environment, health and socioeconomic wellbeing.

The US administration long lobbied against an effective, global Biosafety Protocol and, once the Protocol entered into force, started lobbying African governments and institutions (among others) to accept GM organisms with minimal safety assessment.

For instance, the US government agency USAID assists Regional Economic Communities in Africa to develop policies aimed not at ensuring biosafety, but at limiting regulation, which they consider to be a barrier to regional trade in GM food and crops.

Yet the Biosafety Protocol makes clear that products from new technologies must be based on the precautionary principle and allow developing nations to balance public health against economic benefits.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a Pan-African civil society network, recently condemned USAID-funded guidelines developed by the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) in no uncertain terms, stating that the “COMESA policy aggressively promotes the wholesale proliferation of GM organisms on the African continent by way of commercial plantings, commodity imports and food aid and flouts international biosafety law.”

USAID provided funds to set up COMESA’s Regional Approach to Biotechnology and Biosafety Policy in Eastern and Southern Africa (RABESA) project, which was tasked with developing a mechanism for regulating biosafety in the COMESA region.

There is still the time for Africans to demand that their governments implement policies to uplift and protect the millions of small-scale food producers that currently feed the continent.

The African Union has developed and recently endorsed a Model Law on Biosafety which could contribute to more rigorous biosafety regimes across Africa.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-agencies-gates-foundation-and-monsanto-trying-to-force-unwilling-african-nations-to-accept-expensive-and-insufficiently-tested-gmo/5437715

GATES FOUNDATION INVESTS IN MONSANTO


Both will profit at expense of small-scale African farmers

Seattle, WA – Farmers and civil society organizations around the world are outraged by the recent discovery of further connections between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and agribusiness titan Monsanto. Last week, a financial website published the Gates Foundation’s investment portfolio, including 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock with an estimated worth of $23.1 million purchased in the second quarter of 2010 (see the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission). This marks a substantial increase from its previous holdings, valued at just over $360,000 (see the Foundation’s 2008 990 Form).

“The Foundation’s direct investment in Monsanto is problematic on two primary levels,” said Dr. Phil Bereano, University of Washington Professor Emeritus and recognized expert on genetic engineering. “First, Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well-being of small farmers around the world, as well as an appalling environmental track record. The strong connections to Monsanto cast serious doubt on the Foundation’s heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa and purported goal of alleviating poverty and hunger among small-scale farmers. Second, this investment represents an enormous conflict of interests.”

Monsanto has already negatively impacted agriculture in African countries. For example, in South Africa in 2009, Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to produce kernels and hundreds of farmers were devastated. According to Mariam Mayet, environmental attorney and director of the Africa Centre for Biosafety in Johannesburg, some farmers suffered up to an 80% crop failure. While Monsanto compensated the large-scale farmers to whom it directly sold the faulty product, it gave nothing to the small-scale farmers to whom it had handed out free sachets of seeds. “When the economic power of Gates is coupled with the irresponsibility of Monsanto, the outlook for African smallholders is not very promising,” said Mayet. Monsanto’s aggressive patenting practices have also monopolized control over seed in ways that deny farmers control over their own harvest, going so far as to sue—and bankrupt—farmers for “patent infringement.”
News of the Foundation’s recent Monsanto investment has confirmed the misgivings of many farmers and sustainable agriculture advocates in Africa, among them the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, who commented, “We have long suspected that the founders of AGRA—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—had a long and more intimate affair with Monsanto.” Indeed, according to Travis English, researcher with AGRA Watch, “The Foundation’s ownership of Monsanto stock is emblematic of a deeper, more long-standing involvement with the corporation, particularly in Africa.” In 2008, AGRA Watch, a project of the Seattle-based organization Community Alliance for Global Justice, uncovered many linkages between the Foundation’s grantees and Monsanto. For example, some grantees (in particular about 70% of grantees in Kenya) of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)—considered by the Foundation to be its “African face”—work directly with Monsanto on agricultural development projects. Other prominent links include high-level Foundation staff members who were once senior officials for Monsanto, such as Rob Horsch, formerly Monsanto Vice President of International Development Partnerships and current Senior Program Officer of the Gates Agricultural Development Program.

Transnational corporations like Monsanto have been key collaborators with the Foundation and AGRA’s grantees in promoting the spread of industrial agriculture on the continent. This model of production relies on expensive inputs such as chemical fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, and herbicides. Though this package represents enticing market development opportunities for the private sector, many civil society organizations contend it will lead to further displacement of farmers from the land, an actual increase in hunger, and migration to already swollen cities unable to provide employment opportunities. In the words of a representative from the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, “AGRA is poison for our farming systems and livelihoods. Under the philanthropic banner of greening agriculture, AGRA will eventually eat away what little is left of sustainable small-scale farming in Africa.”

A 2008 report initiated by the World Bank and the UN, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), promotes alternative solutions to the problems of hunger and poverty that emphasize their social and economic roots. The IAASTD concluded that small-scale agroecological farming is more suitable for the third world than the industrial agricultural model favored by Gates and Monsanto. In a summary of the key findings of IAASTD, the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) emphasizes the report’s warning that “continued reliance on simplistic technological fixes—including transgenic crops—will not reduce persistent hunger and poverty and could exacerbate environmental problems and worsen social inequity.” Furthermore, PANNA explains, “The Assessment’s 21 key findings suggest that small-scale agroecological farming may offer one of the best means to feed the hungry while protecting the planet.”

The Gates Foundation has been challenged in the past for its questionable investments; in 2007, the L.A. Times exposed the Foundation for investing in its own grantees and for its “holdings in many companies that have failed tests of social responsibility because of environmental lapses, employment discrimination, disregard for worker rights, or unethical practices.” The Times chastised the Foundation for what it called “blind-eye investing,” with at least 41% of its assets invested in “companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially-concerned philosophy.”

Although the Foundation announced it would reassess its practices, it decided to retain them. As reported by the L.A. Times, chief executive of the Foundation Patty Stonesifer defended their investments, stating, “It would be naïve…to think that changing the foundation’s investment policy could stop the human suffering blamed on the practices of companies in which it invests billions of dollars.” This decision is in direct contradiction to the Foundation’s official “Investment Philosophy”, which, according to its website, “defined areas in which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that [Bill and Melinda] find egregious. This is why the endowment does not invest in tobacco stocks.”
More recently, the Foundation has come under fire in its own hometown. This week, 250 Seattle residents sent postcards expressing their concern that the Foundation’s approach to agricultural development, rather than reducing hunger as pledged, would instead “increase farmer debt, enrich agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, degrade the environment, and dispossess small farmers.” In addition to demanding that the Foundation instead fund “socially and ecologically appropriate practices determined locally by African farmers and scientists” and support African food sovereignty, they urged the Foundation to cut all ties to Monsanto and the biotechnology industry.

https://cagj.org/2010/08/for-immediate-release-gates-foundation-invests-in-monsanto/

GATES FOUNDATION PLOTS WAYS OF PROFITING FROM AFRICA’S SEED SYSTEMS
ON MARCH 24, 2015
POSTED IN LATEST NEWS
Scroll down for more press coverage

Community Alliance for Global Justice, 23 March 2015

676x380
Photo source: http://mg.co.za/article/2015-02-20-00-seeds-are-the-new-big-challenge-for-africas-female-farmers

Source: https://seattleglobaljustice.org/2015/03/press-release-gates-foundation-plots-ways-of-profiting-from-africas-seed-systems/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 23, 2015

Contact: 
Heather Day, Executive Director, Community Alliance for Global Justice, heather@seattleglobaljustice.org

Gates Foundation Plots Ways of Profiting from Africa’s Seed Systems

Simultaneous Demonstrations in London and Seattle

SEATTLE, WA — Today, Monday, March 23, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are sponsoring a secret meeting in London to promote a recent report detailing in clear terms how to privatize the seed and agricultural markets of Africa– without African stakeholders having a seat at the table.

