Rosa Guzmán harvests tomatoes on her family farm in San Pedro, in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago, the Chilean capital, where she is unable to extend her crops due to lack of funds, which prevents her from drilling deeper wells to obtain water and combat the drought. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
QUILLOTA, Chile , Apr 30 2024 (IPS)

Lack of water threatens the very existence of family farming in Chile, forcing farmers to adopt new techniques or to leave their land.

The shortage is caused by a 15-year drought and exacerbated by the unequal distribution arising from the Water Code decreed in 1981 by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which turned water into a tradable commodity and gave its owners rights in perpetuity.

In addition, there are problems such as the accumulation of water rights in the hands of large agro-export companies and real estate speculation with the land of small farmers who are forced to sell.

“We have no water for human consumption,” Julieta Cortés, 52, president of the Rural Women’s Association of the municipality of Canela, told IPS. “In Canela, more than 80 percent of the population depends on the water truck that delivers 50 liters of water per person per day. It’s hard to get by with that amount.”

Located in the Coquimbo region, 400 kilometers north of Santiago, Canela, with a population of just over 11,000, was known for its goat herds, now reduced by half. Local farmers also used to grow wheat and barley. Today, the fruit trees are drying up and the livestock are dying of thirst.

In contrast, the extensive plantations of avocados for export are irrigated and green on the slopes of the dry valleys.

Chile’s agro-exports are one of its major sources of income, together with mining. In 2023, the agro-export sector accounted for 3.54 percent of GDP, or 10.09 billion dollars.

Water problems are concentrated in isolated rural areas that lack technical, economic, and infrastructure capacities.

“Family and small farmers do not have access to water rights controlled by those who have money and can buy and transfer them,” Cortés said in a telephone interview.

“The lower part of the Choapa River flows through my municipality and none of us who live here have access to the water that is used upstream in the Los Pelambres mine and the large agro-industries along the way,” she said.

Hills stand out for their greenery in Quillota, north of Santiago, Chile, with avocado plantations that reach to the top, covering many hectares. They are able to avoid water shortages thanks to water use rights held by large agro-exporters, which allow them to evade the effects of the drought and send their abundant production abroad. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The Issue Is Not Lack of Water, but Inequality

In the publication Guardianas del Agua (Guardians of the Water), published by the German Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation, Macarena Salinas and Isaura Becker reported that 47.2 percent of the rural Chilean population had no formal drinking water supply or irrigation.

In this South American country, some 950 communities are not part of the Rural Drinking Water Program (RWP) and obtain water from informal sources such as wells, springs and water trucks. “We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority has always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water.” -- Evelyn Vicioso

The publication reported that between 2016 and 2021, the State invested 150 million dollars to use water trucks to supply the areas suffering from scarcity.

“While the RWP committees and cooperatives need drinking water and are supplied through emergency measures, there are individuals and companies that have surplus water and can profit from the sale of water using tanker trucks,” write Salinas and Becker.

Therefore, they point out, “rather than a lack of water, there is an unequal distribution of the resource.”

The drought in Canela has been repeated in other areas of this long, narrow country of 19.5 million people living between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The shortage of rainfall has lasted for 15 years, with a brief respite in 2023. It is unclear what will happen in 2024.

In Canela, farmers survive by using recycled water from washing machines and bathrooms, water harvested from rooftops or with fog catchers, systems used to capture or trap microscopic water droplets from mist, which are widely used in Chile.

“We have been reinventing ourselves. We have even rescued water from the dew. Many of us have adopted new techniques; others have moved away,” Cortés said from her community, Carquindaña.

Rosa Guzmán, 57, and her three brothers own a 40-hectare property in San Pedro, a community of some 5,000 inhabitants in the municipality of Quillota, 126 kilometers north of Santiago in the Valparaíso region.

They only grow four hectares of vegetables and 2.5 hectares of avocados because they do not have the money to expand their crops.

“Sometimes we run out of water for the house because the wells are 10 meters deep. They are filled from two canals that rarely have water,” she said during a tour of the family’s farm with IPS.

Guzmán is director of the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (Anamuri) and president of her community’s environmental organization, San Pedro Digno.

Anamuri is an organization founded in 1998, composed solely of women, which organizes and promotes development among rural and indigenous women in this country. It also builds relationships of equality, regardless of gender, class, and ethnicity, on the basis of respect between people and nature.

“I used to collect medicinal herbs on the banks of the canal, but now there are none. The natural springs have dried up. This is a serious problem, and there are people who have no water to drink, which is a grave issue,” she said.

According to the rural activist, the State has abandoned small-scale agriculture.

“It would be very different if the State were to put more of a priority on small-scale agriculture and give us soft credits or subsidies. It has to pay attention to what is happening because, at this rate, it pains me to say it, family farming could disappear in Chile,” she said.

Water stored in a small reservoir allows the Guzmán siblings to maintain vegetable production on their 40-hectare plot of land, of which only 10 percent is planted due to a lack of resources. It is one of the few surviving family farms in the municipality. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Agro-export Model in the Spotlight

Water scarcity directly affects farmers’ livelihoods and way of life and often leads to complex environmental problems.

“The lack of safe water impacts household and community economies, especially for families who depend on small-scale family farming for their food,” write Salinas and Becker.

Guzmán criticized the agro-export model and called for a return to planting wheat, lentils and chickpeas, products that form part of Chile’s food security. But, she stressed, in order to do so, soft loans or subsidies are needed.

“We need food sovereignty. But if small farmers suffer losses every year, many end up selling their land. We want to live well without losing our identity and our know-how,” she underlined.

Sociologist Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of Sustainable Chile, criticized the agro-export model because “it is super intensive in water use and is extremely irresponsible with regard to crops. But above all, because it does not solve a problem nationally: the availability of water for many communities,” she said.

“We particularly depend on small-scale family farming for food, and if it disappears, we have a problem of costs and distribution. The big farmers think about ensuring food sovereignty for any country except their own communities,” she told IPS in Santiago.

Hernán Guzmán, one of four siblings who own a plot of land in Quillota, inspects a small area dedicated to growing basil that is destined, along with other vegetables, for the market in the nearby port city of Valparaíso, in central Chile. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Watershed Management Slow To Take Off

To advance climate justice in a scenario of water scarcity, many experts agree on the need to manage watersheds with representative councils.

“Our country has a gigantic mass of mountains, but today we do not have a management system that allows us to link what happens in the headwaters with what is happening further downstream,” said Vicioso.

She listed a string of failures to create watershed councils, as there have been 25 attempts since 1994 and only one is functioning.

There is no will to create them, especially among water rights owners.

“We have a privatized water model where the focus and priority have always been to maintain the right to property over the human right of access to water,” said Vicioso.

Salinas and Becker regret that the 2005 reforms to the Water Code are not retroactive.

“This generates the conditions for the holders of water use rights to exploit the water with a strictly economic focus, thus discouraging the development of uses not involving extractive industries, such as ancestral and ecological uses,” they argue.

The regulation hinders integrated management of the water cycle, as it does not consider the river basin as the minimum unit, does not establish mechanisms to jointly manage surface and groundwater, and allows rivers to be sectioned off.

Evelyn Vicioso, executive director of the non-governmental organization Sustainable Chile, sits in her office in Santiago, where she monitors the water situation among small farmers and coordinates actions to defend the human right to water. Credit: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Land speculation

In Quillota there is a growing sale of agricultural land to real estate companies that resell it as non-productive family recreational plots.

Thus, native trees disappear and the hope of reviving family farming is waning.

“Land has become a business. It sells for 60 million pesos (60,000 dollars) per half a hectare that sometimes does not even have water. That value attracts people to sell,” Guzmán said.

These plots will increase the demand for water and deforestation because the government’s Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG) has no oversight capacity.

“All the hills are being parceled out and water is brought to these people with water trucks,” said Guzmán.

Migration from the countryside has been driven by climate change.

In Canela, said Cortés, it used to be young people who moved away. But now it is entire families who go to nearby cities in search of access to water.

