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Fighting for Africa's Food Security
When I was a child growing up in Zimbabwe, my grandmother used to go to the same one-acre plot of land each day and work long and exhausting hours.
When I asked her why she put herself through this, she replied: "This is how I wake up every day, this is how I survive."
I am now in my twenties and my grandmother is still out there on her plot each day.
She continues to till her field with a hand hoe, using seed saved from previous harvests, and applying a teaspoonful of fertiliser per maize plant. Her working hours and type of inputs have remained the same over the years; however, the yields have been declining drastically.
Concerns of a generation
This week, the One Young World conference is being held in London.
Young people from around the world have met to discuss the biggest challenges facing the planet, with the guidance of eminent figures such as Kofi Annan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and Alejandro Toledo, the former president of Peru.
There are 700 of us who have gathered from 192 different countries, all with different beliefs, interests and goals. But we are united by a common passion to voice the concerns of our generation.
Political instability, global poverty and health, the financial crisis, religious conflicts and climate change are all issues that affect us and require long-term solutions to address substantially.
This conference offers my generation a chance to seek solutions to questions which elders such as my grandmother might not even realise are facing the world.
Like my grandmother, two-thirds of Africans rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, and 80 per cent of these are women.
This is why I am so concerned with African agriculture and its role in driving broader economic development throughout the continent.
Food security
For the past generation, agriculture has been neglected both by African leaders and by the international community as a development tool. It is only recently that global leaders, such as the G8 and the UN, have again begun to prioritise agriculture in the broader political agenda.
Yet today, in 2010, the effects of climate change are exacerbating an already vulnerable food supply in Africa, leaving farmers less capable of providing for themselves, let alone their communities.
African farmers need to be able to access the knowledge and tools with which to grow a food-secure future for Africa.
This would include, for example, the most effective and cost-efficient fertilisers and seeds, and improved access to markets.
In my work at the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), one of my responsibilities is to help smallholder farmers adapt and create climate-resilient farming methods. Such knowledge exists but often fails to reach Africa's vast rural populations.
Agricultural policies must also reflect the needs of those who will be most impacted: namely, farmers.
A FANRPAN project called Women Accessing Re-aligned Markets (WARM), addresses this problem by getting female farmers more involved in shaping agricultural policies, both at the local and national levels.
Funded by the Gates Foundation, the project aims to link farmers to policymakers in an effort to ensure that policies reflect the realities of farmers' daily lives.
Challenges of the future
While many young people do not seem to care about agriculture, they should acknowledge the fundamental role it plays in our lives.
Not only does it feed the cities, but it also feeds factories with the raw ingredients needed to continue building an economy.
One Young World will give me a chance to promote the importance of agriculture among my peers, and to help them understand its role in creating a food-secure, economically-stable Africa in the future.
Young people have the advantage of having grown up in a globally connected world, within which we communicate more quickly and broadly than perhaps any other generation before us.
Whilst young people may not yet have the power to drive policies, we will be the ones who must accept the big challenges of the future which are as yet unresolved: from population growth to climate change to market reform and the end of poverty.
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5 Comments so far
Show AllAre you joking? You work for Gates and don't realize he is involved with Monsanto and they are working as fast as they can to take control of food in Africa through (you didn't say it but) GMOs seeds.
This is pure Monsanto speak:
"the most effective and cost-efficient fertilisers and seeds, and improved access to markets.
... help smallholder farmers adapt and create climate-resilient farming methods."
Your grandmother's seeds are free. Can't get more cost effective than that. She doesn't need to buy fertilizer. Can't get more cost effective than that. Climate-resilient? Her seeds are adapted to the region and with enough biodiversity, she'll do fine because many seeds can handle droughts.
Whereas GMO seeds are not climate-ready or climate-resilient at all. Nothing done to seeds are anywhere near as complex as they'd need to be to do that, and they take normal "climate-resilient" seeds, make a Bt-change or a Round-up Ready change and claim intellectual property rights over it.
I notice you don't use the word "GMOs" or "genetically engineered" at all. One would hardly know that is what you are talking about but that's what this is about.
Do you really want to take free seed from your grandmother, make her have to pay many times more for "special seed" that is actually worse, and then be dependent on pesticides that will destroy her land?
What is going on that someone your age is so deep into corporate junk like this and pushing something on Africa that will destroy its biodiversity and turn all control of its food over to those multinationals that hold the patents? You are pushing a corporate agenda before your life has even begun and it destroys all your grandmother has accomplished and owned.
You might want to read the Thika Declaration by farmers in Africa.
http://www.grain.org/h/?id=93
“It is not that farmers are against new technologies, so long as these technologies will not force and destroy our indigenous seed varieties, will not change our native farming systems knowledge and will not render us helpless and at the mercy of the Trans National Companies to monopolize even on what we eat.”