The meeting is being criticized for including corporations, development bodies, trade bodies and aid donors, yet excluding any African farmers or representatives of affected organizations. Today protesters on both sides of the Atlantic are picketing to protest the corporate capture of seed, and to urge the foundation to support African food sovereignty. Both in London and Seattle protesters will distribute open-pollinated seeds as a symbol of the alternative to the corporate model promoted by USAID and BMGF. (The Seattle protest will take place 8:30 – 10:00am.)

The London meeting will discuss a study produced by Monitor-Deloitte which was commissioned by the Gates Foundation and USAID. BMGF is a major sponsor of the commercialization of agriculture in Africa including through its subsidiary the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Working with USAID, this commercial agenda extends US foreign policy into Africa on behalf of corporate interests, threatening the livelihoods of millions of small-scale farmers who rely on recycling seed for their livelihoods.

Phil Bereano, food sovereignty campaigner with AGRA Watch and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington said, “This is an extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years – working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion? It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination.”

The goal of the Monitor-Deloitte study is to develop models for commercialization of seed production in Africa, especially “early generation seed”, and to identify ways in which the African governmental sectors could facilitate private involvement in African seed systems. The study was conducted in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia on maize, rice, sorghum, cowpea, common beans, cassava and sweet potato.

The report exposes a typical approach of private sector “cherry picking”, where private companies identify any profitable public activities for their own involvement. While complaining incessantly about “heavy state involvement” they still insist on such involvement for unprofitable activities and permitting the private sector to take the profitable activities.

The Monitor-Deloitte report uses cowpea production in Ghana as an example of where the public sector should carry the extremely expensive improved cowpea breeder seed costs to allow the private sector to profit in seed multiplication and distribution. Breeder seed is prohibitively costly because of low multiplication rates and low demand. But the demand that exists is nonetheless lucrative, so the private sector wants to be involved only in the parts of the production process identified as profitable. Where the whole chain is profitable, such as hybrid maize or in closed value chains where there is strong but limited demand and early production processes are also potentially profitable, for example hybrid sorghum for brewing, Deloitte proposes the public sector be locked out of the production process.

Although historically, in Africa and around the world, farmers have been the traditional developers and distributors of improved seeds, the report does not even consider a potential role for farmers in the production or distribution of seed. Indeed farmers are viewed only as passive consumers of seed produced elsewhere.

The meeting in London and the focus of the report expose the agendas of the BMGF and USAID to enable private interests to profit from essential life processes in African agriculture.

Mariam Mayet Director of the African Centre for Biosafety (ACB) in South Africa said: “ACB insists that an equitable and sustainable solution to seed production and distribution can only come from direct engagement with farmers and their organizations to ensure their active involvement in these activities. We further insist that public-farmer partnerships to improve seed that integrates farmer and scientific knowledge will generate a more accountable process, and produce longer-lasting and more meaningful solutions for African agricultural production, than these profit-driven, exclusive and narrow processes.”

http://seedfreedom.info/gates-foundation-plots-ways-of-profiting-from-africas-seed-systems/

US Government, Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push GMOs on Unwilling Africa
Posted on Feb 23 2015 - 5:03pm by Sustainable Pulse


“The US, the world’s top producer of GM crops, is seeking new markets for American GM crops in Africa. The US administration’s strategy consists of assisting African nations to produce biosafety laws that promote agribusiness interests instead of protecting Africans from the potential threats of GM crops,” said Haidee Swanby from the African Centre for Biosafety, which authored the report commissioned by Friends of the Earth International.

The new report also exposes how agribusiness giant Monsanto influences biosafety legislation in African countries, gains regulatory approval for its product, and clears the path for products such as GM maize (corn).

Only four African countries -South Africa, Egypt, Burkina Faso and Sudan- have released GM crops commercially but the issue of genetically modified maize is deeply controversial, given that maize is the staple food of millions of Africans.

Unlike Europe and other regions where strong biosafety laws have been in place for years, most African countries still lack such laws. Only seven African countries currently have functional biosafety frameworks in place.

“African governments must protect their citizens and our rights must be respected. We deserve the same level of biosafety protection that European citizens enjoy,” said Mariann Bassey Orovwuje from Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

Globally, markets for GM crops have been severely curbed by biosafety laws and regulations in the past decade, and GM foods and crops have been rejected outright by consumers in many countries, especially in Europe.

“South African farmers have more than 16 years’ experience cultivating GM maize, soya and cotton, but the promise that GM crops would address food security has not been fulfilled. Indeed, South Africa’s food security is reportedly declining with almost half the nation currently categorised as food insecure even though South Africa exports maize,” said Haidee Swanby from the African Centre for Biosafety.

“The South African experience confirms that GM crops can only bring financial benefits for a small number of well-resourced farmers. The vast majority of African farmers are small farmers who cannot afford to adopt expensive crops which need polluting inputs such as synthetic fertilisers and chemicals to perform effectively,” she added.

From February 24-27, 2015, Friends of the Earth delegates will attend the International Forum for Agroecology at the Nyéléni Center in Sélingué, Mali [2]

The organisations attending the forum, which represent millions of small scale food producers, believe that genetically modified crops are part of the problem, not the solution, to the hunger, climate, and biodiversity crises we are facing globally. They also believe that agroecology and food sovereignty are the key to address these crises. [3]

In March 2011 the UN Special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, released a report, “Agro-ecology and the right to food”, which demonstrates that agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty.

The report challenged technological, industrial farming methods including patented seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified crops. [4]

Agro-ecological production models, small scale food producers free to plant and exchange seeds, and strong local markets have been recognized as the best way to feed people and protect the planet. [5]

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Mariann Bassey Orovwuje, Friends of the Earth Nigeria: +234 703 44 95 940 or mariann@eraction.org

Haidee Swanby, African Centre for Biosafety, +27(0)82 459 8548 or haidee@acbio.org.za

NOTES TO READERS:

[1] The new report, “who benefits from gm crops? the expansion of agribusiness interests in Africa through biosafety policy” is embargoed until 23 February 2015 but available for preview by members of the media
at
www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Who-benefits-report-2015.pdf

[2] The forum is hosted by Coordination Nationale des Organisations Paysannes du Mali (CNOP); International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), La Via Campesina (LVC), More and Better (MaB), Movimiento Agroecológico de América Latina y el Caribe (MAELA), Réseau des organisations paysannes et de producteurs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA) , World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fishworkers (WFF), World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), and World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP).

[3] According to the final declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty, held in 2007 in Sélingué, Mali, “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced
through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”

[4] For more information read the 2011 UN report ‘Agro-ecology and the right to food’ at
www.srfood.org/en/report-agroecology-and-the-right-to-food

[5] In April 2008 a study by 400 multi-disciplinary scientists and several international organisations known as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) concluded that agro-ecology, local trade and supporting small farmers is the best way forward to combat hunger and poverty. For more information about the assessment see
www.agassessment.org/

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Since genetically modified organisms may have adverse effects on human and environmental health, a global agreement known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which came into force in September 2003, was developed to ensure “adequate safe use, handling and transfer” of GM
organisms.

Regulatory frameworks are necessary for the commercialisation of GM crops but, depending on how the framework is crafted, they can either promote the introduction of GM organisms with minimal safety assessment (the approach promoted by the US administration and lobby), or promote rigorous safety assessment and the protection of the environment, health and socioeconomic wellbeing.

The US administration long lobbied against an effective, global Biosafety Protocol and, once the Protocol entered into force, started lobbying African governments and institutions (among others) to accept GM organisms with minimal safety assessment.

For instance, the US government agency USAID assists Regional Economic Communities in Africa to develop policies aimed not at ensuring biosafety, but at limiting regulation, which they consider to be a barrier to regional trade in GM food and crops.

Yet the Biosafety Protocol makes clear that products from new technologies must be based on the precautionary principle and allow developing nations to balance public health against economic benefits.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a Pan-African civil society network, recently condemned USAID-funded guidelines developed by the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) in no uncertain terms, stating that the “COMESA policy aggressively promotes the wholesale proliferation of GM organisms on the African continent by way of commercial plantings, commodity imports and food aid and flouts international biosafety law.”