According to Guzmán, “young people do not want to stay in the countryside and women say that it is not even profitable to raise chickens.”

Cortés is grateful for the water from trucks, but stresses that the underlying problem is restoring watershed management.

“To rebuild this, resources must be allocated. And for that, we need forestation to make barriers to retain the scarce rainfall and restore the hydrological system,” she said.

Vicioso complained that “there is a lack of protection of the glaciers, which are the headwaters of the basins where the water comes from.”

The sociologist also urged a rethinking of the intensive use of water in productive activities.

“We have an underlying political problem with water that has a high market value and a State that does not dare, does not want, and does not seek the tools to intervene in this deregulated market, just like in drug trafficking,” she said.

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Radio IITA interviews Dr Simeon Ehui. Credit: IITA

By Guy Dinmore
ST DAVIDS, WALES, Aug 2 2023 (IPS)

“My key message is really simple,” says Dr Simeon Ehui, the newly-appointed Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), which works with partners across sub-Saharan Africa to tackle hunger, poverty and natural resource degradation.

“The clock is ticking,” Ehui tells IPS in an interview from Washington DC on his last day at the World Bank, urging Africa’s leaders to recognise the “absolute, paramount” importance of increasing funding for agriculture.

Dr Ehui, who also becomes Regional Director for Continental Africa, CGIAR, a global network of food security research organisations, says Africa’s food security is worsening. He lists the challenges: the climate crisis and extreme weather events that are presently causing floods in the west and central Africa and drought in the east; relatively high population growth; migration to urban areas; and specifically, the Ukraine-Russia war that triggered soaring prices of chemical fertilisers and grain.

As the African Development Bank recently noted, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in fertiliser prices rising two to three times over 2020 levels, creating serious supply gaps across the continent and driving food inflation. In sub-Saharan Africa, households spend up to 40% of their budget on food, compared to 17% in developed economies. Africa, the bank says, is over-reliant on food staples and agricultural inputs, importing over 100 million tonnes of cereals a year.

DG Simeon Ehui visits IITA Semi-Autotrophic Hydroponics (SAH) cassava multiplication section with Kenton Dashiell and Debo Akande, facilitated by Mercy Diebru-Ojo, Assistant Seed Specialist (right). Credit: IITA

Much of that food deficit and accompanying poverty is concentrated in several African states, led by Nigeria (where IITA is based in Ibadan), which is projected to overtake the US as the world’s third most populous country by 2050 with some 400 million people.

“My vision is thriving agricultural food systems in Africa,” says Dr Ehui, and, specifically for IITA and CGIAR, this means fostering the conditions to sustain centres of research excellence where scientists will be excited to work, with transparency of management and gender equality.

“We have to be able to respond quickly … We need to accelerate our research to respond to the needs of the people,” he adds.

While the global climate crisis is having a huge impact on food security, Dr Ehui agrees that political issues cannot be set aside. “We can’t divorce policy issues from the bigger agenda [climate change]. The two go together,” he says, singling out land tenure, land grabbing, and obstacles to women having access to land.

IITA will provide analysis and options for policy-makers to improve access to land and boost investments in agriculture.

Asked whether he is concerned that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plays an overly dominant role in providing over half of IITA’s funding of “research and delivery” projects, Dr Ehui begins by expressing his appreciation of the foundation’s support, particularly in the development of Aflasafe to combat dangerous aflatoxin in maize, groundnuts and other crops. However, the new director general also says he wants to “diversify sources of funding and scale-up research”.

He also rejects criticism from some quarters of the “failure” of Africa’s Green Revolution as embraced by Bill Gates, saying India’s one-crop model of the “green revolution” and a lack of care for the environment had not been applicable to Africa and its own complex systems.

IITA and CGIAR are responding to the needs of smallholder farmers in Africa, Dr Ehui says, and that means agriculture that is sustainable and regenerative.

“The focus on regenerative agriculture reflects the importance of natural resource management and local eco-systems,” says Dr Ehui, a national of Cote d’Ivoire and the United States who worked for 15 years at CGIAR, managing multi-agricultural research development programs in Africa and Asia, and whose most recent post was World Bank Regional Director for Sustainable Development for West and Central Africa.

Asked if there was a genuine shift towards regenerative and sustainable practices for Africa, Dr Ehui said CGIAR had long been focusing on using local technologies for enhancing food security, for example, reducing reliance on chemical fertilisers for those who could not afford it and using locally available inputs instead. “When I was a young scientist, we were working on these technologies,” he notes.

The Dakar 2 summit on food security last January recognised how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had exposed Africa’s over-reliance on imports of chemical fertilisers. “We have the resources to make it locally,” says Dr Ehui, who chaired a summit session.

At the summit, Senegal’s President Macky Sall, then head of the African Union, declared that “Africa must learn to feed itself” and that at least 10 percent of national budgets should be spent on agriculture.

Dr Ehui says it has been shown that every dollar spent on agricultural research brings a return of 10 dollars and that such investment will go a long way to help improve the socio-economic conditions of the people. Meeting basic needs will also help stem migration across the Mediterranean to Europe, he says.

Despite the challenges, agriculture is growing in much of sub-Saharan Africa and remains the mainstay of most African economies and a major employer. With 65% of the world’s remaining arable land in Africa and with a youthful and dynamic population, the African Development Bank believes Africa is capable of feeding itself as the world approaches a total population of nine billion people by 2050.

But have the pleas heard at the Dakar summit been heeded? “There has been a shift,” Dr Ehui replies. Funding for agriculture is still “below optimum”, but “a few countries” have responded, and he feels confident that, with work, numbers will soon increase.

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Her hands loaded with crates, Susan Quintanilla, a union leader of agro-export workers in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, gets ready to collect different vegetables and fruits for foreign markets. She has witnessed many injustices, saying the companies “made you feel like they were doing you a favor by giving you work, they wanted you to keep your head down." CREDIT: Courtesy of Susan Quintanilla

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, May 31 2023 (IPS)

Peru’s agro-export industry is growing steadily and reached record levels in 2022. But this has not had a favorable impact on human development in this South American country, where high levels of inequality, poverty, childhood anemia and malnutrition persist, as well as complaints about the poor quality of employment in the sector.

Exports of agricultural products such as blueberries, grapes, tangerines, artichokes and asparagus generated 9.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2022 – 12 percent higher than the 2021 total, as reported in February by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism.“The increase in revenue from agricultural exports has not brought human development: anemia and tuberculosis are at worrying levels and now dengue fever is skyrocketing.” -- Rosario Huallanca

Agricultural exports represent four percent of GDP in this Andean nation, where mining and fishing are the main economic activities.

“The increase in revenue from agricultural exports has not brought human development: anemia and tuberculosis are at worrying levels and now dengue fever is skyrocketing,” Rosario Huallanca, a representative of the non-governmental Ica Human Rights Commission (Codeh Ica), which has worked for 41 years in that department of southwestern Peru, told IPS.

Ica and two other departments along the country’s Pacific coast, La Libertad and Piura, are leaders in the sector, accounting for nearly 50 percent of agricultural exports in this country of 33 million people, which despite this boom remains plagued by inequality, reflected by high levels of poverty and informality and precariousness in employment.

Monetary poverty affected 27.5 percent of the country’s 33 million inhabitants in 2022, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics. This is a seven percentage point increase over the pre-pandemic period. The number of poor people was estimated at 9,184,000 last year, 600,000 more than in 2021.

Ica, which has a total of 850,765 inhabitants, is one of the departments with the lowest monetary poverty rates, five percent, because it has full employment, largely due to the agro-export boom of the last two decades.

Huallanca said the number of agro-export companies is estimated at 320, with a total of 120,000 employees, who come from different parts of the country.

What stands out, she said, is that 70 percent of the total number of workers in the sector are women, who are valued for their fine motor skills in handling fruits and vegetables.

Although a portion of the workers of some companies are in the informal sector, there are no clear numbers, the expert pointed out.

But there are alarming figures available: more than six percent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, and anemia affects 33 percent of children between six and 35 months of age.

