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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - A new Philanthro-Capitalist Alliance in Africa? - 0 views

  • Elegantly simple in its proposal and presentation, AGRA is the global face of a renewed international effort to revive Africa’s sagging agricultural research institutions and introduce new Green Revolution products across the sub-Sahara. The complex array of institutional and financial interests lining up behind Gates and Rockefeller include multilateral and bilateral aid organizations, national and international research institutes, and the handful of powerful multinational seed, chemical, and fertilizer monopolies upon which the entire financial future of the new Green Revolution ultimately rests.
  • That same week in Davos, the soon-to-retire president of Microsoft put his money where his mouth was by giving another $306 million to AGRA. That’s a lot of recognition, by anyone’s standards. Clearly, the “halo effect” created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ altruism will benefit everyone associated with AGRA—from the CGIAR to Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.
  • as a creative capitalist, what—or for whom—is AGRA’s market-based reward? Recognition for Microsoft? Undeniable, but not significant or necessary for a company who already has all the recognition it wants. Gates’ financial interests in genetic engineering? These investments pale behind AGRA itself. The answer is; there is no market-based reward. Rather, the prize is political. AGRA, backed by Gates’ enormous philanthropic power, bolstered by the best world-renown diplomats and CEOs money can buy, and driven by the sheer financial and institutional momentum of the industrial players within the Green Revolution, is a political machine of immense proportions. AGRA allows the Gates foundation unprecedented influence not only in setting the national food and agricultural policies of many African governments, but in the agenda-setting of continental agreements (like NEPAD), multilateral development institutions (e.g. FAO), the strategies of agricultural research centers (e.g. WARDA), and the political economic re-structuring of Africa’s food systems in general. The Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa is the Gates’ Foundations bold foray into big philanthropy’s latest incarnation: philanthro-capitalism.
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  • A logical extension of current of neo-liberal hegemony, philanthro-capitalism sees unregulated markets not only as engines for creating wealth, but as the ultimate drivers of social change. In this view, governments are too bureaucratic and corrupt, and social movements too unruly and inefficient. Only the market can save us from… well, the market.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Food crisis in the Sahel: Real problem, false solutions - 0 views

  • Tidiane Kassé cautions that by tackling the consequences rather than the causes of the crisis, the region’s people are likely to remain vulnerable to hunger.
  • In contrast with other former French colonies in Africa, where independence parades have been held in a manner devoid of substance and sense (and built on the failings which have reinforced the links of subject to metropole and other examples of power –political, economic, etc), Niamey’s authorities are to limit themselves to a military parade on 3 August. With symbolism put aside, the reality needs to be faced up to: some 8 million Nigeriens – or half the country’s population – are affected by the famine.
  • In addition to the 8 million affected Nigeriens are some 1.6 million Chadians and 500,000 Malians. These statistics are only, however, the visible aspect that institutions and international non-governmental organisations display. They suffer from the limits around reading data on Africa, notably on rural areas and a region of the Sahel in which pastoral traditions and a nomadic lifestyle are a prominent feature.
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  • n the face of empty granaries, Niger’s people have begun to develop a strategy for survival. ‘In Niger, women cover a desert-like environment in search of anthills in order to dig up and retrieve grains of millet, corn and other crops that the ants have collected,’ tells Charles Bambara, in charge of communications for Oxfam GB in Dakar. In the north of Mali, farmers, keen to allow their livestock to drink, have taken to using the water points actually intended for elephants (in a bid to protect the last pachyderms alive in the country).
  • The disorder of the world food crisis in 2008 did not become hazy, and this new peak comes to remind us that, in the Sahel, the crisis results from an endemic problem. This is a problem that, as the thrust of recurrent fever testifies, is more a question of structure than conjuncture, that these are the failings of agricultural policies that impose their own tough realities, and that the recommended solutions are not different from those pushed in the 1980s with the establishing of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) which sounded the death knell of Africa’s agricultural policies.
  • The reduced investment imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had then destroyed the base of an agriculture geared towards food sovereignty. Industrial cultures were promoted which washed the soil (leading to greater soil erosion, the use of pesticides and chemical fertiliser) and disrupted the balance of the systems of production behind subsistence and the generation of complementary revenues on the strength of access to local markets. From this point it was a question of food security, no matter where stocks came from. This was the period in which food aid poured in. Africa was to produce no longer, with African stomachs wagered on agricultural surpluses from Europe, the US and elsewhere. As a result, since 1980 sub-Saharan Africa has been the only region of the world where average per capita food production has continued to decline over the last 40 years.[3]
  • African agriculture has suffered a series of difficulties which, over 30 years, have left it vulnerable to the smallest of changes on both the international market and climatically. Agricultural policies applied by states, under donors’ pressure, have in effect turned their back on policies which, formerly, assured technical assistance to producers, backed up by a price-stabilisation mechanism and subsidies for commodities.
  • We could go even further towards the worst of it and look at the development of biofuels and the extent to which more and more land is being diverted away from food production. Essentially, we will be growing to power cars rather than fill granaries. And in July this year, Burkina Faso has inaugurated its first industrial unit of production, while the country remains vulnerable in the face of a food crisis.
  • ‘Today, in the smallest village, people eat bread, milk and coffee… This wasn’t part of our customs; we used to eat maize-based dough, sorghum and millet. But when you can’t live anymore from your field and you’re reliant on others (neighbours, food aid), you eat what you’re given.
  • The foundation of real food sovereignty lies in the promotion and consolidation of family agriculture, as well as the development of an agro-ecology which offers the best antidote to the wasting-away of fragile ecosystems at the mercy of deregulation.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Biofuels and world hunger - 0 views

  • Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.
  • If all global biofuels targets are to be met, food prices could rise by up to an additional 76 per cent by 2020 and starve an extra 600 million people.
  • While driving up food prices can create hunger, driving people off the land that they have traditionally cultivated deprives them of the last resort of growing their own food. This is happening all over the developing world. In Mozambique, farms are destroyed for industrial biofuels. Elisa Alimone Mongue, mother and farmer said: ‘I don't have a farm, I don't have a garden … the only land I have has been destroyed. We are just suffering with hunger … even if I go to look for another farm, they will just destroy it again.’
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  • Julio Ngoene is fighting to save his community and its way of life. He is the village chief of approximately 100 households of more than 1,000 people. A biofuel company is setting up a project near his village and has taken over 80 per cent of the village farmland without permission, and destroyed the crops. At the beginning of the project, the company promised to resettle the village, but two years later, Julio and the villagers have still heard nothing, and no one in the village has received compensation.
  • There have been warnings against jatropha biodiesel going back several years [3] (Jatropha Biodiesel Fever in India, SiS 36). Jatropha has been hyped as a miracle non-food biofuel crop that would simply grow in marginal areas not suitable for food crops. But there was clear evidence that it would only deliver anywhere near the promised 1,300 litres of oil per ha when grown in fertile land with plenty of water, and that's what companies have set their eyes on.
  • But this year I could not get much because of the trees that have been cut. Now they have destroyed the trees so we have lost a good source of income forever, yet we have not been paid anything in compensation. That is why I confronted the white man at the meeting.’
  • Brazil is the largest industrial biofuel producer in the developing world, where the sugar cane (ethanol) plantation industry is well established. However, working conditions are often poor. Of the one million cane workers, about half are employed as cutters, mostly done by hand, in intense heat for long hours; and a number of deaths have been reported.
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    Biofuels are conservatively estimated to have been responsible for at least 30 per cent of the global food price spike in 2008 that pushed 100 million people into poverty and drove some 30 million more into hunger, according to the report, Meals per gallon, released by the UK charity ActionAid in February 2010 [1]. The number of chronically hungry people now exceeds one billion.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