USAID provided funds to set up COMESA’s Regional Approach to Biotechnology and Biosafety Policy in Eastern and Southern Africa (RABESA) project, which was tasked with developing a mechanism for regulating biosafety in the COMESA region.

There is still the time for Africans to demand that their governments implement policies to uplift and protect the millions of small-scale food producers that currently feed the continent.

The African Union has developed and recently endorsed a Model Law on Biosafety which could contribute to more rigorous biosafety regimes across Africa.

http://sustainablepulse.com/2015/02/23/us-agencies-monsanto-gates-foundation-work-together-force-gmos-africa/#.VeZjxPlViko

Empire and Colonialism: Rich Men in London Still Deciding Africa’s Future
By Colin Todhunter
Global Research, March 26, 2015

Some £600 million in UK aid money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce.

Last year, Director of the Global Justice Now Nick Dearden said:

“It’s scandalous that UK aid money is being used to carve up Africa in the interests of big business. This is the exact opposite of what is needed, which is support to small-scale farmers and fairer distribution of land and resources to give African countries more control over their food systems. Africa can produce enough food to feed its people. The problem is that our food system is geared to the luxury tastes of the richest, not the needs of ordinary people. Here the British government is using aid money to make the problem even worse.”

Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria, Benin, Malawi and Senegal are all involved in the New Alliance.

In a January 2015 piece in The Guardian, Dearden continued by saying that development was once regarded as a process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power over resources from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’, involving a revolutionary struggle over the world’s resources. However, the current paradigm is based on the assumption that developing countries need to adopt neo-liberal policies and that public money in the guise of aid should facilitate this. The notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and the concept of poverty depoliticised and separated from structurally embedded power relations.

To see this in action, we need look no further to a conference held on Monday 23 March in London, organised by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This secretive, invitation-only meeting with aid donors and big seed companies discussed a strategy to make it easier for these companies to sell patented seeds in Africa and thus increase corporate control of seeds.

Farmers have for generations been saving and exchanging seeds among themselves. This has allowed them a certain degree of independence and has enabled them to innovate, maintain biodiversity, adapt seeds to climatic conditions and fend off plant disease. Big seed companies with help from the Gates Foundation, the US government and other aid donors are now discussing ways to increase their market penetration of commercial seeds by displacing farmers own seed systems.

Corporate sold hybrid seeds often produce higher yields when first planted, but the second generation seeds produce low yields and unpredictable crop traits, making them unsuitable for saving and storing. As Heidi Chow from Global Justice Now rightly says, instead of saving seeds from their own crops, farmers who use hybrid seeds become completely dependent on the seed, fertiliser and pesticide companies, which can (and has) in turn result in an agrarian crisis centred on debt, environmental damage and health problems.

The London conference aimed to share findings of a report by Monitor Deloitte on developing the commercial seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa. The report recommends that in countries where farmers are using their own seed saving networks NGOs and aid donors should encourage governments to introduce intellectual property rights for seed breeders and help to persuade farmers to buy commercial, patented seeds rather than relying on their own traditional varieties. The report also suggests that governments should remove regulations so that the seed sector is opened up to the global market.

The guest list comprised corporations, development agencies and aid donors, including Syngenta, the World Bank and the Gates Foundation. It speaks volumes that not one farmer organisation was invited. Farmers have been imbued with the spirit of entrepreneurship for thousands of years. They have been “scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts” who have increasingly been reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry. So who better than to discuss issues concerning agriculture?

But the whole point of such a conference is that the West regards African agriculture as a ‘business opportunity’, albeit wrapped up in warm-sounding notions of ‘feeding Africa’ or ‘lifting millions out of poverty’. The West’s legacy in Africa (and elsewhere) has been to plunge millions into poverty. Enforcing structural reforms to benefit big agribusiness and its unsustainable toxic GMO/petrochemical inputs represents a continuation of the neo-colonialist plundering of Africa. The US has for many decades been using agriculture as a key part of foreign policy to secure global hegemony.

Phil Bereano, food sovereignty campaigner with AGRA Watch and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington says:

“This is an extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years – working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion? It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination.”

Bereano also shows how Western corporations only intend to cherry-pick the most profitable aspects of the food production chain, while leaving the public sector in Africa to pick up the tab for the non-profitable aspects that allow profitability further along the chain.

Giant agritech corporations with their patented seeds and associated chemical inputs are ensuring a shift away from diversified agriculture that guarantees balanced local food production, the protection of people’s livelihoods and agricultural sustainability. African agriculture is being placed in the hands of big agritech for private profit under the pretext of helping the poor. The Gates Foundation has substantial shares in Monsanto. With Monsanto’s active backingfrom the US State Department and the Gates Foundation’s links with USAID, African farmers face a formidable force.

Report after report suggests that support for conventional agriculture, agroecology and local economies is required, especially in the Global South. Instead, Western governments are supporting powerful corporations with taxpayers money whose thrust via the WTO, World Bank and IMF has been to encourage strings-attached loans, monocrop cultivation for export using corporate seeds, the restructuring of economies, the opening of economies to the vagaries of land and commodity speculation and a system of globalised trade rigged in favour of the West.

In this vision for Africa, those farmers who are regarded as having any role to play in all of this are viewed only as passive consumers of corporate seeds and agendas. The future of Africa is once again being decided by rich men in London.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/empire-and-colonialism-rich-men-in-london-still-deciding-africas-future/5438889?print=1

Gates Foundation Helps Bring Coca-Cola and Monsanto (GMO) to Africa
Posted in Africa, Bill Gates, Patents at 7:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Colonial Africa

Summary: Neo-colonialism by multi-national corporations is promoted by well-known capitalists to subjugate under an “aid” pretext

FOR THOSE who do not know yet, the Gates Foundation invests heavily in Coca-Cola, whose offences against humanity are unknown to many people but still well documented. Based on this new report from The Guardian, Coca-Cola is taking more its vicious business to Africa, along with the Gates Foundation which invests in Coca-Cola. To quote the portion of interest from last week’s article:

How can African agriculture be more productive?

[...]

This is an issue that has come up in Soroti district (in which Katine is found). The local politicians lobbied hard for an orange processing factory in Soroti, and believed they had a strong case because the climate and land is excellent for citrus growing. But the investment went in the end to west Uganda. (An $11.5m partnership between the Gates Foundation, Coca-Cola and TechnoServe is, however, expected to benefit smallholder fruit farmers in eastern Uganda).

According to the Killer Coke campaign, Coca-Cola deserves to be accused of “inaction and neglect on health issues in Africa. Health care advocates around the world have demanded that employees of Coke bottlers in Africa be provided with access to care and medicine that would treat, or prevent the further spread of, HIV/AIDS. Although Coca-Cola, the largest private-sector employer on the African continent, has been barely addressing the problem, its public relations juggernaut puts forth the lie that the company has all but solved it. An Oct. 27, 2003 press release from the organization Health GAP (www.healthgap.org) is headlined: “Coke’s HIV/AIDS Treatment Program in Africa Still Just a Public Relations Ploy.” Some in South Africa accuse Coca-Cola of racism.