“With the type of job we have, we cannot take our children to their growth checkups, we can’t miss work because they don’t pay you if you don’t show up, we cry in silence because of our anxiety,” 42-year-old Yanina Huamán, who has worked in the agro-export sector for 20 years to support her three children, told IPS.

The two oldest are in middle and higher education and her youngest is still in primary school. “I am both mother and father to my children. With my work I am giving them an education and I have manged to secure a home of my own, but it’s precarious, the bedrooms don’t have roofs yet, for example,” she said.

Huamán is secretary for women’s affairs in the union of the company where she works, a position she was appointed to in November 2022. From that post, she hopes to help bring about improvements in access to healthcare for female workers, who either postpone going to the doctor when they need to, or receive poor medical attention in the social security health system “where they only give us pills.”

Ica currently has the highest number of deaths from dengue fever, a viral disease that led the government of Dina Boluarte to declare a 90-day health emergency in 13 of the country’s 24 departments a couple of weeks ago.

Not only that, it has the history of being the department with the highest level of deaths from Covid-19: 901 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, exceeding the national average of 630 per 100,000. “The health system here does not work,” trade unionist Huamán said bluntly.

Yanina Huamán, a worker in the agro-export sector in the department of Ica in southwestern Peru, explains at a meeting in Lima the problems that affect labor rights in the sector, particularly for women who make up 70 percent of the workers. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Working conditions more difficult for women

The lack of quality employment and the deficient recognition of labor rights, exacerbated by the pandemic, prompted a strike in November 2020 that began in Ica and spread to the northern coastal area of ​​La Libertad and Piura.

Their demands included a minimum living wage of 70 soles (19 dollars) a day, social benefits such as compensation and raises for length of service, and recognition of the right to form unions.

Grouped together in the recently created Ica Workers’ Union Agro-exports Struggle Committee, which represents casual and seasonal workers, they went to Congress in Lima to demand changes in the current legislation.

Susan Quintanilla, 39, originally from the central Andean department of Ayacucho, is the general secretary of the union. She arrived in Ica in 2014 after separating from her husband. She came with her two children, a girl and a boy, for whom she hoped for a future with better opportunities.

After working as a harvester in the fields, and cleaning and packing fruit at the plant, she decided to work on a piecework basis, because that way she could earn more and save up for times when the companies needed less labor.

“It was incredibly hard,” she told IPS. “I would leave home at 10 in the morning and leave work at three or four in the wee hours of the next morning to be there to get my kids ready for school. I was 29 or 30 years old, I was young, but I saw older women with pain in their bodies, their arms and their feet due to the postures we had at work, but they continued because they had no other option.

“I saw many injustices in the agro-export companies,” she added. “They made you feel that they were doing you a favor by giving you work, they wanted you to keep your head down, they shouted at and humiliated people, they made them feel miserable. I protested, raised my voice, and they didn’t fire me because I was a high performance worker and they needed me. The situation has changed a little because of our struggles, but it hasn’t come for free.”

The late 2020 protests led to the approval on Dec. 31 of that year of Law No. 31110 on agricultural labor and incentives for the agricultural and irrigation sector, aimed at guaranteeing the rights of workers in the agro-export and agroindustrial sectors.

But in Quintanilla’s view, the law discriminates against non-permanent workers who make up the largest part of the workforce in the sector, since the preferential right to hiring established in the fourth article of the law is not respected.

“Nor have they recognized the differentiated payment of our social benefits and they include them in the daily wage that is calculated at 54 soles (a little more than 14 dollars): it’s not fair,” she complained.

At the same time, she stressed that the agro-export work is harder on women because they are the ones responsible for raising their children. “We live in a sexist society that burdens us with all of the care work,” Quintanilla said.

She also explained that because several of the companies are so far away, it takes workers longer to get to work, which means they are away from home for up to twelve hours a day. “We go to work with the anxiety that we are leaving our children at risk of the dangers of life, we cannot be with them as we would like, which damages us emotionally.”

Added to this, she said, are the terrible working conditions, such as the fact that the toilets are far from the areas where they work, as much as three blocks away, or in unsanitary conditions, which leads women to avoid using them, to the detriment of their health.

Workers sort avocados for export in Peru. Agro-exports account for four percent of the country’s GDP, but the prosperity of the sector has not translated into better human development for its workers, and diseases such as anemia and tuberculosis are alarmingly prevalent in agroindustrial areas. CREDIT: Comexperu

Agro-export companies and human rights

Huallanca said that Codeh Ica was promoting the creation of a space of diverse stakeholders so that the National Business and Human Rights Plan, a public policy aimed at ensuring that economic activities improve people’s quality of life, is fulfilled in the department. Five unions from Ica and the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Tourism participate in this initiative.

“We have made an enormous effort and we hope that on Jun. 16 it will be formally created by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the governing body for this policy,” she said.

In the meantime, she added, “we have helped bring together women involved in the agro-export sector, who have developed a rights agenda that has been given shape in this multi-stakeholder space and we hope it will be taken into account.”

A small but growing number of women are heading up agribusinesses in Africa, some of which are producing innovative products to combat malnutrition. Credit: Jeff Haskins/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 24 2020 (IPS)

Oluwaseun Sangoleye’s son developed rickets after rejecting baby formula. So she started a business to make natural baby cereal from locally-sourced ingredients in Nigeria.

“My personal experience opened me up to the dearth of nutrient dense, affordable meal solutions for infants and young children,” Sangoleye told IPS. Baby Grubz products are targeted at low and middle-income women with children aged six months to three years.

Sangoleye is one of a small but growing number of women who are heading up agribusinesses in Africa, some of which are producing innovative products to combat malnutrition.

While there are no conclusive figures on the number of women participating in agribusinesses across the continent, the African Women in Agribusiness Network (AWAN) states it works in 42 African countries, linking 1,600 women’s networks in different sectors.

• In the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) says healthy diets, including fruits; vegetables and protein-rich foods cost more than $1.90 a day — the global poverty threshold.  Estimates show than more than three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet and in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, 57 percent of the population is affected.

Since opening Shais Foods in 2014, Mirriam Nalomba has sought to transform grain-based mono-diets in Zambia by offering baby cereals from millet, sorghum, cassava, soya bean and Vitamin A orange maize.

“We cannot use imported foods to combat malnutrition; locally-grown crops will produce nutritious foods,” Nalomba told IPS.

• The Food Sustainability Index (FSI) developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition (BCFN), shows that Zambia has high prevalence of malnutrition and stunting for children under five years of age as scored under nutritional challenges, one of the three pillars of the FSI.  
• Chronic malnutrition affects 39 percent of children under five years in Zambia, according to the FAO.

Nalomba’s business model of using locally-grown crops has proved foresightful as COVID-19 lockdowns have disrupted markets across the continent. But she lamented that COVID-19 restrictions have affected her plans of expanding her market. Nalomba has started selling her products online.

Sangoleye told IPS that while the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to access quality raw materials, she had gained more customers during the lockdown. It’s also led her to start innovating in other areas of packaging.

“One of our distributors shared an emotional story of how three women bought a jar of Grubz and shared it into three equal parts for their babies to augment their breast milk,” Sangoleye said.

“This has challenged us to start looking into the production of smaller packs that are more affordable and guarantees food safety for the children with compliance to physical distancing.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a 10 percent decrease in sales for Sanavita, a Tanzanian social enterprise, which supports more than 1,000 smallholder farmers growing Orange Fleshed Sweetpotato (OFSP), pro vitamin A maize, and iron and zinc-fortified beans, which are processed into nutritious flours. 

Sanavita sells about 1,000 kg of flour each month and estimates that it has about 10,000 customers.

“We are aiming to end hidden hunger in Tanzania and this means growth for us,” Sanavita founder Jolenta Joseph told IPS. In October, the FAO listed Tanzania as one of the African countries to be hardest-hit by adverse weather in the coming years. The low-income country is currently listed by the U.N. agency as not having achieved its hunger target of halving the proportion of the chronically undernourished with “lack of progress of deterioration”. 