  • there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
  • The Principle of food sovereignty.
  • The Principle of priority of food over export crops produced by small farms sustained by state provision of the necessary infrastructure of financial credit, water, energy, extension service, transport, storage, marketing, and insurance against crop failures due to climate changes or other unforeseen circumstances.
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  • The Principle of self-reliance and national ownership and control over the main resources for food production.
  • The Principle of food safety reserves.
  • The Principle of a fair and equitable distribution of “reserve foods” among the population during emergencies.
  • the above quite commonsensical and, we believe, reasonable principles have not been followed by many governments in the South. They have been grossly violated through five main reasons,
  • Distorted state policies on production and trade (e.g. removal of tariffs that made local producers vulnerable to imported food
  • and grab by the rich commercial farmers
  • Effective loss of control over resources of food production,
  • Donor aid dependence
  • Disruption of the infrastructure of food production (as described above) that came as a consequence of the above four factors.
  • Just 10 corporations, including Aventis, Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta, control one third of the $23 billion commercial seed market and 80% of the $28 billion global pesticide market.
  • In an increasingly liberalizing (globalizing) world, Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have increased their control over the supply of water, especially in the South. In many cases, private sector participation in water services has been one of the “aid conditionalities” of the so-called “donor assistance” (ODAs) from donor countries and the IMF and the World Bank. Just three companies, Veolia Environnement (formerly Vivendi Environnement), Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux and Bechtel (USA), control a majority of private water concessions globally..
  • The Social Enterprise Development (SEND) Foundation in Ghana have criticised multi-national companies that are trying, using the “opportunity” of “food crisis”, to capture African agriculture through the so-called “Green Revolution” for Africa. FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) said that peasants have been evicted in several African countries so that palm oil can be produced from forests.
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    there are five basic guidelines, or principles, that must form the basis of any food policy.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

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    An absolute priority has to be given to domestic food production in order to decrease dependency on the international market. Peasants and small farmers should be encouraged through better prices for their farm products and stable markets to produce food for themselves and their communities. Landless families from rural and urban areas have to get access to land, seeds and water to produce their own food. This means increased investment in peasant and farmer-based food production for domestic markets.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News : Issue 459 - 0 views

  • Food sovereignty entails transforming the current food system to ensure that those who produce food have equitable access to, and control over land, water, seeds, fisheries and agricultural biodiversity.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Social movement definition of food sovereignty
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Land grabs: Africa's new 'resource curse'? - 0 views

  • In Madagascar, a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres of land – 50 per cent of Madagascar’s arable land, granted to multinational Daewoo ‘ensuring food security’ for South Korea, lead to a coup. ‘In the constitution, it is stipulated that Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent, so the agreement with Daewoo is cancelled,’ said current president Andry Rajoelina, a baby-faced former DJ, backed by the army – and allegedly, the majority of Malagasys, 70 per cent of whom depend on farmland for income. ‘One of the biggest problems for farmers in Madagascar is land ownership, and we think it’s unfair for the government to be selling or leasing land to foreigners when local farmers do not have enough land,’ an official from Madagascar’s Farmer’s Confederation revealed to Reuters.
  • The mentality of ‘grabbers’ could not be more different. ‘We are not farmers…’ stated an official from SLC Agricola, Brazil’s largest ‘farm’ corporation. ‘The same way you have shoemakers and computer manufacturers, we produce agricultural commodities.’
  • But with Africa losing an estimated US$148 billion in development finance each year, 60 per cent as a result of multinational mispricing, in addition to the direct servicing of odious debts – (amounting to a global figure of US$560 billion per annum of an outstanding US$2.9 trillion), little or no rents derived from the liquidation of exhaustible resources is redistributed in intangible capital. This is precisely because across Africa citizens are not required to finance the state budget – as occurs in high-income countries through intangible capital – they lack the political representation necessary to influence policies and usurped power structures.
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  • The terms differ from country to country, with the bulk of Ghana’s leased land allocated for export, in contrast to Ethiopia’s mixed status, but the issue remains one of control and exploitation, whether it is over local food monopolies or exported crops.
  • over 100 known specialised land funds and investments firms have embarked on ‘private sector’ land grabs, including well-known entities such as Morgan Stanley. Facilitating this process is the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank group, ensuring for investors the ‘enabling environments’ and positive ‘investment climates’ required for the extractive industries, such as repatriation of profits and tax ‘competition’. From 1991-2002, deregulation proposed by IFIs composed 95 per cent of changes implemented in host countries.
  • development finance siphoned from Africa, whether through the extractive industries, or land grabs, are unlikely to be revealed as the IMF scrapped mandatory information exchange. Global watchdogs, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) remained beholden to high-income nations as a ‘subsidiary’ unit in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Meanwhile, the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB), founded and finance by the ‘big four’ accounting firms – maintaining units in secrecy jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands – prefers multinationals to self-regulate trade via arms length transfer. What this effectively does is enable multinationals, conducting 60 per cent of global trade within rather than between corporations, to determine the future of entire continents such as Africa, where primary commodities – extracted by corporations, account for 80 per cent of exports.
  • Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Why land matters to Africans regardless of agriculture - 0 views

