While Sophie Mabhena may be embracing the South African government’s policy to implement biotechnology in farming by growing genetically modified maize, anti-GM experts caution that this does not necessarily lead to food security. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
MASOPANE, South Africa, Jan 27 2014 (IPS)

On a family farm tucked between the rolling hills of Masopane, 40 km outside of South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, 35-year-old Sophie Mabhena is dreaming big about her crop of genetically modified (GM) maize.

“This is my dream and I know that I am contributing to food security in South Africa,” she told IPS.

Debate is raging here over the government’s policy to promote the cultivation of GM crops.

This month, South Africa launched a new bio-economy strategy, which the government says will boost public access to food security, better health care, jobs and environmental protection.

The new policy promotes multi-sector partnerships and increased public awareness on the benefits of biotechnology – including the use of GM crops.

Mabhena is growing GM maize on part of her family’s 385-hectare Onverwaght Farm because she says the transgenic maize has saved her 218 dollars a season in dealing with pests and weeds.

“Growing stack maize has reduced my costs in terms of pesticides and labour, but the major benefits are the good yields and income from growing this improved variety of maize,” Mabhena said from Onverwaght Farm where, this season, she expects to harvest up to seven tonnes of maize per hectare.

In-built insect resistance (Bt) maize has been grown in South Africa for the last 15 years, but not without opposition from anti-GM activists.

The benefits of GM maize that Mabhena speaks of are not shared by Haidee Swanby, research and outreach officer at the Africa Centre for Biosafety (ACB), which has been on the forefront of spirited campaigns against GM food in South Africa.

Swanby said that GM technology fits into a concentrated farming system, which requires large volumes based on economies of scale, but does not provide livelihoods or healthy, accessible food for ordinary South Africans.

“We need to take a step back and look at our food system in its entirety and decide what system is equitable, environmentally sound and will provide nutritious food for all,” Swanby told IPS.

“The system in which genetically modified organisms [GMOs] fit can’t do that. Apart from the technological failure – for example, the development of resistant and super weeds – adopting this technology leads to the concentration of power, money, land in the hands of the very few and does not necessarily lead to food security.”

Swanby said it was deeply ironic that controversial research on GM maize by Professor Gilles Eric Seralini from France’s University of Caen was ripped apart by regulators, while approvals to allow GMOs in the South African food system have been based on what she calls “un-peer reviewed science that is very scant on detail.”

A 2012 study by Seralini and his research team linked GM maize to cancer. The study has since been dismissed for failing to meet scientific standards by the European Food Safety Authority, a body responsible for reviewing the use and authorisation of GMOs.

“Very rarely do we see information on how many animals were used, for how long, what they were fed and a full analysis of the results. Why has Monsanto’s [an agricultural company and manufacturer of GM maize] research not been submitted to the same kind of scrutiny as Seralini?”

ACB’s recent report, “Africa Bullied to Grow Defective Bt Maize: The Failure of Monsanto’s MON810 Maize in South Africa”, states that Monsanto’s Bt maize failed hopelessly in South Africa as a result of massive insect resistance only 15 years after its introduction into commercial agriculture.

“Today, 24 percent of South Africans go to bed hungry … but the biotech industry has habitually used yield as an indicator of success and this is too narrow and very misleading,” Swanby said.

The ACB argues that the safety of stacking genes is a new area of science whose long-term sustainability remained questionable and states that Bt technology was approved in South Africa before regulatory authorities had the capacity to properly regulate it.

But Dr. Nompumelelo Obokoh, chief executive officer of AfricaBio, a biotechnology association based in Pretoria, told IPS that the GMO Act was passed in 1997 and before then GM crops were regulated under the Agricultural Pests Act.

“Farmers are business people. If it is so difficult or unprofitable to grow Bt maize why is almost 90 percent of our maize based on biotechnology? Surely, if South African farmers found GM maize so difficult to manage why haven’t they rushed back to the old maize varieties of the past?” asked Obokoh.

In 2011 and 2012, 2.3 million hectares and 2.9 million hectares, respectively, of GM crops were grown in South Africa by both small-scale and commercial farmers.

“Food security is a prime right and biotechnology offers one of the many available solutions,” Obokoh said. “While South Africa is without doubt food secure as a country, we still suffer from food insecurity at household level because of high costs of food and poor incomes. This is where biotechnology is complementing and not competing against conventional farming.”