Vitamin A orange maize provides highly-nutritious food that combats malnutrition. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Malnutrition on the rise but COVID-19 will make it worse

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragility of current food systems and has amplified poverty, inequalities and food insecurity, according to the BCFN, which has outlined 10 bold interdisciplinary actions for the transformation of food systems.

In an earlier interview with IPS, Dr. Marta Antonelli, head of research at BCFN, and Katarzyna Dembska, a researcher at BCFN, said the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced the ability of those who are food insecure to buy food. As a result there is a risk in the decline of dietary quality as a result of compromise employment and the revocation of schemes such as school deeding programmes and shock as a result of the breakdown of food markets.

COVID-19 has impacted on food systems, increased food prices have a direct impact on the quality of diets, preventing access to fresh fruits and vegetables as well as dairy, meat and fish as a result of people failing to reach wholesale and retail markets, the researchers said.

Debisi Araba, a public policy and strategy specialist and managing director at the Alliance for a Green Revolution Forum (AGRF), told IPS humanity has been innovating for a long time to ensure people are nourished. It is important to promote agriculture innovation in technologies, processes, programmes and systems in private enterprise and public policy.

With the current COVID-19 crisis, health and nutrition is suffering from multiple shocks, Lawrence Haddad, executive director of Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), told IPS.

“SMEs across Africa and Asia are vital in the pandemic response but their ability to operate is being put under increasing strain,” Haddad said, adding that SMEs need continued support and investment to adapt and innovate.

Investing in agriculture innovation

But COVID-19 has not been the only obstacle to the growth of these women-led agribusinesses.

Amandla Ooko-Ombaka, economist and associate partner at global management firm McKinsey, told IPS that women face a combination of challenges in starting and running an agribusiness because of their disproportionate access to information and technology to access agronomic advice and payments. She added that women consistently have less access to capital to increase their productivity and are 50 percent less likely than men to own their land.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute the highest average agriculture labour force participation rate in the world of more than 50 percent in many countries, especially in West Africa, according to the FAO.

“Food systems worldwide are decades behind other sectors in adopting digital technology and innovation,” Ooko-Ombaka added.

“The growth of mobile access has been an important unlock for innovation in African agriculture for most of our countries 70-90 percent of land is held by smallholder farmers. If we cannot reach them, the impact in the sector is muted,” Ooko-Ombaka told IPS via e-mail.

Ooko-Ombaka said in sub-Saharan Africa about 400 digital agriculture solutions have come to market — 60 percent of which came to market only in the last two years — serving user needs, including financial services, market linkages, supply chain management, advisory and information and business intelligence.

An analysis by McKinsey notes that the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted food systems in Africa but continues to open the gap for innovation.

Ooko-Ombaka says the agriculture value chain can benefit from innovation, particularly in the COVID-19 era where profound shifts are projected around marketplaces, making it critical for farmers to have access to markets.

“With restrictions on movement, interacting with farmers and value-chain partners digitally may become more important,” Ooko-Ombaka said, predicting that food-distribution chains, particularly in urban areas, are very likely to become more digitised.

Farmers may increasingly seek e-advice, digital savings products, or access to government subsidies that might be offered through digital wallets, she said adding that agricultural players can explore digital services, including marketing, extension to farmers, financial products and supply chain tracking.

Determination and perseverance needed

Despite the obstacles the women are positive and committed to their work.

“It is not easy running a woman-led business, but hard work, passion, commitment and the ability to plan and set priorities are keys for success,” Sanavita founder Joseph said.

Maame Akua Manful, founder of a Ghanaian social enterprise Fieldswhite Co. Ltd, which makes OFSP yoghurt, concurs that running a woman-led agribusiness comes with a lot of sacrifice and spontaneous decision-making.  

“It is not easy learning how to manage a team of men and communicate in a way that they would understand, but I feel that with determination and perseverance every woman can bring out that entrepreneurial ability in her to make things work,” she told IPS.

Investing in entrepreneurs will help make the food system more sustainable. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2016 (IPS)

Investing in new entrepreneurs who bring a holistic approach to food sustainability is one way that the food movement can overcome mounting global challenges from environmental degradation to food waste.

“I grow food, I feed people, body and minds. We must look at the food system at large,” Washington told IPS during the recent Food Tank Summit.

Karen Washington, is a 62 year old community activist who co-foundered the movement Black Urban Growers. After decades of working as a physical therapist in the Bronx, New York City, she decided to become a food entrepreneur advocating low-income communities to have inclusive access of to fresh, healthy food and a fair market.

“I am active, it is not about talk, it is easy for people to talk, you can look at my hands, I also talk but I farm as well.”

Washington is a member of a community garden in the Bronx and also grows collectively in a three acre piece of land in Chester, New York. She grows vegetables and flowers selling to local markets and restaurants.

As a health care professional Washington saw her patients having problems with their diet and, ultimately, with their health.

“They were developing diet related diseases like type two diabetes, hypertension and obesity. And all of this had to do with the food they were eating. I looked at my patients holistically and saw they were eating the wrong thing”.

An holistic approach to food systems must also address the racial divide in the production and consumption of food.

The face of agriculture in the United States is a white male farmer. As a matter of comparison, New York state has 55,000 white farmers but only 150 are black. “If you look at some states there are no black farmers, so we felt that this was something we had to bring out and expose, racism that continues to persist in the food system,” said Washington.

“We needed to have our own stories and seek for a black leadership on agriculture. There was no place like it, where black young people could see black leadership in action or have a conversation that affected black neighbourhoods, and also to find out we could get together and look at solutions,” she said.

Activists, entrepreneurs and food experts agree there is an urgent need to reinvent the cycle of food, empowering local based solutions and intersecting with economics, education, health, environment and, of course, “the four letter word ‘race’ that no one talks about”, said Washington. “We have to look to those intersections and move the full system in the right direction”.

Supporting entrepreneurs like Washington is one way that the food system can become more sustainable, experts at the two-day summit agreed.

“We have to create a new alliance of people wanting to ensure sustainability for the present generation and also guarantee the future generations can meet their demands and needs,” Alexander Muller, leader of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) hosted project TEEB for Agriculture & Food (TEEBAgriFood), told IPS during the summit.

“If we look at the whole cycle, we see we cannot guarantee that the future generations can feed themselves and, therefore, we have to act,” said Muller.

Around one billion people suffer from hunger worldwide, and more than two billion have food related health problems like diabetes and obesity. The global food system also relies on increasingly fragile resources. The world is losing 24 billion tons of fertile soils a year because of erosion and the food system is currently losing about 70 percent of all water withdrawn from natural cycles.

“Waiting would only increase the problems. We already see that major agriculture production systems are at risk. We need to know the true price of our food and have clear signals on the markets that sustainable food in the long-run is cheaper than unsustainable food,” said Müller.

The summit featured more than 75 speakers from the food and agriculture fields – such as researchers, farmers, chefs, policymakers, government officials, and students – that came together to discuss on topics including food waste, urban agriculture, family farmers, and farm workers.

They agreed that supporting sustainable agriculture is a a matter of urgency. The food movement is at the beginning of transforming a complex system with multiple actors, the time is now, warned Danielle Nieremberg Founder and President of Food Tank, a research organization dedicated to cultivating individuals and organizations to push for a better food system.

“A lot of innovations that farmers are using in the fields cover a great potential to be scaled up,” Nieremberg told IPS. “We have things like climate change conflicts, and we really need to move forward if we are going to make changes and leave this planet in good enough conditions for future generations,” she said.

For Jason Clay, the senior vice president of Food & Markets at WWF, there is a need to increase efficiency and change the way we value food.

“If we can reduce and eliminate waste, that would be half of the new food we need to produce by 2050. We have to double food production by that year. It also means 10 percent of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and more than 20 percent of water used to produce food that is going to be wasted,” Clay told IPS.

Clay said that bringing efficiency, conscious consumption and infrastructure to food distribution, especially in developing countries, are relevant strategies to help enhance the food cycle.

