Africa: Successful Alternatives to Corporate ‘Green Revolutions’

Carol Thompson And Andrew Mushita

24 March 2011

analysis

In the face of the Rockefeller and Gates foundations-funded AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) lobby ‘to extend outdated 20th century industrial agriculture’ to the continent, Carol Thompson and Andrew Mushita look at alternative African approaches for improving agriculture that focus instead on farmers’ rights and build upon local knowledge.

‘How can a green revolution be achieved in Africa?’ After more than a year of study, the expert panel, commissioned by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, replied as follows: ‘no single technological bullet is available for radically improving African agriculture.’ African agriculture will require numerous ‘rainbow evolutions’ across the diverse African farming systems, ‘rather than a single Green Revolution.'[1]

By 2007, however, Annan agreed to be executive director of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. 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). AGRA finances agricultural research and lobbies across the globe (e.g., January in Davos) to extend outdated 20th century industrial agriculture to the African continent.

Current crises in global agriculture affect the African continent the most, from agrofuels replacing food to market failures and privatisation of living organisms. Because of their place in the international division of labour (including South Africa) as primary commodity exporters, with little or no value-added processing, African economies remain vulnerable to the vagaries of both weather and markets.

Given these dire situations, how could Africa possibly offer alternatives to the dominant industrial agriculture of ‘green revolutions’? After briefly summarising the various threats of the global agricultural crises to African food security, this article analyses African alternatives, focusing on their approach to farmers’ rights and an initiative to award and disseminate African innovations.

AGROFUELS

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]

Europe and the USA have set ‘green’ targets for agrofuel consumption that they cannot fulfill using their own land. The agrofuel ‘craze’ therefore very much depends on global corporations’ taking command of land in South countries in order to grow agrofuel crops.

To further the problem, 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 Ã- 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]

The extent of African land coveted by investors, therefore, expands to tens millions of hectares, involving 20 countries.[4] No matter how the land is allocated – from leasing to contract farming – its use will be overwhelmingly for foreign consumption. Such major tracts of land designated to meet foreigners’ energy or food needs signals, once again, the expatriation of African lands.

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.

MARKET FAILURES IN AGRICULTURE

The dominance of the ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ market approach to land redistribution dates only from the 1980s. The serious problem of treating land simply as a commodity is best illustrated by the case of Namibia. At independence in 1990, only 4,000 white farmers owned about 50 per cent of all arable land. Abiding by the ‘willing seller-willing buyer’ principle, the rate of land transfers over the first 20 years indicates it will take 100 years to acquire just 25 per cent of the commercial land. And this market approach offers no land use plan nor agrarian reform policy.

By 2002, the Namibian government concluded that the market failed to address land inequities, poverty reduction or environmental conservation. 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.

Studies from Southern Africa offer data about the additional failure of markets to provide farm inputs and services for smallholder farmers. As one report from Malawi summarises, ‘Ten years on, it is evident that the expected benefits of the liberalization of both input and outputs markets has failed to penetrate the remote rural markets.'[5] In spite of the World Bank,[6] the history of market failure in agriculture is now reviving African government regulation.

Agreeing with this African reversal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, this month gave the decisive conclusion:

‘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]

BIOPIRACY OF AFRICAN BIODIVERSITY WEALTH

The agroecology of Africa is characterised by complex agricultural systems mainly dominated by smallholder farmers who grow a range of diverse crops in a single field. 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.

The unspoken but central goal of AGRA is to attain access to African genetic wealth by requisitioning the expertise of African scientists and tapping indigenous knowledge in order to select a few varieties from thousands available. From this African knowledge and wealth, the global corporations will develop new plant varieties. However, these plant materials, instead of being freely shared, will be patented. Such privatisation of genetic material, without recognition of all those who bred the species for centuries, is biopiracy.

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. Here we offer a few details of just one current case from Southern Africa.[8]

The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO) warns that the world’s livestock production has become increasingly based on a limited number of breeds. Since 2001, an average of one breed per month has become extinct.[9] Searching for a broader genetic base by which to save a livestock industry therefore becomes an impetus for biopiracy. Accessing the gene pool of other animals with favourable characteristics is more crucial than respecting indigenous knowledge or thousands of years of breeding. In addition, if the new breed becomes marketable, the profits are not shared.

Evolving 7,000 years ago from the wild ox, the humpless African cattle differ greatly from those brought to the continent from Asia about 3,000 years ago. Tolerating tropical diseases and surviving on much less water than other breeds, Tuli cattle thrive on low-nutrient grasses; their name derives from the Ndebele word utuli, meaning dust. Custodians of the breed, the communities developed local knowledge and technologies for improving the cattle within the prevailing environmental conditions and social needs (for food and draught power).

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