  • In both cases the agrarian question in relation to agricultural productivity and ownership of land in Africa was brought to the fore not least because of the ‘new’ wave of ‘land grabbing’ across the continent.
  • The case of South Africa and Zimbabwe’s ongoing land reforms highlights this contentious relationship. On the one hand they jointly affirm the centrality of land ownership in Africa irrespective of whether Africans use it for agricultural production or not. Yet, on the other hand, they dialectically confirm the viability of agricultural productivity among the African peasantry.
  • even such a presumable better land would hardly compensate. After all they had a rationale for being where they were in the first place. It is those kind of rationales that one needs to unpack, even today, before jumping into the bandwagon of claiming such and such land in Africa is idle and hence the imperial imperative of displacing Africans to pave way for investors.
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  • land is intimately linked to identity. It is central to the production and reproduction of community. Land thus ensures cultural continuity.
  • Although all forms of land tenure recognized by the Ugandan constitution are underpinned by patriarchy, she sharply noted, research from the ground indicates that the often demonized customary land tenure is relatively far beneficial to women when it comes to ensuring their access to land. At the risk of appearing a pro-patriarchy apologetic she aptly states: ‘Customary land tenure systems and production relations have in-built social insurance mechanisms … meant to ensure that the land needs of everybody in the community, including the needs of vulnerable members of society – aged, widowed, orphans, etc, are met.
  • Customary tenure arrangements are also designed to support livelihood systems. This is not the case for other tenure systems which support highly individualized and commercialized lifestyles. As long as women’s membership to a production unit is intact under customary tenure systems, therefore, they can have access to land, social networks and mutual support systems as well as common property resources which supports their efforts to fulfill their obligations for household food production, whether they are married, widowed or unmarried.’[4]
  • By reducing “the land question to a question of livelihoods and agriculture only” they fail to grasp that in South Africa as in other African countries “there is more to the land question which has to do with fundamental claims of legitimacy over ownership and control of the country at large”.[7]
  • This blind spot, and the persistence denial of the failure of ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ and ‘use it or lose it’ land reform models in South Africa, needs an eye salve from Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Unfortunately the debate on the merits and demerits of FTLRP has been coloured if not tainted by the preoccupation on the despotic regime of President Robert Mugabe. Yet when one scratches the surface on the ground it is easy to see how such selective engagement had been informed by a similar myopic discourse on land use for agriculture.
  • ‘Needless to say, a number of scholars have never recognized this potential. On the contrary, they continue to speculate about “crony capitalism” (Patrick Bond) and the “destruction of the agriculture sector” (Horace Campbell), without having conducted any concrete research of their own, or properly interrogated the new research that has emerged.’[12]
  • The irony is that even the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), well known for being so quick to dismiss if not demonize any positive side of Zimbabwe’s radical land reforms, had to reluctantly swallow its pride and prejudice as it extensively quoted Scoones’ admission of being “genuinely surprised” by findings of their study on ‘Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myth and Reality’ that debunks these five myths perpetuated by “political and media stereotypes of abject failure” in Zimbabwe: (1) That land reform has been a total failure; (2)That most of the land has gone to political "cronies"; (3) That there is no investment on the resettled land; (4) That agriculture is in complete ruins, creating chronic food insecurity; (5)That the rural economy has collapsed.[14]
  • There has been a torrent of journalistic accounts on the success of the Zimbabwean farmers in transplanting commercial agriculture to Nigeria. Under titles like ‘White Zimbabweans Bring Change to Nigeria’, ‘White Zimbabwean farmers highlight Nigeria's agricultural failures’ , and ‘White farmers from Zimbabwe bring prosperity to Nigeria’. The impression is created of a massive transformation based on the ingenuity of the Zimbabwean farmers and without any support from Nigerian governments. But is this really so? The terms of the [Memorandum of Understanding] MOU which the Kwara State government signed with the Zimbabwean farmers, and developments surrounding the establishment of the farms, paint a different picture. It committed the State government to the provision of a series of services crucial for the development of the commercial farms. Crucially, it committed the government to provide land. The government undertook to clear choice land of the indigenous users’ right next to the River Niger. 1289 local farmers in 28 communities were uprooted from their farms to make way for the Zimbabwean farmers. The state set aside a total of N77m (US$513,333) as compensation for the displaced local farmers. Each of the initial 13 Zimbabwean farmers received a 25-year lease of 1000 hectares. The state's instrumentalist use of compensation and 'agricultural packages' (bicycles – 720 were distributed – , fertilizers, seed etc.) and the provision of long sought after communal infrastructure like electricity and additional classrooms in local schools helped to defuse local protests. [15]
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Profits before people: The great African liquidation sale - 0 views