Anti-GM activist and the executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, Jeffrey Smith, told IPS via email that bundling herbicide-tolerant GM crops with herbicide use was in conflict with farming. He cited the diversion of much-needed research dollars into development of expensive GMOs and away from more appropriate technologies

“The GMO advocates have also promoted the myth that crop productivity, by itself, can eradicate hunger,” said Smith, arguing that key international reports over the last 15 years describe how economics and distribution are more fundamental to solving this problem.

However, in November the African Science Academies urged African governments to invest heavily on biotechnology, declaring that biotechnology-enhanced tools and products can help Africa break the cycle of hunger, malnutrition and underdevelopment.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

U.N. climate talks have largely stalled with the suspension of one of three negotiating tracks at a key mid-year session in Bonn, Germany.

Meanwhile, civil society organisations claim the controversial issue of “carbon farming” has been pushed back onto the agenda after African nations objected to the use of their lands to absorb carbon emissions."There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits." -- Helena Paul of EcoNexus

At the Bonn Climate Change Conference this week, Russia insisted on new procedural rules. That blocked all activity in one track of negotiations called the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation” (SBI). The SBI is a technical body that was supposed to discuss finance to help developing countries cope with climate change, as well as proposals for “loss and damage” to compensate countries for damages.

The SBI talks were suspended Wednesday.

“This development is unfortunate,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Figueres also said the two-week Bonn conference, which ends Friday, had made considerable progress in the two other tracks. A complex new global climate treaty is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2015 with the goal of keeping global warming to less than two degrees C.

“Governments need to look up from their legal and procedural tricks and focus on the planetary emergency that is hitting Africa first and hardest,” said Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), an African-wide climate movement with over 300 organisations in 45 countries.

And where there is “progress” at the climate talks it is in the wrong direction, according to civil society.

“We’ve seen many governments in Bonn call for a review of the current failed carbon markets to see what went wrong, why they haven’t actually reduced emissions and why they haven’t raised finance on a significant scale,” said Kate Dooley, a consultant on market mechanisms to the Third World Network.

“If we don’t learn these lessons we’ll be doomed to repeat these environmentally and financially risky schemes, at the cost of real action to reduce emissions,” Dooley said in a statement.

In Bonn, two key African negotiators appear to be pushing the World Bank agenda rather than their national interests, civil society organisations claim. Those negotiators are also working for organisations receiving World Bank funding.

One appears to want African nations’ mitigation actions to be based on agriculture, they said.

The World Bank and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and other organisations favour what they call “climate smart” agriculture. This is defined as forms of farming that are sustainable, increase productivity and with a focus on soaking up carbon from the atmosphere.

African environment ministers from 54 nations recently stated they were not obligated to use their lands to mitigate carbon emissions since Africa is not responsible for climate change. They also instructed African negotiators at the Bonn climate talks to focus on helping African agriculture adapt to a changing climate.

“Are these people serving two masters?” asked Mariam Mayet of the Africa Centre for Biosafety, which works to protect farmers’ rights and biodiversity across the continent.

“What is the World Bank’s level of influence over these individuals, and is there a risk that this is impacting on their actions and the outcome here?” Mayet told IPS.

In December 2011, more than 100 African and international civil society organisations sent a joint letter to African ministers asking for “no soil carbon markets in Africa”.

Globally, agriculture is a major source of global warming gases like carbon and methane – directly accounting for 15 percent to 30 percent of global emissions. Changes in agricultural practices such as reducing or eliminating plowing and fertiliser use can greatly reduce emissions.

Agriculture can also be used to absorb or trap carbon in the soil. When a plant grows, it takes CO2 out the atmosphere and releases oxygen. The more of a crop – maize, soy or vegetable – that remains after harvest, the more carbon is returned to the soil.

Civil society organisations warn that if agriculture becomes part of a carbon market, it will spur more land grabbing in Africa, with woodlands being used mainly for carbon sequestration instead of food production.

“There is a profound danger to agriculture here, with real potential for more land grabbing and expansion of monocultures in order to harvest credits,” Helena Paul of EcoNexus, an environmental NGO, previously told IPS.

Soils are extraordinarily variable and different climatic regimes affect how they function, said Ólafur Arnalds, a soil scientist at the Agricultural University of Iceland. While soils are a key part of the planet’s carbon cycle, we don’t know enough about soil carbon, Arnalds told IPS at a recent Soil Carbon Sequestration conference in Iceland.

That complexity does not suit carbon markets well and drives up costs of accounting and verification. However, Arnalds does believe that soils and agriculture have an important role in climate change and farmers should be compensated for their efforts.