-Mr Moses Shaha, Chairman of the Kenya Small Scale Farmers Forum (Kenya Times, 25 August 2004)
The Thika Declaration on GMOs
Statement from the Kenya Small Scale Farmers Forum 20 August, 2004
We, the Kenya Small Scale Farmers Forum leaders, representing crop farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk, do declare today, August 20th 2004, that farming is our livelihood and not just a trade. Farming has been passed down from generation to generation, and is now threatened by Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).
GMOs are a danger to food security and our indigenous gene pool. Patented GMO crops threaten farmers’ ability to save and share their indigenous seeds which have stood the test of time. Thus they will reduce our seed security and food security, without the long and short term effects on our health and environment being known. GMOs will hand control of our food systems to the multinational companies, who have created these seeds for financial gain, and not for our need.
These new seeds may create conflict between farmers due to the risks of cross pollination from GMO to non GMO crops leading to contamination between farms.
GMOs will increase costs for farmers. This new kind of agriculture has been produced using a complicated and expensive process called genetic engineering. To make their profits back from the farmers, the companies patent the GMO seeds, which leads to higher costs for farmers, who are then forbidden from saving and sharing their seeds for planting the following season. If the seeds fail, farmers are left in great destitution. The agrochemicals associated with GM crops will oblige farmers to pay the high prices set by the companies, and replace the need for paid farm labour, thereby threatening our livelihoods.
GMOs threaten Kenya’s environment. A clean environment is a fundamental right for all. GMOs on the contrary are contaminative, unfriendly to our biodiversity, and pose a threat to the existence of our indigenous seeds, to organic farming systems, and to human and animal health in general.
Our government is being arm-twisted to accept GMOs by multinationals, without considering the effects on small scale farmers.
Small scale farmers in Kenya should be included in policy formulation on agriculture research and food security. Government should invest in irrigation, improvement of infrastructure, appropriate technologies, marketing, subsidies, credit, farm inputs and better rangeland management, and NOT ON GMOs.
We believe that God created life, and no one can own it, not even Monsanto, Syngenta or other multinational companies. We therefore reject all GMOs in agriculture, and call upon the Kenyan government to respect our indigenous expertise. Therefore to be able to fully understand the effects of GMOs on our livelihoods, health and environment, we demand a twenty-year moratorium on GMOs in Kenya.
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The Gates Foundation has been exposed for some time as predatory. Join those trying to save Africa from GMOs and the organ damage they cause, and from the patents that will turn farmers there to indentured servants, putting them into the same debt that has led to the suicides of more than 200,000 Indian farmers.
Have some decency, sir. Have some respect for the wisdom of your grandmother.
Exceedingly well said! Thanks for taking the time to care and to say what needed to be said about this.
Well Mr. Ndema, it looks like no one else has anything to say about what you wrote. This is a big part of the problem- people in the u.s. don't know much about Africa, or care about it either. i'm not saying you need s to"help" you. I'm sure you know what u.s. "help" looks like, and where the money goes.
although it may be difficult to see, your grandmother is the future of food security in Africa. Small farmers, using their own seeds and traditional farming methods, can feed the continent. u.s. agrabusinesses like monsanto would starve you to feed their corporate investors.
please tell your grandmother what I said. she might like it.
Along the lines of Moore's comment above, see also the admirable 2007 Nyeleni Declaration in Mali. More than 500 farmers, fisherfolk, herders, scientists, activists from over 80 countries gathering to cultivate food sovereignty, which they argue is the foundation for food security.
"Most of us are food producers and are ready, able and willing to feed all the world’s peoples. Our heritage as food producers is critical to the future of humanity. This is specially so in the case of women and indigenous peoples who are historical creators of knowledge about food and agriculture and are devalued. But this heritage and our capacities to produce healthy, good and abundant food are being threatened and undermined by neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Food sovereignty gives us the hope and power to preserve, recover and build on our food producing knowledge and capacity."
http://www.nyeleni.org/?lang=en&lang_fixe=ok
Farmers from Wisconsin USA, from Family Farm Defenders, attended the Nyeleni conference. I hear they're winning the Food Sovereignty prize this year. They're members of the National Family Farm Coalition, the lead voice for the world's farmers in the US in many respects, for La Via Campesina (last years winner) for example.
African farmers often don't understand the US farm bill and its impact on them. As we often dominate world export markets, we set world prices. Our policy has been the opposite of OPEC in oil. Instead of high prices we've sought to export grains and cotton below our own costs, to subsidize processors.
NFFC is the lead coalition fighting against this, against export dumping (below cost). NFFC's policies are along these lines parallel those of the Africa Group at WTO. Both call for price floors and supply management (ie. instead of subsidies). IATP does good work on this and features Africa Group materials, and described them in: http://www dot iatp.org/tradeobservatory/genevaupdate.cfm?messageID=120055 (also in pdf). More links at my zspace page.