Anyway, Coca-Cola is likely to profit or inflate its massive brand value (PR) and guess who is a shareholder? Africa has bigger agricultural issues and as we noted in previous posts, the Gates Foundation is promoting GMO (for Monsanto) down in the oppressed continent. Posts on the subject include:

Links:

How the Gates Foundation Privatises Africa
With Microsoft Monopoly in Check, Bill Gates Proceeds to Creating More Monopolies
Gates-Backed Company Accused of Monopoly Abuse and Investigated
Reader’s Article: The Gates Foundation and Genetically-Modified Foods
Monsanto: The Microsoft of Food
Seeds of Doubt in Bill Gates Investments
Gates Foundation Accused of Faking/Fabricating Data to Advance Political Goals
More Dubious Practices from the Gates Foundation
Video Transcript of Vandana Shiva on Insane Patents
Explanation of What Bill Gates’ Patent Investments Do to Developing World
Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems
Gates Foundation Looking to Destroy Kenya with Intellectual Monopolies
Young Napoleon Comes to Africa and Told Off
Bill Gates Takes His GMO Patent Investments/Experiments to India
Gates/Microsoft Tax Dodge and Agriculture Monopoly Revisited
Beyond the ‘Public Relations’
UK Intellectual Monopoly Office (UK-IPO) May be Breaking the Law
“Boycott Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in China”
The Gates Foundation Extends Control Over Communication with Oxfam Relationship
Week of Monsanto

...

http://techrights.org/2010/06/28/neocolonialism-by-famous-capitalists/

The New Agricultural Colonialism by Phil Bereano and Matt Canfield
Published February 10, 2015 | By Shana Greene
*Third World Resurgence No. 292, December 2014, pp 2-4

http://www.twn.my/title2/resurgence/2014/292/eco1.htm

The authors are members of the Seattle organization the Community Alliance for Global Justice and activists in its AGRA Watch program (http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org/agra-watch). Matt Canfield is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. His research investigates global governance and the transnational food sovereignty movement. Phil Bereano participated in the negotiations on the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol and its Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress as well as work of the Codex Alimentarius.(Boxed with the above article)
The G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition

The G8 ‘New Alliance’ was founded in 2012 ‘to accelerate responsible investment in African agriculture.’ In addition to the G8 leading industrial countries and the EU, 100 corporations are involved as donors, and 10 African countries are now involved. It has been criticised, however, for being a mechanism used to compel African countries to create a more favourable investment climate for international agribusiness, instead of the needs of small producers.



The drive by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to introduce a genetically engineered ‘super banana’ into the Ugandan market can only be viewed as part of a powerful and coordinated effort to transform Africa’s agricultural systems to serve corporate and foreign interests.

Matt Canfield and Phil Bereano



RECENTLY student volunteers at Iowa State University in the US have become subjects in human feeding trials of what’s being touted as a ‘super banana’. As its name suggests, this is no ordinary banana; it has been genetically engineered to produce increased levels of vitamin A. Created for the Ugandan market, the ‘super banana’ was developed to mitigate nutritional deficiencies that cause blindness across the global South. Yet, in a nation where the banana is not just a staple food but also a cultural icon, Ugandans are furious about this latest international intervention into African agriculture.

Bridget Mugambe is one Ugandan concerned about plans for bringing this banana to her homeland. ‘In my country,’ she explains, ‘there are over 50 varieties of local and indigenously cultivated bananas, and in my culture many of these varieties have individual cultural attachments. For example, in celebrations of marriage, birth and funeral rites, we use different varieties of banana for these different purposes…’ A social scientist working with the African Food Sovereignty Alliance, Mugambe argues that this new example of genetic engineering threatens not only Ugandan culture but also local economies and markets. And it is not even clear that the ‘super banana’ is necessary since there are other low-cost existing means of addressing the problem of low vitamin A intake.

Before the banana can be brought to Uganda, the country would need to change its laws to allow genetically engineered (GE) crops to be grown and consumed there. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Agency for International Development (USAID, currently headed by a former Gates staffer, Rajiv Shah) have been pressuring Uganda to do so. By changing its laws, the Ugandan government would not only contaminate the heritage varieties of banana that Ugandans treasure; such changes would also open the way for Monsanto and other multinational corporations eagerly waiting to push other GE crops to be approved for use.

Of course, with $15 million in support from the Gates Foundation, the ‘super banana’ has some powerful backers. However, its opponents are organizing. In October, Mugambe and eight other colleagues from the African continent traveled to Seattle, home of the Gates Foundation, to participate in the Africa-US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit. In four days of conversations with US-based food activists, she and her colleagues discussed a much more worrying trend of which the ‘super banana’ is symbolic: new colonial attempts to dominate African agriculture.

The Scramble for Africa: Neocolonialism and the Rush for African Agriculture

Over the last decade, Africans have witnessed an increasingly powerful and coordinated effort to transform their agricultural systems. While agricultural systems across the continent are diverse, agricultural production there remains dominated by smallholder producers and peasants. Together, they produce around 70% of food consumed in Africa. Because smallholders produce primarily for subsistence and secondarily for the market, they are not easily amenable to the profit schemes of multinational corporations.

This is not the first time that outside groups have called for an agricultural revolution. In the 1970s, the Rockefeller Foundation partnered with USAID to introduce American agro-industrial production methods in South Asia and Latin America. By introducing hybrid seeds and chemical inputs, the resulting ‘Green Revolution’ was hailed as a success for increasing the yield of food crops. Today, however, we know that the Green Revolution did not in fact solve global hunger, which increased by 11% between 1970-90, nor did it improve the livelihoods of those who adopted these new methods.



Third World farmers have simply been unable to compete with American crop exports that are low-cost because of US government subsidies. As a result, these farmers increasingly cannot afford to utilize the different technological systems (requiring the purchase of seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs) that they were pressured to adopt in the 1970s. The violence of the Green Revolution is exemplified today by the thousands of economically ruined farmers who are committing suicide – tragically by ingesting those same chemical inputs that have degraded their land and driven them into debt.



While Africa was also a target of the original Green Revolution, most interventions there failed. Africa’s strong network of smallholder agriculture is a testament to its farmers’ resistance to previous development schemes and colonial endeavors seeking to dispossess them of their land and livelihoods.



In today’s age of ‘crisis capitalism’, however, a new scramble for African resources has begun. Colonialism in Africa has always aimed at extracting resources for the global North. Now, big agribusiness, Northern countries and global ‘philanthropists’, seeking to increase the sales of agricultural inputs and to replace small-scale farming with large-scale market-oriented agro-industrial production, have joined together in calling for a new ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa. Looking for opportunities to profit from Africa’s soil and mineral riches, they have mobilized images of impoverished farmers and utilized shrill narratives of crises – of hunger, climate change or population growth – to justify foreign land acquisitions, the introduction of biotechnology and the importation of new legal regimes aimed at ‘harmonizing’ seed and agricultural laws.



Responding to capitalism’s inexorable impulse for growth, these schemes aim to gain entry for foreign corporations into African markets. They are assisted by governments through agencies such as USAID and global partnerships like the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (see box) championed by US President Barack Obama. These ‘public-private partnerships’ employ public resources to support private investment and profitability under the guise of development. Like the first Green Revolution, these partnerships often do not benefit smallholder farmers. Instead, they seek to integrate farmers into global value chains that draw them into debt and competition with large multinational firms. Moreover, these partnerships are not accountable to citizens of either the funding or recipient countries.





The Gates Foundation’s Green Revolution in Africa



Since 1997, the Gates Foundation has devoted over $3 billion to ‘improving’ African agriculture under the banner of alleviating global hunger. Over the past two decades, its Agricultural Development program has grown to be one of the largest of Gates’ philanthropic endeavors. As this investment has grown, so has the criticism; the Foundation is becoming increasingly scrutinized by those affected by its largesse.



As one of the world’s largest economic entities, the Gates Foundation not only shapes approaches to development, it sets the agenda. Its grants are aimed at direct, on-the-ground interventions, as well as scientific research, public relations lobbying and advocacy. Across its programs, the Foundation has promoted technological ‘silver bullet’ solutions, rather than tackling underlying problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its approach to African agriculture.



In 2006, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, Gates launched a subsidiary called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). The ‘super banana’ in Uganda is just one example of the Gates approach. Though vitamin A deficiency is indeed a widespread problem according to the World Health Organization, companies and philanthropists have used this deficiency to peddle new genetically engineered food products fortified with vitamin A. As in the case of the widely touted but so far ineffective ‘Golden Rice’, a product created for South Asian markets, the Gates Foundation has supported the production of the ‘super banana’ for the Ugandan market.