“Governments should also be investing in rehabilitating land rather than subsidising business as usual. This is an opportunity to do better,” said Clay.

For Clay and also for Muller, it is important to ensure that the positive signals from the food movements are growing faster than the negative signals of destroying the environment.

The attention on food and linking the act of eating to sustainability are the key issues. Without changing the food systems this planet will not become sustainable and the way society produces food cuts across the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed September 2015 at UN headquarters.

An unidentified woman from Zimbabwe's Mashonaland Central Province at Manzou Farm packs her tobacco with the help of her children as they prepare to leave following an eviction order. “Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances” – Terry Mutsvanga, Zimbabwean rights activist. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

There is a new scramble for Africa, with ordinary people facing displacement by the affluent and the powerful as huge tracts of land on the continent are grabbed by a minority, rights activists here say.

“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development (PYD), a democracy lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.

Civil society activist Owen Dliwayo, who is programme officer for the Youth Dialogue Action Network, another lobby group here, said multinational companies were to blame in most African countries for land seizures.“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land” - Claris Madhuku, Zimbabwe’s Platform for Youth Development (PYD)

“I can give you an example of the Chisumbanje ethanol fuel project here in Chipinge. The project resulted in thousands of villagers being displaced to pave way for a sugar plantation so that thousands of hectares of land space could be created for the ethanol-producing project, consequently displacing poor villagers,” Dliwayo told IPS.

The 40,000 hectare sugar cane plantation which started in 2008 left more than 1,754 households displaced, according to PYD.

Fifteen years ago, Zimbabwe embarked on a controversial land reform programme to address colonial land-ownership imbalances, but activists have dismissed the move as disastrous for this Southern African nation.

“To say African nations like Zimbabwe addressed the land problem is untrue because land which African governments like Zimbabwe grabbed from white farmers was parcelled out to political elites at the expense of hordes of peasants here,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean rights activist, told IPS.

“Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances,” he added.

In 2010, ZimOnline, a Zimbabwean news service, reported that about 2,200 well-connected black Zimbabwean elites controlled nearly 40 percent of the 14 million hectares of land seized from white farmers, with each farm ranging in size from 250 to 4,000 hectares, with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his family said to own 14 farms spanning at least 16,000 hectares.

Further up in East Africa, according to a 2011 presentation by Uganda’s Joshua Zake titled ‘Land Grabbing; silent pain for smallholder farmers in Uganda’, key characters of land grabbing in that country are also a few wealthy or powerful individuals against many vulnerable individuals or communities.

Zake is Senior Programme Officer Environment and Natural Resources and Coordinator of the Uganda Forestry Working Group at Environmental Alert.

According to Zake, land grabbing in Africa, particularly in Uganda, is promoted by the suspected presence of oil and other mineral resources beneath the land, such as in Uganda’s Amuru and Bulisa districts.

Zake’s remarks fit well with Zimbabwe’s situation, where more than 800 families were displaced by government from Chiadzwa in Manicaland Province after the discovery of diamonds there in 2005.

But land grabs in Africa may also be rampant in towns and cities, according to private land developers here.

“There is high demand of land for the construction of homes in towns and cities across Africa owing to the sharp rural-to-urban migration,” Etuna Nujoma, a private land developer based in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, told IPS.

“The wealthy and the powerful as well as the corrupt politicians are taking advantage of the land demand and therefore often parcelling out urban land amongst themselves for resale at exorbitant prices at the expense of the poor.”

Last year, irked by corrupt local authorities appearing to be dishing out land among themselves for resale, a group of informal settlement dwellers outside Namibia’s coastal holiday town of Swakopmund occupied municipal land with the intention of settling there.

With land grabs at their peak in Zimbabwe, members of the ruling Zanu-PF party are measuring out land pieces which they then give to people who pay in the range of 10 to 20 dollars for 30 to 50 square metres, depending on the areas in which they want to obtain housing stands, according to Andrew Nyanyadzi of Zanu-PF.

“We don’t need permission from local authorities for us to have access to the land which our liberation war leaders fought for. It’s our land and we are therefore selling at affordable prices to ruling party loyalists,” Nyanyadzi told IPS.

Houses that once sheltered farmworkers stand empty as lands are reallocated for commercial farming and other profit-making purposes in Africa. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

Consequently, lobby groups in Zimbabwe say havoc rules supreme in the country’s towns and cities.

“In Harare, land belonging to the city has been taken over by known militant groups of people with links to Zanu-PF, whom police here are even afraid to apprehend,” Precious Shumba, the director of Harare Residents Trust, told IPS.

“This is exactly what happened to Harare’s urban land in Hatcliff high density area, where housing cooperatives belonging to the ruling Zanu-PF leaders have grabbed council land using their political power,” Shumba said.

However, like other countries across Africa, Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit individuals or organisations from selling land that does not legally belong to them.

Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the poor are losing out to foreign investors on land rights there despite the state being the sole owner of land.

Under the country’s constitution, there is no private land ownership – land and its associated resources are the property of the state – although the country’s Land Law grants private persons the right to use and benefit from the land whether or not they have a formal title. However, loopholes have emerged in the law.

A survey last year by Mozambique’s National Farmers’ Union showed that there was a colonial-era style land grab there, with politically-connected companies in the former Portuguese colony seizing hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland from peasants.

According to GRAIN, a non-profit organisation supporting small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, peasants in northern Mozambique have difficulties keeping their lands as foreign companies set up large-scale agribusinesses there.

The NGO says Mozambicans are being told that these projects will bring them benefits, but this is not how Caesar Guebuza and other Mozambican peasants see it.

“Agricultural investments by foreign companies have not benefitted us, but rather we have lost land to these companies investing here and we are being treated as aliens in our own land,” Guebuza told IPS.

Economists blame the Mozambican government for favouring foreign investors, who now possess large swathes of state land.

“The Mozambican government is known for siding with foreign investors who now occupy huge tracts of land for their own use as local peasants lose out on land, which is their birth right,” Kingston Nyakurukwa, a Zimbabwean independent economist, told IPS.

With foreign investors acquiring huge tracts of land ahead of locals in Africa, ActionAid Tanzania earlier this year said that through the European Union, United States and several European countries, the European Union’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition plans to invest 7.57 billion euros in agricultural development and food security across Africa.

However, said Nyakurukwa, these will be business ventures that will strip Africans of their hard-earned money as they buy agricultural produce.

Similarly, in Nigeria, Mozambique and Tanzania, smallholder farmers are being moved off their land, paving the way for sugarcane, rice and other export crop-growing projects backed by New Alliance money, according to ActionAid Tanzania’s findings.

For Africans in Tanzania, big money might be gradually rendering them landless.

“Money from investors seem to be elbowing us out of our native lands here in Tanzania as no one has been offered the choice of whether to be resettled or not as we are being forcibly offered money or land for resettlement,” Moses Malunguja, a disgruntled peasant from Tanzania, told IPS.

Edited by Phil Harris   

“There is no doubt that African small-scale producers need much greater support in their efforts, but GM seeds which are designed for large-scale industrial production have no place in smallholder systems”. Credit: La Via Campesina/2007/Creative Commons

By Haidee Swanby and Mariann Bassey Orovwuje
JOHANNESBURG, Mar 1 2015 (IPS)

The most persistent myth about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is that they are necessary to feed a growing global population.

Highly effective marketing campaigns have drilled it into our heads that GMOs will produce more food on less land in an environmentally friendly manner. The mantra has been repeated so often that it is considered to be truth.

Now this mantra has come to Africa, sung by the United States administration and multinational corporations like Monsanto, seeking to open new markets for a product that has been rejected by so many others around the globe.“It may be tempting to believe that hunger can be solved with technology, but African social movements have pointed out that skewed power relations are the bedrock of hunger in Africa”

While many countries have implemented strict legal frameworks to regulate GMOs, African nations have struggled with the legal, scientific and infrastructural resources to do so.

This has delayed the introduction of GMOs into Africa, but it has also provided the proponents of GMOs with a plum opportunity to offer their assistance and, in the process, helping to craft laws on the continent that promote the introduction of barely regulated GMOs and create investor-friendly environments for agribusiness.

