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.