The problems with this high-tech approach are plentiful. Firstly, it may not even be necessary, since programs in the Philippines have been successful by distributing cheap vitamin A pills. Secondly, a recent report by The Ecologist cites how the ‘super banana’ is a clear case of bio-piracy – stealing the genetic resources of developing countries without remuneration for use in products and programs that benefit developed countries. The gene spliced into the ‘super banana’ was taken from the Fe’i banana variety indigenous to Papua New Guinea. Thirdly, like with Golden Rice, farmers have raised important questions about the health and safety effects of this new genetically engineered variety. Finally, Ugandans are concerned that it could contaminate and otherwise harm the many indigenous varieties central to local Ugandan markets and culture. Even the developer of the ‘super banana’, University of Queensland researcher James Dale, acknowledges that it’s been designed to open the door for the uptake of more GE crops in Africa and globally.



By promoting technologies not controlled by Africans, with unaccountable processes, the Gates Foundation and AGRA are actively attempting to subsume smallholder agriculture into the global food market. The African Centre for Biosafety, an organization that supports ecological approaches to farming, argues in a 2013 report that AGRA is not a philanthropic endeavor but ‘should be understood as a political project, a “proof of concept” to show private owners of capital that there are profitable opportunities for investment in African agriculture.’



An escalating countermovement: Food sovereignty and agro-ecology

In 2008, the Seattle-based trade and food justice organization, Community Alliance for Global Justice, founded AGRA Watch. AGRA Watch challenges the Gates Foundation’s questionable agricultural programs in Africa and argues that though the Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be ‘pro-poor’ and ‘pro-environment’, their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations such as Monsanto and foreign policy actors like USAID.

AGRA Watch contends that the Gates Foundation/AGRA must be understood as a form of ‘philanthro-capitalism’ – the use of charitable funds to advance market-based approaches to social issues. The Foundation takes advantage of food and climate crises to promote high-tech, industrial agriculture that generates profits for corporations while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers.

Recently, AGRA Watch analyzed Gates Foundation grants for African agriculture (2009-11) in order to understand how well they measure against the Foundation’s claims of promoting solutions to hunger and fostering social justice. Although the Gates Foundation maintains that only a small percentage of its grants go to genetically engineered crops, AGRA Watch identified 42 Foundation grants related to genetically engineered organisms that amount to $300 million. In addition, 29 of the 160 grants investigated involved ‘market integration’ – linking of smallholders to global markets – representing $210 million or 40% of funding. These findings were recently corroborated in an independent study by the organization GRAIN.



As part of its ongoing work to hold the Foundation accountable, AGRA Watch hosted the set of strategic meetings in Seattle between 14 US-based organizations and eight Africa-based ones, representing a mix of national NGOs, international networks, small-scale producers and farmer networks, and community-based organizations. The Africa-US Food Sovereignty Strategy Summit marks the beginning of a new collaboration between African and US groups to contest the policies that aim to transform Africa’s vibrant smallholder farming systems into American agribusiness.



The African and US groups were united through an alternative vision of the global food system guided by the principle of ‘food sovereignty’ – a term originated by La Via Campesina, a worldwide network of peasant farmers – which asserts that the people who actually produce, distribute and consume food should control the mechanisms and policies of their food systems, rather than corporations and market institutions. All people should have the right to decide what they eat and to ensure that food in their community is healthy and accessible for everyone.



Each morning, the Summit participants began their work by gathering in a “mistica”, a powerful practice originated by the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST). Delegates contributed seeds, banners of struggle, and other meaningful objects to the center of the room. Calling on ancestors, families, and joint moral and spiritual intention, this meditative activity cultivated a sense of trust and community among the US- and Africa-based organizations, strengthening their resolve to advance the struggle against philanthro-capitalism and the neocolonial scramble for Africa.



Just one month after the Summit, Mugambe signed a letter calling for an end to the human feeding trials in Iowa and the ‘super banana’ project altogether. Now, however, she was not alone. Joined by over 120 organizations worldwide, African and US activists have committed to fight colonial agricultural interventions in Africa and the Gates Foundation’s call for a Green Revolution for Africa.



Today, over one billion people remain hungry in the world, including an estimated 30 million here in the United States itself. Yet the US government, corporations and non-state actors such as the Gates Foundation promote solutions that are profitable to them but not necessarily beneficial to people in the Third World. Our solutions must not be driven by a narrow ideology; we already have enough food to feed the world – it must ultimately be distributed more equitably and ethically.



*Third World Resurgence No. 292, December 2014, pp 2-4

http://www.twn.my/title2/resurgence/2014/292/eco1.htm

https://www.villagevolunteers.org/forum/new-dangerous-colonialism-food-systems/

How Gates the Foundation and Western Countries Are Plotting to Take Control of Africa's Agriculture
Small farmers are being marginalized and excluded thanks to corporate-friendly regulations.
By Stephen Greenberg, Oliver Tickell / The Ecologist March 30, 2015
S
A battle is currently being waged over Africa's seed systems. After decades of neglect and weak investment in African agriculture, there is renewed interest in funding African agriculture.

These new investments take the form of philanthropic and international development aid as well as private investment funds. They are based on the potentially huge profitability of African agriculture - and seed systems are a key target.


Right now ministers are co-ordinating their next steps at the 34th COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa) Intergovernmental Committee meeting that kicked off yesterday, 22nd March, in preparation for the main Summit that will follow on 30th and 31st March 2015.

COMESA's key aim is to pave the way for a "Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) in 2017 under the auspices of the African Union" with uniform regulations, including on agricultural products, seeds and GMOs.

A recent meeting on biotechnology and biosafety was held to establish a "COMESA biotechnology and biosafety policy implementation plan" (COMBIP) to roll out from 2015-2019, "leading to increased biotechnology applications and agricultural commodity trade in the region."

But read between the lines and its real purpose was to facilitate the planting and commercialization of GMO crops in Africa all at one go, instead of country by country. USAID Regional representatives for East Africa, based in Nairobi, were present to monitor the process and ensure the desired outcome.

And on the agenda for the main COMESA Summit next week is the approval of a 'Master Plan' for the implementation of the COMESA Harmonised Seed Trade Regulations agreed last year in Kinshasa.

The regulations, according to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, "will greatly facilitate agricultural transformation in the COMESA member states towards industrialization of farming systems based on the logic of the highly controversial, failed and hopelessly doomed Green Revolution model of agriculture."

They "promote only one type of seed breeding, namely industrial seed breeding involving the use of advanced breeding technologies. The entire orientation of the seed Regulations is towards genetically uniform, commercially bred varieties in terms of seed quality control and variety registration."

No place for small farmers!

"What is very clear is that small farmers in Africa, seeking to develop or maintain varieties, create local seed enterprises or cultivate locally adapted varieties are excluded from the proposed COMESA Seed Certification System and Variety Release System, because these varieties willnot fulfill the requirements for distinctness, uniformity and stability (DUS).

"Landraces or farmers' varieties usually display a high degree of genetic heterogeneity and are adapted to the local environment under which they were developed. In addition, such varieties are not necessarily distinct from each other."

COMESA's key agricultural objectives are to raise production by 6% per year, "integrate farmers into the market economy", make Africa a "strategic player in agricultural science and technology development".


To this end USAID is funding COMESA programmes for 'Coordinated Agricultural Research and Technology Interventions' and 'A Regional Approach Towards Biotechnology' - in other words, to create uniform corporation-friendly regulations for seeds, agro-chemicals and GMOs across the region.

More than 80% of Africa's seed supply currently comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. This seed meets very diverse needs in very diverse conditions.

Farmers know the quality of 'recycled' seed, selected and saved from their own crops. It is cheap and readily available. New varieties can be introduced through informal trade within villages and beyond. This system may not be perfect, but it has been broadly functional for generations.

The so-called 'formal' seed sector is a relatively new addition in Africa and has a narrow focus on commercial crops, especially hybrid maize. This commercial seed may offer yield advantages, but only in the right conditions, e.g. when coupled with continuous use of synthetic fertilizer, irrigation, larger pieces of land and mono-cropping - the Green Revolution package.

Seed production in the formal sector goes through a number of stages, starting with breeders' and pre-basic seed which has high varietal purity; then foundation / basic seed, which is a bulking up of the breeders' seed; then larger quantities of certified seed are produced for retail sale to farmers.