Their line is that African governments must adopt GMOs as a matter of urgency to deal with hunger and that laws implementing pesky and expensive safety measures, or requiring assessments of socio-economic impacts, will only act as obstructions.

To date only seven African countries have complete legal frameworks to deal with GMOs and only four – South Africa, Burkina Faso, Egypt and Sudan – have approved commercial cultivation of a GM crop.

The drive to open markets for GMOs in Africa is not only happening through “assistance” resulting in permissive legal frameworks for GMOs, but also through an array of “philanthropical” projects, most of them funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

One such project is Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA), funded by the Gates Foundation in collaboration with Monsanto. Initially the project sought to develop drought tolerant maize varieties in five pilot countries but, as the project progressed, it incorporated one of Monsanto’s most lucrative commercial traits into the mix – MON810, which enables the plant to produce its own pesticide.

Interestingly, MON810 has recently come off patent, but Monsanto retains ownership when it is stacked with another gene, in this case, drought tolerant.

WEMA has provided a convenient vehicle for the introduction of Monsanto’s controversial product, but it has also used its influence to shape GM-related policy in the countries where it works.

The project has refused to run field trials in Tanzania and Mozambique until those countries amend their “strict liability” laws, which will make WEMA, and future companies selling GMOs, liable for any damages they may cause.

WEMA has also complained to governments about clauses in their law that require assessment of socio-economic impacts of GMOs, saying that assessment and approvals should be based solely on hard science, which is also often influenced or financed by the industry.

African civil society and smallholders’ organisations are fighting for the kind of biosafety legislation that will safeguard health and environment against the potential risks of GMOs, not the kind that promotes the introduction of this wholly inappropriate technology.

About 80 percent of Africa’s food is produced by smallholders, who seldom farm on more than five hectares of land and usually on much less.  The majority of these farmers are women, who have scant access to finance or secure land tenure.

That they still manage to provide the lion’s share of the continents’ food, usually without formal seed, chemicals, mechanisation, irrigation or subsidies, is testament to their resilience and innovation.

African farmers have a lot to lose from the introduction of GMOs – the rich diversity of African agriculture, its robust resilience and the social cohesion engendered through cultures of sharing and collective effort could be replaced by a handful of monotonous commodity crops owned by foreign masters. 

There is no doubt that African small-scale producers need much greater support in their efforts, but GM seeds which are designed for large-scale industrial production have no place in smallholder systems.

The mantra that GMOs are necessary for food security is hijacking the policy space that should be providing appropriate solutions for the poorest farmers.

Only a tiny fraction of farmers will ever afford the elite GM technology package – for example in South Africa, where over 85 percent of maize production is genetically modified, GM maize seed costs 2-5 times more than conventional seed, must be bought annually and requires the extensive use of toxic and expensive chemicals and fertilisers.

What is more, despite 16 years of cultivating GM maize, soya and cotton, South Africa’s food security continues to decline, with some 46 percent of the population categorised as food insecure.

It may be tempting to believe that hunger can be solved with technology, but African social movements have pointed out that skewed power relations – such as unfair trade agreements and subsidies that perennially entrench poverty, or the patenting of seed and imposition of expensive and patented technology onto the world’s most vulnerable and risk averse communities – are the bedrock of hunger in Africa.

Without changing these fundamental power relationships and handing control over food production to smallholders in Africa, hunger cannot be eradicated.

A global movement is growing and demanding that governments support small-scale food producers and “agro-ecology” instead of corporate agriculture, an agricultural system that is based on collaboration with nature and is appropriate for small-scale production, where producers are free to plant and exchange seeds and operate in strong local markets.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

This opinion piece was originally published by Common Dreams.

Excerpt:

By Frederic Mousseau
OAKLAND, United States, Jan 27 2015 (IPS)

At the same time as the United States, Canada and the European Union announced a set of new sanctions against Russia in mid-December last year, Ukraine received 350 million dollars in U.S. military aid, coming on top of a one billion dollar aid package approved by the U.S. Congress in March 2014. 

Western governments’ further involvement in the Ukraine conflict signals their confidence in the cabinet appointed by the new government earlier in December 2014. This new government is unique given that three of its most important ministries were granted to foreign-born individuals who received Ukrainian citizenship just hours before their appointment.

Frédéric Mousseau

The Ministry of Finance went to Natalie Jaresko, a U.S.-born and educated businesswoman who has been working in Ukraine since the mid-1990s, overseeing a private equity fund established by the U.S. government to invest in the country. Jaresko is also the CEO of Horizon Capital, an investment firm that administers various Western investments in the country.

As unusual as it may seem, this appointment is consistent with what looks more like a takeover of the Ukrainian economy by Western interests. In two reports – The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture and Walking on the West Side: The World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict – the Oakland Institute has documented this takeover, particularly in the agricultural sector.

A major factor in the crisis that led to deadly protests and eventually to president Viktor Yanukovych’s removal from office in February 2014 was his rejection of a European Union (EU) Association agreement aimed at expanding trade and integrating Ukraine with the
EU – an agreement that was tied to a 17 billion dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

After the president’s departure and the installation of a pro-Western government, the IMF initiated a reform programme that was a condition of its loan with the goal of increasing private investment in the country.“The manoeuvring for control over the country’s [Ukraine’s] agricultural system is a pivotal factor in the struggle that has been taking place over the last year in the greatest East-West confrontation since the Cold War”

The package of measures includes reforming the public provision of water and energy, and, more important, attempts to address what the World Bank identified as the “structural roots” of the current economic crisis in Ukraine, notably the high cost of doing business in the country.

The Ukrainian agricultural sector has been a prime target for foreign private investment and is logically seen by the IMF and World Bank as a priority sector for reform. Both institutions praise the new government’s readiness to follow their advice.

For example, the foreign-driven agricultural reform roadmap provided to Ukraine includes facilitating the acquisition of agricultural land, cutting food and plant regulations and controls, and reducing corporate taxes and custom duties.

The stakes around Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector – the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat – could not be higher. Ukraine is known for its ample fields of rich black soil, and the country boasts more than 32 million hectares of fertile, arable land – the equivalent of one-third of the entire arable land in the European Union.

The manoeuvring for control over the country’s agricultural system is a pivotal factor in the struggle that has been taking place over the last year in the greatest East-West confrontation since the Cold War.

The presence of foreign corporations in Ukrainian agriculture is growing quickly, with more than 1.6 million hectares signed over to foreign companies for agricultural purposes in recent years. While Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont have been in Ukraine for quite some time, their investments in the country have grown significantly over the past few years.

Cargill is involved in the sale of pesticides, seeds and fertilisers and has recently expanded its agricultural investments to include grain storage, animal nutrition and a stake in UkrLandFarming, the largest agribusiness in the country.

Similarly, Monsanto has been in Ukraine for years but has doubled the size of its team over the last three years. In March 2014, just weeks after Yanukovych was deposed, the company invested 140 million dollars in building a new seed plant in Ukraine.

DuPont has also expanded its investments and announced in June 2013 that it too would be investing in a new seed plant in the country.

Western corporations have not just taken control of certain profitable agribusinesses and agricultural activities, they have now initiated a vertical integration of the agricultural sector and extended their grip on infrastructure and shipping.

For instance, Cargill now owns at least four grain elevators and two sunflower seed processing plants used for the production of sunflower oil. In December 2013, the company bought a “25% +1 share” in a grain terminal at the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk with a capacity of 3.5 million tons of grain per year. 

All aspects of Ukraine’s agricultural supply chain – from the production of seeds and other agricultural inputs to the actual shipment of commodities out of the country – are thus increasingly controlled by Western firms.

European institutions and the U.S. government have actively promoted this expansion. It started with the push for a change of government at a time when president Yanukovych was seen as pro-Russian interests. This was further pushed, starting in February 2014, through the promotion of a “pro-business” reform agenda, as described by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker when she met with Prime Minister Arsenly Yatsenyuk in October 2014.

