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Arabica Robusta

IPS - Food Security and the Failure of Mechanisation in DRC | Inter Press Service - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...ailure-of-mechanisation-in-drc

food security international agriculture development crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels drc

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Mechanisation was expected to transform agriculture in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s central province of East Kasaï. But a project to offer tractors for ploughing land has fallen flat. Meanwhile, many households don’t have enough to eat because agricultural production in this mineral-rich province is too low.
  • He said that would encourage smallholders to progressively abandon the hoe, because they would all like to cultivate larger plots and produce more.
  • Back in 2007, the provincial governor proclaimed agriculture the “priority of priorities”. The announcement was greeted warmly by farmers, who saw this as a new beginning for the agriculture and livestock sectors, which had declined steadily for three decades, following the liberalisation of artisanal diamond mining in 1982.
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  • “They charged me 35 dollars per hectare to rent a tractor, besides the charge for the tractor operator and his assistant. I also had to pay for 40 litres of diesel at 2.50 dollars per litre. It was too expensive for me,” Mudila told IPS. “We are in a diamond-rich province where people have lost sight of how agriculture works,” said Tshibanza. “It makes no sense to want to have access to the tractor service for free. The tractors have to be maintained and their parts replaced.”
Arabica Robusta

May 6 2008 - Agrofuels on Stolen Lands Continue to Threaten Colombian Rainforests and C... - 0 views

www.rainforestportal.com/...send.asp

activism advocacy agribusiness agrofuels biofuels colombia crisis food palmoil security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 May 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 07 May 08
     
    If agrofuels -- growing food for fuel -- continue to expand in Colombia, food prices are bound to rise and the nation's food security erode as is happening around the world. Decisive government action is needed to guarantee the lives and the safety of community members and to ensure reparation for environmental destruction and the human rights abuses. The exiled community leader Ligia Maria Cheverra has summed up the situation: "Our territory is being given to the palm oil producers. We need to stop every monoculture and the projects that are targeting our Colombia. This will affect the whole continent. Everything will be lost: the land, the water, the air, the animals, the people. What belongs to us is being destroyed. In Colombia those who speak out with a loud voice are being killed. Here only the ones who sell themselves are rewarded, and those who don't are called guerrilleros."
Arabica Robusta

The European Civil Society Round-Up: Food security as key: New biofuels report - 0 views

wdev-newsblog.blogspot.com/...urity-as-key-new-biofuels.html

biofuels development food foodsecurity international security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08
     
    a new study released by the Common Fund for Commodities at an international forum on biofuels held recently in Kuala Lumpur. "Fundamentally, there is a link between poverty reduction and biofuels sector development that can be promoted," said Ambassador Ali Mchumo, the managing director of the Common Fund in Amsterdam.
Arabica Robusta

Remarks to the World Food Prize Panel on "Stakeholders & synergies: Socio-economic dime... - 0 views