In most countries in Africa, the public sector was responsible for certified seed production and distribution. Lack of resources, especially following structural adjustment imposed by the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s and 1990s, reduced the effectiveness of this system.

As a result, availability of certified seed was sometimes limited and farmers often found it difficult to access this seed. Farmers continued relying on the tried and trusted seed saved on their farms and exchanged with one another.

The new commercialisation agenda

The new commercialisation agenda is based on the premise that the public sector is inherently incapable of meeting farmer requirements for quality seed.

This agenda is led by USAID and other G8 countries especially through the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, and philanthropic institutions like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) working hand in hand with multinational corporations (MNCs) including Monsanto, Syngenta, Yara and others.


The EU also funded a key programme, now concluded, the 'COMESA Regional Agro-Inputs Programme' (COMRAP), to the tune of €20 million, which aims to "reach farmers in each country to improve their sustainable access to agro-inputs and services", "strengthen the capacity for the improvement of seed quality" and "harmonise seed trade regulations throughout the COMESA region".

The first line of attack was to argue for the privatisation of certified seed production and distribution, ostensibly to generate competition. This was identified as a profitable niche in a sector otherwise characterised by low demand, partly because farmers did not have the resources to pay for commercial seed, and partly because their seed needs were already being met through existing systems of production and distribution managed by farmers themselves.

Over the past two decades, a long and slow process of seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8, BMGF and others has secured this space for private companies to profit from seed production.

This opened the door to MNC involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the continent. The focus remained on hybrid maize and a few other commercial crops with high demand at national level, or niche on demand.

It now appears that phase two of the commercialisation agenda is being launched. This begins the process of privatising the production of early generation seed (EGS), the breeder and foundation seed.

Already plant variety protection laws are being enacted to allow for private ownership of germplasm previously in the public domain. Now Green Revolution pundits are looking for opportunities to remove public control of potentially profitable processes in EGS production.

Gates, USAID and Deloitte study ways to commercialise early generation seed production

To this end, BMGF and USAID commissioned US strategy consulting firm Monitor-Deloitte to identify private business opportunities in EGS production. The study was conducted in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia on maize, rice, sorghum, cowpea, common beans, cassava and sweet potato.

BMGF and USAID have handpicked an elite group to meet behind closed doors in London in March 2015 to discuss the consultant's report and to strategise on how to open up another front in the battle to turn African seed into a profit-making venture for MNCs.

What is remarkable about this meeting is that there are very few Africans present. Those who are there mostly represent private sector interests, including seed companies and traders' associations. There are no farmer representatives.


This raises serious concerns about the transparency and accountability of these processes. The image of colonial robber barons meeting in secret to carve up the African continent arises unbidden in the mind.

Private sector cherry picking with public subsidy

The Deloitte report exposes a typical approach of private sector 'cherry picking', where private companies identify profitable activities for their own involvement.

While complaining incessantly about "heavy state involvement" they still insist on selected heavy state involvement to cover unprofitable interventions so that the private sector can take the profitable activities.

These include establishing systems, developing institutions, and even engaging in some productive activities where profits are unlikely but which are needed to allow the profit-making scheme to function.

The report uses cowpea production in Ghana as an example of where the public sector should carry the extremely expensive breeder seed costs to allow the private sector to profit in seed multiplication and distribution.

Breeder seed is prohibitively costly because of low multiplication rates and low demand. But the demand that exists is nonetheless lucrative, so the private sector wants to be involved in those parts of the production process identified as profitable.

Where the whole chain is profitable, Deloitte proposes the public sector be locked out of the production process. Examples are hybrid maize or closed value chains where there is strong but limited demand and early production processes are also potentially profitable, for example hybrid sorghum for brewing.

Deloitte's proposal to "channel government and donor financing into supporting mechanisms for private investment in seed production" is a route to effectively subsidising MNCs at the expense of building farmer capacity and resilience to produce quality seed to meet their own context-specific needs.

Active role for farmers disregarded

A potential role for farmers in production or distribution of seed is not even considered in the study, from conception to results. Indeed farmers are viewed only as passive consumers of seed produced by others for a profit.

While we can acknowledge that farmer-managed systems are not perfect, these systems have survived through extremely adverse conditions. They undoubtedly form a base for seed production and distribution that can be built on. But they require support, especially from public R&D and extension services.

There is a growing movement in Africa to reassert the enduring importance of farmer-managed seed systems. . Even under ideal circumstances, MNCs will not venture into the production of many small crops where demand is fragmented nationally but is very strong in local pockets.

The MNC business model of economies of scale and standardised products cannot respond to the diverse needs of asset-poor but dynamic African farmers.

Rather than engaging in partnerships with MNCs with dubious long-term benefits for farmers, it will be far better for the public sector to orient the capacity and resources at its disposal to work directly with farmers to build on existing seed production and distribution activities.

http://www.alternet.org/world/how-gates-foundation-and-western-countries-are-plotting-take-control-africas-agriculture

"Poor-Washing," the Gates Foundation, and the "Green Revolution" in Africa
Submitted by Bill Quigley on Thu, 05/31/2007 - 09:34

by BAR managing Editor Bruce Dixon

Genetically altered crops will rescue Africa from endemic shortfalls in food production, claim corporate foundations that have announced a $150 million "gift" to spark a "Green Revolution" in agriculture on the continent. Of course, U.S.-based agribusiness holds the patents to these wondercrops, and can exercise their proprietary "rights" at will. Are corporate foundations really out to feed the hungry, or are they hypocritical Trojan Horses on a mission to hijack the world's food supply - to create the most complete and ultimate state of dependency.

"Poor-washing" is the common public relations tactic of concealing bitterly unfair and predatory trade policies that create and deepen hunger and poverty with clouds of hypocritical noise about feeding the hungry and alleviating poverty. It's hard to imagine a better case of media poor-washing than the hype around the recently announced $150 million "gifts" of the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations to the cause of reforming African agriculture, feeding that continent's impoverished millions and sparking an African "Green Revolution"

For ADM, Cargill, Monsanto and other agribusiness giants farming as humans have practiced it the last ten thousand years is a big problem. The problem is that when farmers plant and harvest crops, setting a little aside for next year's seed, people eat, but corporations don't get paid. That problem has been so thoroughly solved in US food production that chemical fertilizers and pesticides create a biological dead zone of hundreds of square miles in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi, draining much of the continent's richest farmland, empties into it. U.S. law requires the registration all crop varieties, and makes it extraordinarily difficult for farmers to save and plant their own seed year to year without paying royalties to corporations who "own" the genetic code of those crops.

african_farmer01But until recently in the developing world, farmers still planted, plowed and harvested without paying American agribusiness anything. The first attempt to "monetize" food production took place a generation ago in Southeast Asia and India. Called the "Green Revolution" its public face was a masterpiece of pious poor-washing. A thin layer of native academic, "experts" and local officials were bought off, and slick ad campaigns were told local farmers the road to prosperity was the use of vast quantities of pesticides, herbicides, and high-yield crops grown for international markets instead of feeding local populations.

The "Green Revolution" in India worked out well for the middlemen who sold the chemicals and lent poor farmers money to buy them, and for its wealthiest farmers. But when millions of farmers, on the advice foreign and domestic "experts" produced cotton, sugar and export crops for the world market instead of food to feed their neighbors, several nasty things happened. The prices for those export staples went down, so poor farmers wound up without the cash to repay loans for the year's seed and chemicals. Food which used to be abundant and locally grown became scarce, expensive and had to come from other regions or overseas. The chemicals killed many beneficial plants and insects, and promoted the emergence of newer, tougher pests and diseases. Export crops needed more water than traditional ones, so wealthy farmers monopolized what water there was to feed their export crops. Man-made famines occurred. People starved or became dependent on imported foreign grain. Millions of farmers were forced to sell their land (or sometimes their children) to pay off their debts, and move to the cities.