The European Union and the United States are working hand in hand in the takeover of Ukrainian agriculture. Although Ukraine does not allow the production of genetically modified (GM) crops, the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union, which ignited the conflict that ousted Yanukovych, includes a clause (Article 404) that commits both parties to cooperate to “extend the use of biotechnologies” within the country.

This clause is surprising given that most European consumers reject GM crops. However, it creates an opening to bring GM products into Europe, an opportunity sought after by large agro-seed companies such as Monsanto.

Opening up Ukraine to the cultivation of GM crops would go against the will of European citizens, and it is unclear how the change would benefit Ukrainians.

It is similarly unclear how Ukrainians will benefit from this wave of foreign investment in their agriculture, and what impact these investments will have on the seven million local farmers.

Once they eventually look away from the conflict in the Eastern “pro-Russian” part of the country, Ukrainians may wonder what remains of their country’s ability to control its food supply and manage the economy to their own benefit.

As for U.S. and European citizens, will they eventually awaken from the headlines and grand rhetoric about Russian aggression and human rights abuses and question their governments’ involvement in the Ukraine conflict? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Industry analysts say the institutional share of U.S. farmland ownership is rising quickly. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 2014 (IPS)

An estimated 400 million acres of farmland in the United States will likely change hands over the coming two decades as older farmers retire, even as new evidence indicates this land is being strongly pursued by private equity investors.

Mirroring a trend being experienced across the globe, this strengthening focus on agriculture-related investment by the private sector is already leading to a spike in U.S. farmland prices. Coupled with relatively weak federal policies, these rising prices are barring many young farmers from continuing or starting up small-scale agricultural operations of their own."This is no longer necessarily about food at all, but rather is a way to reap financial profits." -- Anuradha Mittal

In the long term, critics say, this dynamic could speed up the already fast-consolidating U.S. food industry, with broad ramifications for both human and environmental health.

“When non-operators own farms, they tend to source out the oversight to management companies, leading in part to horrific conditions around labour and how we treat the land,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director of the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group focusing on global large-scale land acquisitions, told IPS.

“They also reprioritise what commodities are grown on that land, based on what can yield the highest return. This is no longer necessarily about food at all, but rather is a way to reap financial profits. Unfortunately, that’s far removed from the central role that land ultimately plays in terms of climate change, growing hunger and the stability of the global economy.”

In a new report released Tuesday, the Oakland Institute tracks rising interest from some of the financial industry’s largest players. Citing information from Freedom of Information Act requests, the group says this includes bank subsidiaries (the Swiss UBS Agrivest), pension funds (the U.S. TIAA-CREF) and other private equity interests (such as HAIG, a subsidiary of Canada’s largest insurance group).

“Today, enthusiasm for agriculture borders on speculative mania. Driven by everything from rising food prices to growing demand for biofuel, the financial sector is taking an interest in farmland as never before,” the report states.

“Driven by the same structural factors and perpetrated by many of the same investors, the corporate consolidation of agriculture is being felt just as strongly in Iowa and California as it is in the Philippines and Mozambique.”

As yet, the amount of U.S. land owned by private investors is thought to be relatively low. The report points to a 2011 industry estimate that large-scale investors at the time owned around one percent of U.S. farmland, worth between three five billion dollars.

Last year, however, another industry analyst put this figure at around 10 billion dollars, suggesting that the institutional share of farmland ownership is rising quickly.

“We’ve been seeing a decimation of the family farmer for a long time, but now these processes are accelerating,” Mittal says. “We need a tightening at the policy level before we’re swamped by these trends.”

Demographic collision

In the year after food prices suddenly rose in 2008, global speculation in land rose by some 200 percent. With the international financial meltdown coinciding almost simultaneously with this crisis, investors have increasingly viewed agricultural land as a relatively safe place to put their money amidst rising volatility.

In the United States, investors are particularly eyeing potential future returns from mineral prospecting, water rights and strengthening trends in meat consumption. U.S. farmland is also seen as globally desirable due to a combination of high-tech farming opportunities and lax regulations regarding the use of genetically modified crops.

As a result of this new interest, land prices in the United States have risen by an estimated 213 percent over the past decade. This could now play into two trends at once.

Already, the United States is home to relatively low numbers of farmers, with the country famously home to more prisoners than full-time agriculturalists. But those who do continue to farm are also quickly aging.

While federal agriculture officials are expected to offer updated demographic information within the coming week, the most recent statistics suggest that just 6 percent of farmers are under 35 of age. Further, some 70 percent of U.S. farmland is owned by people 65 years or older.

“The older generation needs to cash out because they have no retirement funds, even as the new generation doesn’t have the capital to get into the kind of debt that [starting a farm] requires,” Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a farmer and co-founder of the Agrarian Trust, a group that helps new farmers access land, told IPS.

“Today there is a huge number of older folks trying to decide what to do with their land, and in many places we don’t have many years to help them make that decision. So in that sense there’s an urgent need, and we don’t have many tools at the federal level to help.”

For the most part, Fleming suggests, U.S. federal agriculture policy today is not aligned to the country’s best interests, instead pointing away from greater agricultural diversity, regional resilience and greater strengthened opportunity for rural economies. Nonetheless, she says that her organisation is encountering a surge of attention from young people that want to start their own farms.

“Over the past seven years, we’ve had an explosion of interest in being trained as a farmer and entering the trade of agriculture, and this is very much related to the crises around the banks and the environment,” she says.

“The problem we’re facing is not one in which nobody wants to farm, but rather the fact that the U.S. economy is structured in such a way that makes it really hard to start a farm in this country.”

Shareholders are calling on 15 U.S.-based multinational corporations to ensure that their global supply chains are not facilitating human rights abuses, particularly labour and sex trafficking.

A sex worker near the central station in Rome. Credit: Pier Paolo Cito/Save the Children

In a new campaign running throughout January, the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which represents 300 shareholder organisations managing around 100 billion dollars in assets, is focusing on two sectors in particular, hospitality and food agriculture. These industries – which include hotels, airlines, restaurant chains, large retailers and agribusiness companies – are seen as particularly at risk for rights violations.

“To properly fight abuses like human trafficking, we all have a role to play – and business must become part of the solution through putting into practice respect for human rights and ensuring their partners, suppliers, subsidiaries and agents do the same,” Amol Mehra, director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, a network based here, told IPS.

“Business has a responsibility to respect human rights, but this is more than just compliance with domestic laws. Instead, business must ensure that they, throughout their business relationships and including within their supply chains, avoid negatively impacting human rights and engage in appropriate judicial remediation when violations do occur.”

ICCR is now urging 15 U.S.-based corporations in particular to take a series of steps in this regard. These include agribusiness giants (ADM and ConAgra), retailers (Costco, Kroger, Target and Walmart), airlines (Delta, US Airways and Southwest), hotel chains (Hyatt, Starwood, Choice) and others.

The group’s members recently released a new set of principles and recommendations that would lead companies to make specific declarations to ensure that the entities within their supply chain will comply with a host of international agreements aimed at cracking down on various forms of human trafficking, including the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, passed in 2011.

Companies are also urged to publish regular updates on steps taken in this direction, as well as analysis of their impact.

“These are not aspirational recommendations – they’re very practical and very much based on ongoing and emerging practice,” Lauren Compere, an ICCR board member and managing director at Boston Common Asset Management, a social investment firm, told IPS.

“We started to really engage on how to implement the Guiding Principles, taking our practical experience over the past 15 years of engaging on child labour, human trafficking, modern-day slavery. These principles offer a roadmap for companies to take to engage on this.”

ICCR has a standing relationship with each of the 15 companies, which Compere and others feel could be particularly amenable to talking about additional steps to safeguard their supply chains.

“Where companies generally still miss the grade is on disclosure, especially within the hospitality sector. Disclosure on mitigating risks around trafficking really needs a lot more systematic, standardised reporting,” she says.

“For the moment, most of the information that is available is anecdotal, without data even on the percentage of operations that are covered. Some companies are getting better on general human rights disclosure, but we’re not seeing that yet on human trafficking.”