www.iatp.org/...ergies-socio-economic-dimensio

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels chappell

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Unfortunately, the power of these tools has been blunted. It has been blunted because science—which at its most basic is the careful and systematic study of the world around us, and the consistent testing of our ideas against reality—this wonderful and powerful process has been narrowed too often in discussions of food to mean technology. Technology is but one way to use science; it is only the tip of one particular tool that can be found in the powerful toolbox that is science.
  • Scientifically, these are two different things. We know that what is produced is not the same as how much actually goes to become food for people[1], but too often we forget this. Luckily, this is a place where the toolbox of science can help us, but only if we open it wider to use all of the tools—including social sciences like sociology, anthropology, ecological economics and political ecology.[2]
  • in India, as in many other places, this is tied to the legacies of monoculture, cash crops, and a lack of support for smallholder farmers, household equality, especially gender equality, and agrobiodiversity.[6]
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  • We’ve consistently seen that smallholder farmers very often produce more per unit area than larger farmers. Indeed, the observation is so common that it has been formally named the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity.
  • I think the same type of skepticism has quite often accompanied new innovations and new ideas. Skepticism, for example, about the usefulness of biotechnology, should not and has not stopped investigation of how it might be used.
  • We have to be brave enough to ask ourselves, especially about this Inverse Relationship and its implications, whether we may need to move away from large farms and invest more heavily in small farms.[7] We have to ask ourselves if our skepticism may reflect certain biases or a reluctance to engage against the current trends of agricultural consolidation—or whether it reflects the empirical reality, where this relationship is seen, again and again[8].
  • Too often, the diverse crops that smallholders rely on for stability, resilience, and nutritional diversity are defined as “women’s crops.” Traditional crops, and the fact that often they cannot easily be made into large-scale monocultures, can be both a strength and a weakness.
  • Well, estimates put the value of unmarketed ecosystem services at three times the size of the nominal world economic size.
  • And those farmers, especially larger-scale farmers, who make the rational decision to focus on producing only what they’re paid for—just making one crop, and a lot of it—are simply following a rational response in narrowing diversity, separating crops and livestock, and using energy-intensive and unsustainable levels of inputs.
  • We need to keep realizing that science does not simply mean production, and that production does not at all mean food security.
  • So if I am to conclude with one message, it is for us to remember that science is a powerful set of tools, but to use it we must learn about how to use all of its tools. Social, natural and technological—and we must expressly and purposefully use them to support small farmers, especially women farmers, and must never let “social” approaches be the second step in our conversations about feeding the world, but always—in line with the science—be at the forefront of our considerations.
Arabica Robusta

Public Aid, Philanthropy, and the Privatization of African Agricultural Development | F... - 0 views

www.foodfirst.org/2905

food security international development agriculture foodsecurity gates bio-technology

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The revived dream of an African Green Revolution in the new millennium, however, is actually a much larger project to make Africa safe for capital.
  • It is difficult to disentangle the web of alliances between the Gates Foundation, USAID, and various U.S., African and pseudo-African biotech research institutions-but the motives are crystal clear. USAID is currently headed by Rajiv Shah, former director of agricultural development programs at the Gates Foundation. It has become one of the main agencies promoting the expansion of biotech crops in Africa. The push for GM crops received a boost from the Global Food Security Act (AKA the Lugar-Casey Bill) based on a suspiciously appropriate Gates Foundation report entitled "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty." The Lugar Casey bill would restructure aid funding to include over $7 billion for GM crops, giving Aid-dependent poor countries few options for formulating "home-grown" agricultural solutions.
  • The Gates Foundation recently donated US$ 270 million to CGIAR. According to Prabhu Pingali, head of agriculture policy and statistics at CGIAR, the plan is to double the organization's funding to $1 billion over the next four years. The Gates Foundation seems to have acquiesced to the reality that Africa is a complicated continent with myriad social networks, and that CGIAR's planned new consortium of research centers and it's decades of "Green Revolution" experience, might help him ramp up his own vision of a ‘modernized' and ‘marketized' African agriculture.
Arabica Robusta

AfricaFiles | Responsibly destroying the world's peasantry? - 0 views

www.africafiles.org/article.asp

food security international development crisis agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity trading carbon environment offset

shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Jun 10 - Cached
  • It has been several years since private investors and states began buying and leasing millions of hectares of farmland worldwide in order to secure their domestic supply of food, raw commodities, and biofuels, or to get subsidies for carbon storage through plantations.
  • All too often, notions such as "reserve agricultural land," or "idle land," are manipulated out of existence, sometimes being used to designate land on which many livelihoods depend, and that is subject to long-standing customary rights. The requirement that evictions take place only for a valid "public purpose," with fair compensation, and following consultation of those affected, is honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
  • what is required is to insist that governments comply fully with their human rights obligations, including the right to food, the right of all peoples to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources, and the right not to be deprived of the means of subsistence.
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  • Because the principles ignore human rights, they neglect the essential dimension of accountability. There is also a clear tension between ceding land to investors for the creation of large plantations, and the objective of redistributing land and ensuring more equitable access to it.
  • It should come as no wonder that smallholders and agricultural labourers represent a combined 70% of those who are unable to feed themselves today.
  • Smallholders, by contrast, produce at a higher cost. They are often very productive by hectare, since they maximize the use of the soil, and achieve the best complementary use of plants and animals. But the form of agriculture that they practice, which relies less on external inputs and mechanization, is highly labour-intensive. If smallholders compete in the same markets as the large farms, they lose. Yet they render invaluable services, in terms of preservation of agro- and biodiversity, local communities' resilience to price shocks or weather-related events, and environmental conservation. The arrival of large-scale investment in agriculture will alter the relationship between these worlds of farming. It will exacerbate highly unequal competition. And it could cause massive social disruptions in the world's rural areas.
Arabica Robusta