In the tradition of the European explorers unleashed on the rest of humanity with letters from their kings entitling them to claim and seize the lands, treasure and inhabitants of all places not under the rule of white Christian princes, the US patent office began in the 1990s, granting American corporations exclusive "patents" for varieties of rice produced in Asia for thousands of years, for beans grown in Mexico centuries before Columbus, and for all the products which were or might be made from trees, plants, roots and molds growing in the rain forests of Africa and Asia. Indian courts, under pressure from their citizens, rebuffed for now American attempts to collect royalties for the production of basmati rice, which farmers in India and Pakistan have cultivated for centuries. But every developing country can't bring to the table against the U.S. the power that India, with a fifth of the world's population can.

In the US media this privatization of nature is called "the biotech industry". Most of humanity outside the U.S. call it biopiracy. In the last decade, corporate "life scientists" in the biotech industry have invented, and the US Department of Agriculture has patented a perverse but profitable technology which prevents a current year's crop from producing usable seed for next year's planting. These "terminator seeds" will force farmers to return to corporate seed suppliers every year.

For the last 20 years, the US has, with varying degrees of success, bullied, bribed and threatened governments on six continents to enforce its skull-and-crossbones patent laws through bilateral trade agreements --- think NAFTA and CAFTA - through World Bank and International Monetary Fund dictates, and the World Trade Organization. Today UN bodies and dozens of individual countries are under pressure to allow the introduction of genetically modified crops and terminator seed technologies into their food chains. Despite their poverty and need for development aid, African countries, informed by the world media (outside the US) have been forced by their own citizens, scientists and farmers to stoutly resist Western efforts to undermine their food security. But the slick and shiny PR campaign around the Gates and Rockerfeller initiatives, supposedly addressed at alleviating world hunger seem to mark a new stage in the continuing scramble for African resources.

Last year, the Gates Foundation hired former Monsanto VP Robert Robert Horsch as senior robert_horschprogram officer for Africa. Monsanto is the company that invented "biotechnology" and the patenting of life forms by corporations. This is the context for the "philanthropy" of the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations, and their expressed concern for foisting a "Green Revolution" upon Africa. Will African farmers and their governments be forced to pay American corporations to cultivate the crops they have for centuries? Global capital and competition to control the world's remaining energy have put Africa's oil resources in the sights of America's strategic planners. If the Gates and Rockerfeller Foundations, along with Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and other agribusiness and biotech and "life science" players have anything to say about it, Africa's food supply is up for grabs too.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/poor-washing-gates-foundation-and-green-revolution-africa

Acquisition of Africa’s SeedCo by Monsanto, Groupe Limagrain: Neo-colonial occupation
Tuesday, October 07, 2014
MEDIA RELEASE FROM ALLIANCE FOR FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IN AFRICA

Addis Ababa 7 October 2014

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is deeply concerned about the recent acquisitions by multi-national seed companies of large parts of SeedCo, one of Africa’s largest home-grown seed companies. Attracting foreign investment from the world’s largest seed companies, most of who got to their current dominant positions by devouring national seed companies and their competitors through mergers and acquisitions, is an inevitable consequence of the fierce drive to commercialise agriculture in Africa.

The deals in question involve French seed giant Groupe Limagrain, the largest seed and plant breeding company in the European Union, who has invested up to US$60 million for a 28% stake in SeedCo. In another transaction, SeedCo has agreed to sell 49% of its shares in Africa’s only cottonseed company, Quton, to Mahyco of India. Mahyco is 26% owned by Monsanto and has 50:50 joint venture with the gene-giant to sub-license its genetically modified (GM) bt cotton traits throughout India. Interestingly, Mahyco also specialises in hybrid cotton varieties, unlike Quton, who also produces open-pollinated varieties (OPVs) of cottonseed.

These acquisitions follow close on the heels of Swiss biotech giant Syngenta’s take-over in 2013 of Zambian seed company MRI Seed, whose maize germplasm collection was said at the time to be amongst Africa’s most comprehensive and diverse. Taken together, this means that three of the world’s largest biotechnology companies, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, all now have a significant foothold on the continent in markets for two of the three major global GM crop varieties: maize and cotton.

SeedCo, like so many other seed companies around the world, began life as a farmer-led and owned organisation to improve the availability of quality maize seed in 1940. Today it describes itself as Africa’s largest seed company, operating in 15 countries across the continent and has significant market shares in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. SeedCo also has access to government and donor-funded input subsidy programmes in Zambia and Malawi and has set its sights on potentially lucrative markets in Nigeria and Ghana. In July 2014, SeedCo and Limagrain began discussions with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) for a collaborative research project on maize lethal necrosis in Africa.

The creation of an predominantly privately owned seed industry in Africa is a vital component of the Green Revolution push, which equates agrarian transformation in Africa with the adoption of commercial (corporate) certified seed and other expensive inputs such as fertilizer. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), for example, claims to collaborate with 80 small and medium sized seed companies across Africa and has also organised public-private-partnerships between seed companies and public research institutions. How many of these newly established entities will remain independent of global seed industry players remains to be seen.

Multinational capture of local seed companies is a process that has long been underway in South Africa, a country much further down the Green Revolution path than any other in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 1999 and 2000 Monsanto purchased two of the country’s largest seed companies, Carnia and Sensako, and the Missouri based company now enjoys a dominant position in South Africa’s commercial seed market. In 2012 the largest domestic seed company, Pannar Seed, was taken-over by US firm Pioneer Hi-Bred, itself a subsidiary of the DuPont chemical company. The purchase not only gave Pioneer access to Pannar’s vast maize germplasm collection and agro-dealer network in South Africa, but also the company’s long established footprint in 23 other countries across the continent. Even the smaller South African companies are now seen as fair game, with Link Seed being taken over by, ironically, also Limagrain in 2013.

Apart from the concerns raised above, there are numerous worrying implications arising from these deals. What, for example, will be the implications of Mahyco’s (and thus Monsanto’s) involvement in the cotton seed sector in Africa through its SeedCo interests given their focus on hybrid and GM cotton seed, as opposed to SeedCo’s current focusonOPVs? Under what terms will Limagrain’s involvement in the proposed public private partnership with CIMMYT (and future project’s that its stake in SeedCo)inevitable bring? Monsanto’s involvement with public research bodies in Africa through the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project has been uncovered as bio-piracy instead of benevolence. Further, how will Limagrain benefit from SeedCo’s involvement in input subsidy schemes in Malawi and Zambia? From the outside this appears to be another case of scarce African agricultural budgets being used to subsidise the multinational seed industry.

AFSA believes that solutions to Africa’s agricultural challenges can be found in the collaboration between its small-scale farmers and public researchers, with the former taking the lead in setting the research agendas and objectives. A key part of public investments in R&D and extension should include identifying, prioritising and supporting work around participatory plant breeding, participatory variety selection, farmer-managed seed certification and quality assurance systems, identifying and supporting the development of locally important crops on the basis of decentralised participatory R&D, farmer to farmer exchanges and so forth. The encroachment of the international seed industry, which focuses almost exclusively on genetically uniform varieties, subject to UPOV 1991 style intellectual property protection, takes us further away from this agricultural vision and closer to neo-colonialism of Africa’s food systems.

http://afsafrica.org/acquisition-of-africas-seedco-by-monsanto-groupe-limagrain-neo-colonial-occupation-of-africas-seed-systems/

The neo-colonial G8 corporate takeover of African agricuture
admin 24 July 2012, 8:26am 2
AgricultureInternational
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What is being portrayed as charity is nothing more than a cynical neo-colonial raid by the G8 to control African commodities, land and seeds, writes Glenn Ashton.


An anti-Monsanto crop circle made by farmers and volunteers in the Philippines. (By Melvyn Calderon/Greenpeace HO/A.P. Click on picture to read original article in Vanity Fair.)
A DANGEROUS international game is being played in the name of assisting Africa to feed itself. What is portrayed as charitable largesse has more in common with reinvigorating neo-colonialism than feeding Africans. This is in fact a misanthropic, multi-pronged raid by the G8 to control African commodities, land and seeds.