  • it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa’s genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them.
  • These monetarist schemes have helped to make Africa poorer and even more dependent on foreign donors and capital, and thus more vulnerable to still more of the big plans, so that now, even as Africans struggle to confront the perfect storm of the global food crisis, financial crisis and climate change – all of which are the offspring of the unfettered free-market financial system – the same big planners are at it again with more sweeping solutions (profitable ones) for the problems they themselves caused.
  • So what do the world’s great investors have their eyes on in Africa, in addition to the usual natural resources – minerals, petroleum and timber – that they’ve always coveted? In a word, land. Lots of it. The land-grabbing 'investors' are purchasing or leasing large chunks of African land to produce food crops or agrofuels or both, or just scooping up farmland as an investment,
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Biofuels as an "export crop": immoral.
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  • At the moment, the grabbing of Africa’s land is shrouded in secrecy and proceeding at an unprecedented rate, spurred on by the global food and financial crises. GRAIN, a non-profit organisation that supports farm families in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, works daily to try to keep up with the deals on its farmlandgrab.org website.[vi]
  • Apart from the African governments and chiefs who are happily and quietly selling or leasing the land right out from under their own citizens, those who are promoting the new wave of rapacious investment include the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and many other powerful nations and institutions. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation is helping to reform new land ownership laws – privatising land – in some of its member countries. The imported idea that user rights are not sufficient, that land must be privately owned, will efface traditional approaches to land use in Africa, and make the selling off of Africa even easier. GRAIN notes the complicity of African elites and says some African 'barons' are also snapping up land.
  • another big plan is buffeting Africa’s farmers. It’s the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which claims it is working in smallholder farmers’ interests by 'catalysing' a Green Revolution in Africa. Green Revolution Number Two.
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    "it was all summed up clearly for me by members of COPAGEN, a coalition of African farmer associations, scientists, civil society groups and activists who work to protect Africa's genetic heritage, farmer rights, and their sovereignty over their land, seeds and food. All these knowledgeable people have shown me that the answer is quite straightforward: many of those imported mistakes, disguised as solutions for Africa, are very, very profitable. At least for those who design and make them."
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Successful African alternatives to corporate 'green revolutions' - 0 views