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

pambazuka.org/...66292

food security international crisis development agriculture agribusiness foodsecurity pambazuka agrofuels agroecology sovereignty biofuels

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 Jul 10 - Cached
  • 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

"The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq" by Richard Manning (Harper's Ma... - 0 views

www.harpers.org/...0079915

agriculture energy food foodsecurity industry manning petroleum security

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 08 - Cached
  • “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”
  • As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.
Arabica Robusta

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

www.pambazuka.org/...60526

food security international crisis development pambazuka foodsecurity agribusiness biofuels agriculture mozambique

shared by Arabica Robusta on 27 Nov 09 - Cached
  • 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

From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements | Books | AlterNet - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...challenge_of_social_movements_

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity agroecology

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • efforts to bring agrarian advocacy to farmer-to-farmer networks have run up against the historical distrust between development NGOs implementing sustain- able agriculture projects and the peasant organizations that make up the new agrarian movements. Aside from having assumed many of the tasks previously expected of the state, NGOs have become an institutional means to advance social and political agendas within the disputed political terrain of civil society.
  • Though the MST initially promoted industrial agriculture among its members, this strategy proved unsustainable and economically disastrous on many of its settlements. In 1990 the movement reached out to other peasant movements practicing agroecology, and at its fourth national congress in 2000, the MST adopted agroecology as national policy to orient production on its settlements.
  • Like its predecessor, the new Green Revolution is essentially a campaign designed to mobilize resources for the expansion of capitalist agriculture.
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  • The alternative, smallholder-driven agroecological agriculture, was recognized by the IAASTD as the best strategy for rebuilding agriculture, ending rural poverty and hunger, and establishing food security in the Global South. To be given a chance, however, this strategy requires a combination of strong political will and extensive on-the-ground agroecological practice to overcome opposition from the well-financed Green Revolution.
Arabica Robusta

World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme 'complicit' in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Naf... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...land-carbon-grab-sengwer-kenya

food security international development agriculture crisis agribusiness foodsecurity biofuels monsanto coercive conservation

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government's Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.
  • Under the REDD scheme companies in the developed world purchase carbon credits to invest in reducing emissions from forested lands. Those credits turn up on the companies' balance sheets as carbon reductions. In practice, however, REDD schemes largely allow those companies to accelerate pollution while purchasing land and resources in the developing world at bargain prices.
  • A letter to the Bank in March by No REDD in Africa network (Nran) – a group of African civil society organisations - signed by over 60 international NGOs accused the Bank with the above words of "both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide."
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  • ony La Viña, Dean of the Ateneo School of Government and chair of the intergovernmental REDD negotiations at the climate conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, said: "The carbon markets, when up and running, need to support the forest stewardship of the people who live there, and not provide national governments with yet another tool to dispossess their citizens from the natural resources they have cared for and depended on for generations." According to the No REDD in Africa network, it is precisely because indigenous people and their rights are not factored into REDD principles that their implementation could lead to outright genocide.
Arabica Robusta

IPS - Filling the Granaries in Burkina Faso | Inter Press Service - 1 views

www.ipsnews.net/...-the-granaries-in-burkina-faso

development international news governance bank world burkina faso maize

shared by Arabica Robusta on 30 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • New, high-yielding varieties of the staple crop have been developed at the country’s Institute for the Environment and Agricultural Research (INERA) as part of a drive to improve food security in this landlocked West African country.
  • Both Kabré and Kaboré were introduced to Bondofa when they became members of Burkina Faso’s National Union of Seed Producers (UNPSB) two years ago. The UNPSB was established in 2006, and coordinates production and marketing activities as well as acting as an interface between its 4,000 members and the government.
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