Africa presently occupies an interesting niche amongst the emerging, tripartite global realpolitik. First are longstanding, yet waning, relationships between Africa and its European colonial powers — Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Italy and, most particularly, France and England. Second is the expanding post Second World War relationship between Africa and the global superpower of the USA. Thirdly, there is the increasingly important influence of the rapidly emerging BRICS alliance, with South Africa posing as regional superpower along with Brazil, India and China. These three blocs often have conflicting, and conflicted, roles in the development and exploitation of Africa.

Nowhere else is this more apparent than in the field of agriculture. African agriculture remains in the doldrums, beset by twin curses. On the one hand lies its huge vulnerability to climatic variability, which will be exacerbated by climate change. On the other are the market-disrupting impacts of food subsidies amongst the developed world. These combine to render the precarious business of farming in Africa even more treacherous than it needs to be.

The past decade has seen the rise of a third threat — that of land grabs across the continent. Some emanate from corporate speculators and investors, others from nation states, particularly amongst the oil-rich but infertile Middle East, but also from the Far East, Europe and the USA. This trend has already created significant local hardships documented by watchdog groups like Grain and Action Aid. Africa has ceded an estimated 40 -50 million hectares to foreign interests over the past decade or so.

Now a fourth, possibly more ominous threat has arisen.

G8 Africa food security Play Video


Some background: in July 2009 at the G8 meeting a L’Aquila, just north of Rome, US$ 22 billion was pledged to support and improve African agriculture over the following 3 years. Of course this is a pittance compared to the estimated $250 to $350 billion annually paid in market distorting agricultural subsidies within the OECD. However, $22 billion could at least go some way to addressing some of the profound systemic problems facing African agriculture.

The galling reality is that only around half the pledged amount was disbursed within the 3 year time frame. Worse yet, only 12 per cent of that amount was new money which would not have been donated anyway.

Accordingly, a Faustian bargain was made at the June 2012 G8 meeting by President Obama. Instead of delivering on commitments, he changed tack and roped in a $3 billion “pledge of corporate assistance” for African Agriculture. Introducing “The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition”, Obama made a hugely condescending – yet sinister – promise that corporations would somehow magically assist Africa to overcome its systemic production challenges, when the G8, the green revolution and pretty much everything else has failed to date.

To pile cynicism onto condescension, Obama then warned that African nations would have to make "tough reforms" and “refine policies in order to improve investment opportunities,” in order that they could attract this investment. From an African perspective, this appears indistinguishable from previous externally imposed structural adjustment policies. This looks just like neo-colonial “Change, or else,” paternalism writ large. If it quacks like a duck is it a duck?

Well, who did Obama bring to the party to save Africa? For starters, we have Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF — the world’s largest seed and agricultural chemical companies, all deeply involved in genetically modified crops, industrial agriculture and patenting of crops and foods, with nary a verifiably charitable bone in their collective corpus.

President Obama Speaks on Food Security at G8 Meeting Play Video


Surely it is cynical to reject such expertise, such seed wizardry, I hear the cynics cry? Perhaps, but we must be absolutely clear about one central issue. Private corporations have one primary goal: profit. Everything else is secondary. Corporate largesse is predicated solely by self-interest.

This hints at why Pioneer Hi-Bred, a DuPont subsidiary and the world’s second biggest seed company after Monsanto, was recently given the green light to purchase Africa’s largest remaining independent seed company, Pannar. This South African based seed multinational – with a presence in at least 14 African nations, as well as South America and the USA – was a rich jewel indeed.

This merger was initially rejected by the South African Competition authorities. Subsequently, it was authorised by the Competition Appeals Court, after the deal was cynically sweetened to “benefit” South Africa. The result is that South Africa’s seed industry is now effectively controlled by a duopoly of two US multinationals, Monsanto and Pioneer. Pioneer openly states its wish to expand into Africa; Pannar provides the ideal framework. Who controls the seed, controls the food.

The South African Department of Agriculture bizarrely considers this merger beneficial. Yet this is understandable when contemplating this department’s remarkable ineptitude in addressing national food security. Instead of concentrating on change they have unconditionally supported the corporate controlled, industrialised agricultural value chain, while lamenting that South African agriculture remains un-transformed.

Such naïve posturing is not the case elsewhere in Africa. Apparently anticipating Obama’s announcement of his “The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition,” a letter from a representative African farmers union, endorsed by African entrepreneurs and development experts presciently enquired:
“I ask you to explain how you could possibly justify thinking that the food security and sovereignty of Africa could be secured through international cooperation outside of the policy frameworks formulated in an inclusive fashion with the peasants and the producers of the continent.”

In other words, how about not imposing unilateral, imperial decrees on Africa, yet again, President Obama?

Henok Fente on G8 Summit Play Video


The letter continued:
“This is why we must build our food policy on our own resources as is done in the other regions of the world. The G8 and the G20 can in no way be considered the appropriate fora for decisions of this nature.”

But will the G8, the OECD and the corporate free-riders listen? Not bloody likely. Not when there is an entire continent up for grabs. The very agencies who decry corruption are apparently happy to facilitate it.

Is it a coincidence that the G8 corporate “sponsors” include Kraft, Intersnack and Olam (the world’s largest cashew trader), along with the world’s leading cashew processing machine manufacturer Oltremare? Surely they are just “assisting” cashew nut production in Mozambique? Self-interest? Never!

That must also be why Mars, the world’s largest chocolate company, Kraft (again!), which recently bought out Cadbury and Cote D’or, along with US chocolate giant Hershey and of course the predominant international cocoa trader Armajaro, are “assisting” African cocoa production. Self-interest? Of course not!

Even cursory analysis indicates how the apparent largesse of this new G8 corporate brotherhood is little less than a $3 billion fire sale of the African agricultural market to the biggest players in the game. Most of them are already players; this “alliance” is simply a huge lever to legitimise a World Economic Forum (WEF), free-market inspired, sleight of hand trick to appear to help Africa while really helping themselves.

Surely, I hear, this is all exaggeration?

Ogaden Protest G8 Summit Demonstrators Thurmont, Maryland 2012 Play Video


Well, no. Bunge, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland – the world’s biggest food commodity traders – consistently demonstrate predation before beneficence. Obama’s corporate cotton assistance package has all of the main cotton traders, none of who demonstrate concern about how US cotton subsidies have decimated the African industry.

What about Rabobank, actively involved in land acquisitions in the ongoing African land-grab? Rabobank also has close relationships with Rothschild, Morgan Stanley and is the major shareholder in Agri-Sar, which has the “monetisation of water” as an investment goal. Surely these corporate interventions are to the benefit of African agriculture?

There can be no denial that Africa certainly requires as much agricultural assistance as it can get. Africa has the potential to provide vast variety and volumes of food. And yes, there are many good people involved in some programmes to help Africa feed itself — and the world. But to impose a new, faux green, revolution on top of the failed previous one is not a solution. Neither are a set of novel, corporate enforced, G8 and WEF inspired structural adjustments going to benefit Africa.

If problems with African agriculture are going to be addressed, how about starting with trade distorting OECD agricultural subsidies? Neither can USAid continue to disrupt local economies by dumping subsidised food into African markets — it must adopt the European model of purchasing local food for redistribution. Likewise, European companies cannot continue to usurp vast tracts of land to grow “green” fuel to fool their consumers they are following sustainable practices.

The real problem is the intractable relationship engendered in the corporate political nexus. If nothing else, Obama has done us all a favour by alerting us to the pernicious nature of this relationship with this latest, cynical offer to assist Africa with his “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.”

The reality is that, yet again, Africa is being coerced to opening up its doors to exploitation portrayed as assistance. If any good is to come of this latest neo-colonial onslaught, Africa must demonstrate authoritative leadership to direct how this assistance is provided. Yet given the inherently corrupt relationship between corporations and political power, this is a slim hope. Yet again, Africa stands at risk of being corrupted by a system corrupt to its very core.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-neo-colonial-g8-corporate-takeover-of-african-agricuture,4325