  • AGRA proposes exactly the kind of agriculture the panel of agricultural experts (from South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China and more) rejected: Monoculture of one or two crops with the goal of increasing yields through the high use of fossil fuels, chemicals (fertilisers, pesticides) and biotechnology (patented genetically modified seeds).
  • As the demand for agrofuels seems to be insatiable, global corporations are noticing Africa for its extensive land masses, while not seeing the hungry. Calling Africa the ‘green OPEC’, they assert that 15 countries in Africa have a total combined land area greater than all of India ‘available’ for agrofuel production, not bothering to explain what ‘available land’ means in the context of a food deficit continent.[2]
  • the amount of plant material needed is massive. Lester Brown offers the comparison that the amount of grain required to fill the 90-litre petrol tank of a 4 × 4 vehicle once with maize ethanol could feed one person for a year. The grain it takes to fill the tank every two weeks over a year would feed 26 people.[3]
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  • Exporting crops for overseas consumption while Africans go hungry is a historical pattern all too familiar on the continent. It is certainly not the hope of 21st century African agriculture.
  • Both Namibia and South Africa are moving towards expropriation of land as a necessary means to correct this economic apartheid. Southern Africa is learning from the negative experience of land grabs in Zimbabwe, yet the commodity market approach can be similarly inequitable and destructive of livelihoods.
  • ‘Agroecology [sustainable mixed cropping] is a knowledge-intensive approach. It requires public policies supporting agricultural research and participative extension services. States and donors have a key role to play here. Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don’t open markets for chemical products or improved seeds.’[7]
  • There are about 18 recognised farming systems in Africa that can be grouped as a maize-dominated system, a cereal/root crop system, a root crop system and an agro-pastoral millet/sorghum system, all within overall mixed cropping. Part of Africa's food heritage, this genetic wealth offers important contributions towards making Africa a well-nourished continent.
  • Stories of stolen genetic treasures echo across the continent. Like traditional story tellers, when a botanist or agronomist ends his or her account of the latest theft, another joins in to give yet another account, often in voices of anguish and despair.
  • Today, the North American Tuli Association promotes the breed as follows: ‘NATA intends to expand their activities by spreading the benefits of the Tuli cattle to many countries within the Western hemisphere….the Tuli breed can provide the missing link to bridge the gap in cattle genetics, the gap being adaptation to heat and nutritional stress combined with carcass merit.’[10] Neither the government of Zimbabwe nor the foreign cattle associations consulted with the local communities or recognised their contribution in any way. NATA has even usurped the name of ‘tuli.’
  • A major discussion in the process of domesticating farmers' rights will be determining the relationship between individual rights of private property and social rights of farmers.
  • The WTO gives no recognition to social rights, only to private property rights, while the CBD, the ITPGRFA and the AU Model Legislation all recognise the rights of groups (farmers and communities) as equal to those of individuals (persons and corporations).
  • The AU model legislation also directly addresses the issue of biopiracy, such as the Tuli cattle case, by adopting the CBD principle of prior informed consent (PIC)
  • Because the wealth of the existing biodiversity is the basis for the future of agricultural Africa, it is essential that those who care about this wealth, and work toward improving its potential for use, are acknowledged.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Oil-dependency and food: Livelihoods at risk - 0 views

  • Food sovereignty, the political project put forward by the international peasant movement Via Campesina, offers a promising road map.
  • Industrial agriculture may be more ‘efficient’ in terms of labour (output per worker), but its productivity is achieved through massive applications of fossil fuel-based inputs such as tractor fuel and agrochemicals. Small organic farms, however, are generally more efficient in terms of land (output per acre), since they grow a variety of plants and animals, taking full advantage of each ecological niche.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Court ruling on GMO case: Why we intend to appeal - 0 views

  • It is the contention of FSG that modern biotechnology is a potent and novel technology that presents unique risks. This means that whatever the perceived benefits seen in advances in biotechnology, they must be developed and used with adequate safety measures for the environment and human health. This is why international conventions such as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CPB), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) regulating its safe use need to be respected, hence our application for the injunction.
  • The "confined field trials" for the Bt cowpeas and the genetically modified rice did little to respect the provisions of Advance Informed Agreement under the Protocols; that advance informed consent includes public awareness and participation in the decision-making processes leading to the intentional release of living modified organisms into the environment.
  • The other fact that we intend to contest is the interpretation of the applicability of the CPB and the CBD. Even assuming that the use and handling of internally generated GMOs has nothing to do with transboundary movements, how can a GMO that has been imported from Australia not be a transboundary issue? Is that not what we normally call import and export? Is this an internal matter?
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  • There is sharply divided opinion in the scientific community, even among molecular biologists, that genetically engineered crops are "safe". The recent email scandals showing the big influence of the biotechnology industry on the scientific community adds yet another twist to where the scientific consensus would swing without the corrupting influence of the industry. Hence the only avenue available to them to legally approve any genetically engineered crop must be to follow the Advance Informed Agreement (AIA) Procedure under the Protocol. There is no other way around it and this has not been respected.
  • One important point to keep in mind and that is rarely spoken of is that there is no science that demonstrates GMOs are safe to eat. There is only industry designed testing designed to demonstrate what industry wants us to think. GMOs were approved in the US on the basis of substantial equivalence as claimed by Monsanto here, without any independent testing. That is the model USAID is pushing.
Arabica Robusta

Resist/Submit: Biofuels, corporate agriculture and the predicted crisis of land and food - 0 views

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    "It is wrong to burn the food of the poor to drive the cars of the rich."
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