On dealing with grievances or the mitigation of risks, she says, in many companies there is still no real understanding of the full impact that corporate policies are having.

20-30 million

Estimates on the size of the global human trafficking problem are notoriously difficult. According to the International Labour Organisation, around 14.2 million people were thought to have been engaged in some form of forced labour in 2012, while another 4.5 million had been coerced into sex work.

Others say these numbers are likely far higher, with global numbers perhaps topping 30 million.

ICCR became involved in the intersection of corporate responsibility and trafficking in 2006, when a group of Scandinavian investors began pressuring the Marriott hotel chain over reports of child prostitution rings making use of the some of the company’s facilities in Costa Rica. Within a year, Marriott had rolled out a new, pointed policy on the issue, and has since engaged in annual shareholder disclosure.

While Marriott was never accused of knowingly facilitating these exchanges, the lack of stated policy was seen as detrimental to broader anti-trafficking efforts.

“Hotels, motels and others in the entertainment sector are all vulnerable to sex trafficking, and we’ve seen that if these types of businesses open their eyes they may find trafficking taking place within their operations,” Karen Stauss, director of programmes at Free the Slaves, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“While agriculture is a bit different, all across the world this is a sector where workers are very ill-paid, often coming from rural areas where they may not have a strong education, including on their rights. Without a doubt there is no way that we’ll solve the human trafficking problem until multinational corporations get involved – they have huge buying power and thus can access much farther down the supply chains.”

Pressure from consumers, advocacy groups and national and international regulation has had an increasing impact in recent years, with more and more companies recognising that actions taken throughout their supply chains can be a damaging liability. Further, Stauss notes that the use of, for instance, forced labour typically offers profits only far down the supply chain, with little to no positive effect for parent companies.

“Unfortunately, we still constantly see companies using the language of ‘impossibility’, claiming that their supply chains are so long that it is impossible to tackle these problems,” she says.

“The way I see it, this is just a lack of vision and creativity. The information and communications technology industry, for instance, has been pushed to take this on [due to U.S. legislation] and we’re now seeing that sector doing things that five years ago they said were impossible.”

Yet while recent federal legislation here is starting to have an impact on certain industries – such as the electronics sector – at risk of using so-called conflict minerals, there is currently no broader U.S. law requiring corporations to take steps to ensure that their supply chains are free of human trafficking.

Important precedent in this regard has come from California, however, which in 2010 passed landmark legislation requiring such regular disclosure for certain large companies (related information is available here).

While efforts to adopt a similar law at the federal level failed during the last congressional session, Stauss says supporters are expecting a new such bill to be introduced in coming weeks – and notes that the coalition of lawmakers and stakeholders in favour of such a law has continued to grow.

Members of the Pukobjê-Gavião indigenous people in the Governador indigenous territory. Credit: Courtesy of CIMI

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

The powerful tractors and other farm machinery that landowners recently used to block roads at a dozen points from north to south in Brazil illustrated the economic clout of big agriculture, which rose up against the demarcation of indigenous reserves.

The presence of lawmakers in the protests also indicated the growing political influence of the “ruralistas” – the bloc of large landowners in the Brazilian Congress that frequently deals blows to the left-leaning government of Dilma Rousseff, which nominally holds a broad majority in the legislature.

The “national strike” organised Friday Jun. 14 by the Agricultural Parliamentary Front mobilised a few thousands of farmers in some places and a few hundred in others. But the protests and roadblocks were only part of an ongoing offensive by landowners and agribusiness against the creation of new indigenous territories and the expansion of existing ones.

The main objective of the ruralistas is to modify the 1988 constitution, which guarantees indigenous groups the exclusive right to land that they have traditionally lived on, and a large enough area to provide for their “physical and cultural” survival.

In 2012, the rural bloc managed to get the country’s forest code overhauled, to their own benefit and at the expense of the environment.

Other measures that they are demanding, like the participation of the ministries of agriculture and agrarian development, and agricultural research centres, in the process of demarcation of native lands, are aimed at hindering the recognition of new indigenous reserves.

The ruralistas represent “a major step backwards,” said Marcos Terena, an official at the government’s indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, and a veteran activist for native rights.

The ruralistas see it as a dispute over land ownership, said Marcio Santilli, an expert with the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute and a former head of FUNAI. According to him, the landowners want to expand agribusiness as usual, taking over public lands, whether they are unoccupied or form part of indigenous or nature reserves.

Areas that have officially been recognised as traditional indigenous territory often contain pockets of private property, which are illegal and are subject to expropriation to incorporate them as part of the reserve.

Santilli said the landowners are trying to depict such situations as mere conflicts over land.

A number of such private properties were illegally acquired. But in the western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, many landowners have valid title deeds, granted by previous governments. In that area, a large number of conflicts over land have dragged on for decades, and many have become violent.

The ranching and soy-growing state accounted for 57 percent of the 560 murders of indigenous people documented between 2003 and 2012 in Brazil, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), linked to the Catholic Church.

Although not all of the killings were over land disputes, the number of murders of indigenous people in such conflicts reflects the asymmetry in the clash between the ruralistas and Amerindians.

The 2010 census counted nearly 900,000 indigenous people in this country of 198 million – three times the number found in 1991, when the category of native people was incorporated into the census, for people to self-identify their ethnic origin.

The recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities in the 1988 constitution helped boost the sense of indigenous identity, leading to more people identifying themselves as native people, even outside of their home villages and reserves.

Of the nearly 900,000 people who identified themselves as indigenous in the 2010 census, 36 percent lived in towns and cities. There are large native communities in some cities, such as Campo Grande, the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul.

The resurgence of indigenous identity and cultures also helped lead to advances in education among indigenous people, including the rescue of native languages and the incorporation of new technologies.

Terena, the FUNAI official, predicted that within about a decade, “a new factor” would give a boost to development in indigenous communities and their relations with mainstream society: “indigenous doctors” who are now being trained in the country’s universities “without losing their own cultures,” especially in southern Brazil, he said.

This phenomenon has represented a reverse in Brazil’s history of ethnocide since the arrival of the Portuguese colonisers in 1500, when there were an estimated five million indigenous people in the territory that is now Brazil. But it is now facing new threats.

Besides the ruralistas, which are seeking to tie the hands of the institutions that have fomented the resurgence of indigenous identity, major infrastructure projects in the Amazon jungle are modifying the living conditions and territories of indigenous communities.

Plans for the construction of dozens of hydroelectric dams on rivers in the Amazon basin have led to growing tension and battles between indigenous communities, dam-building companies and the government.

Police repression has been stepped up as indigenous activists have repeatedly invaded the Belo Monte hydropower plant under construction on the Xingu river, a major tributary of the Amazon river, in the northern state of Pará.

An indigenous protester, Oziel Gabriel, died during a May 30 police operation in the town of Sidrolandia in Mato Grosso do Sul.

He was apparently killed by a police bullet during a court-ordered eviction of hundreds of indigenous people who had occupied part of a large landed estate officially identified as part of the traditional territory of the Terena people 13 years ago.

The demarcation of the territory has been delayed by lawsuits, legal rulings and difficulties in indemnifying the owner of the land.

The correlation of forces and the government’s strong emphasis on economic development are totally negative for indigenous people.

But in their favour are the constitution, international conventions and international public opinion that defends diversity and native rights.

With the awareness and values that have been built up, “Brazilian society today would not allow the country to move backwards in terms of rights enshrined in the constitution,” said Paulo Maldos, head of the National Secretariat for Social Articulation in the Brazilian presidency, whose work has taken him into dangerous negotiations with indigenous groups that have occupied land.

Negative repercussions have discouraged anti-indigenous actions. Every indigenous person who is killed, like Gabriel, becomes a martyr and strengthens the resolve of the communities. For that reason this latest death might moderate the ruralista offensive against indigenous territories.

According to FUNAI, there are more than 450 indigenous territories in Brazil in the process of being demarcated, covering more than 100,000 hectares, while another one hundred or so are in the initial stage of being identified.