GATES HUNGER PLAN IN AFRICA IS WRONG APPROACH

By Peter Rosset and - - Reprint | | Print |

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BERKELEY, Oct 1 2006 (IPS) - The Gates-Rockefeller initiative to bring a \’new\’ Green Revolution to Africa ignores the lessons of the failures of the first Green Revolution, which caused worse hunger and environmental degradation, writes Peter Rosset, author of World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Food is Different, and A New Green Revolution for Africa? (forthcoming), and Visiting Scholar in Environmental Science, Policy & Management at the University of California at Berkeley. In this article, Rosset writes that free-trade agreements have made it easier for private traders to import subsidised food from the US and the EU than to negotiate with local farmers, driving local farm prices below the cost of production and farmers into urban slums in search of low wage jobs. African farmers could easily produce far more food than they do at present but don\’t because they cannot get credit to cover production costs, obtain fair prices that would give them a minimum profit margin, or find buyers. Under such circumstances, what difference could a new \’\’technology package\’\’ make? They still could neither afford the inputs, sell what they grow, nor make a living as farmers. Not to mention the severe environmental and human health risks of genetic engineering technology.

The most recent philanthropic effort to attack hunger in Africa is sadly misguided and may actually worsen the problem. The announcement that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will team up with the Rockefeller Foundation to bring a ‘new’ Green Revolution to Africa ignores the lessons of the failures of the first Green Revolution, in which the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations supported the export of industrial-style agriculture — based on chemicals and ‘high response’ seeds — to the Third World.

Paradoxically the outcome was greater production of a few food crops accompanied by even worse hunger and environmental degradation. Pesticides and chemical fertilisers eventually undercut the capacity of the land, leading to declining productivity, while the high cost of these purchased inputs deepened the divide between rich and poor farmers, swelling the ranks of the poor and hungry.

The Gates’ apparent naivete about the causes of hunger have led them to make private investments in genetically-engineered seeds and to launch this 150-million-dollar altruistic offensive to promote technology packages that use irrigation, fertiliser, and — not surprisingly, given their investments — new seeds. This is despite both the historical lessons and the current realities of contemporary rural Africa, which will likely reduce the results to higher profits for the agricultural seed and fertiliser industry, negligible impacts on total food production, and worsening exclusion and marginalisation in the countryside. The Gates would do better to support the efforts of the global family farmer and peasant alliance, La Via Campesina (www.viacampesina.org), to address the true causes of hunger in Africa and elsewhere in the world by promoting ”Food Sovereignty”.

Rural Africa has been devastated by 25 years of free-trade and anti-peasant policies imposed on the continent’s governments by the World Bank, IMF, WTO, United States, and European Union. The forced privatisation of food crop marketing boards — which though flawed, once guaranteed African farmers minimum prices and held food reserves for emergencies — and rural development banks –which gave farmers credit to produce food– have left farmers without either financing to grow food or buyers for their produce. Free trade agreements have made it easier for private traders –the only buyers and sellers of food who are left now that the marketing boards are largely gone– to import subsidised food from the US and the EU than to negotiate with thousands of local farmers, driving local farm prices below the cost of production. Faced with this negative situation, peasant families across the continent have abandoned agriculture in search of low wage jobs in urban slums and in the international migrant stream.

Understanding this reality is critical to addressing hunger in Africa. First, rising hunger is largely due to the increased impoverishment of the very rural people who once grew food. Second, African farmers could easily produce far more food than they do at present but don’t because they cannot get credit to cover production costs, obtain fair prices that would give them a minimum profit margin, or find buyers. Under such circumstances, what difference could a new ”technology package” make? They still could neither afford the inputs, sell what they grow, nor make a living as farmers. Not to mention the severe environmental and human health risks of genetic engineering technology.

In contrast, the Via Campesina will hold a world conference on Food Sovereignty in Mali in February 2007. Civil society delegates from across Africa and around the world, and selected government representatives, will debate the changes that are needed to truly reverse the policy-driven collapse of peasant agriculture in Africa and other continents. These policies, including a step-back from free-trade extremism and market fundamentalism, plus increased supports for family farmers, improved access to farmland for the poor, and ecological farming methods, are together called Food Sovereignty.

Without such changes, no farming technology whether chemical, genetically-engineered, organic, or ecological, can truly address hunger. In contrast to the Gates/Rockefeller guaranteed-to-fail approach, creating such a favorable policy environment for family agriculture would make it possible for the hungry to feed themselves using sustainable, ecologically-sound farming methods.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)