By Busani Bafana
JOHANNESBURG, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

South African smallholder farmer Motlasi Musi is not happy with the African Centre for Biosafety’s call for his country and Africa to ban the cultivation, import and export of all genetically modified maize. “I eat genetically modified maize, which I have been growing on my farm for more than seven years, and I am still alive,” he declared.

Musi, 57, a maize farmer in the Fun Valley area of Olifantsvlei, outside Johannesburg, and a beneficiary of South Africa’s Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development programme, has embraced the science of biotechnology with gusto.

“What have changed are my yields and my income.” He said that he earned about 225 dollars more per hectare for his GM maize crop than he did when farming ordinary maize.

He is also a member of The Truth About Trade, which describes itself on its official website as “a nonprofit advocacy group led by American farmers – narrowly focused, issue specific – as we support free trade and agricultural biotechnology.”

“For me it has largely been the exposure to biotechnology issues. They are not a seed company and the issue we are talking about here is GM seed so I do not see how that means I am influenced by them and in my views.”

He said that he was helping reduce food insecurity in South Africa by growing and selling GM maize.

“Biotechnology has a very big role in food security,” Musi told IPS. “The climate has changed and I know that with drought-tolerant seed I have a tool to fight climate change. I cannot guarantee that the rain will come and I if plant crops which are not drought tolerant, I could get into debt and lose my farm.”

South African smallholder farmer Motlasi Musi is not happy with the African Centre for Biosafety’s call for his country and Africa to ban the cultivation, import and export of all genetically modified maize. Courtesy: Busani Bafana

A report in April 2012 by the Climate Emergency Institute titled “The Impact of Climate Change on South Africa” said the country is experiencing a gradual, yet steady, change in climate with temperatures showing a significant increase over the last 60 years. Temperatures in South Africa are predicted to rise in costal regions by one to two degrees Celsius by 2050.

But the ACB does not believe that GMOs can deliver food security on the continent, specifically in South Africa, a leading African producer of GMOs.

The organisation is behind an African Civil Society statement calling for a ban on GM maize in South Africa and on the continent, which it hopes to submit to African governments. To date 656 signatures have been collected on the online statement, including those of 160 African organisations.

“We have sent an open letter to our minister of agriculture in October to ban GM maize in South Africa,” Haidee Swanby, an officer with ACB, told IPS.

“We (South Africa) have been cultivating, importing and exporting GM crops for 14 years with absolutely no impact on food security whatsoever. In fact, a bag of mealie meal is 84 percent more expensive than it was four or five years ago due to international prices and the extensive use of maize for biofuel production.”

Swanby said there was a need to improve access to food, by addressing poverty, unemployment and issues around land tenure, service delivery, infrastructure, access to markets, and unfair global trade practices.

“Genetically modified food has never been labelled in South Africa so there is no way to know if it is causing health problems,” Swanby said, calling for a rigorous scientific study into the health implications of GM food.

“If someone is getting sick, how are they going to trace it back to GMOs when they don’t know they’re eating them? We want more science, not less!”

The ACB has a supporter in Friends of the Earth International, which is also lobbying for a GMO-free Africa.

The organisation’s coordinator Nnimmo Bassey told IPS that GMOs do not deliver on the promises made by the biotechnology industry. He argued that hunger in Africa is used as an excuse to contaminate and erode genetic diversity on the continent.

Bassey said that GM crops are neither more nutritious nor better yielding nor use fewer pesticides and herbicides. And he said they are unsafe for humans and for the environment.

“It is all about market colonisation,” Bassey told IPS. “GM crops would neither produce food security nor meet nutrition deficits. The way forward is food sovereignty – Africans must determine what crops are suitable culturally and environmentally. Up to 80 percent of our food needs are met by smallholder farmers. These people need support and inputs for integrated agro-ecological crop management. Africa should ideally be a GMO-free continent.”

Friends of the Earth International cites failed GMO experiments in Africa with Bt cotton (a strain of cotton that had the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium inserted into its genetic code) in Burkina Faso and South Africa where they had been touted as the crops to pull smallholder farmers out of poverty.

Global developer and supplier of plant genetics, including hybrid seed, DuPont Pioneer, said that the effect of switching from saved seed to hybrid seed is dramatic.

The company’s vice president responsible for Asia, Africa and China, Daniel Jacobi, told IPS that of the 24 million hectares of maize planted annually in sub-Saharan Africa, about a third was hybrid seed.

Furthermore, farmers get a fuller yield from hybrid seeds by using fertiliser and agronomic practices, reducing post-harvest losses and getting the crop to market, he maintained.

“We can spend a long time and gain a lot of productivity in sub-Saharan Africa by doing all those things without ever getting to the introduction of GMOs,” Jacobi said following a tour of the DuPont Pioneer facility in the Midwestern U.S. state of Iowa.

“I think we tend to get wrapped up in the debate about GMOs and how multinational companies are forcing GMOs down the throats of local farmers. I think we ought to be focused on helping farmers do the best job they can do today by using hybrid seed and let us not let those priorities get lost in the big philosophical debate about GMOs.”

AfricaBio, a biotechnology stakeholder association formed in 1999, says a vast majority of the South African population are struggling to meet their daily needs and GM products offer a proven solution.

“For 14 consecutive seasons, South Africans have planted and consumed foods and food products derived from approved GM crops as part of their diet and no confirmed cases of harm to consumers of GM foods have been reported,” AfricaBio chief executive officer Nompumelelo Obokoh told IPS.

Meanwhile, Musi remained unhappy about the call to ban GM maize. “Africans should come to a realisation that all this is happening in the name of contraceptive imperialism. Africa missed out during the Green Revolution – we must not miss the Gene Revolution. Let Africans decide for Africa,” he said.

(*Adds information that Musi is a member of The Truth About Trade. Story first moved on Nov. 23, 2012)

Professor Patrick Bond, a leading thinker and analyst on climate change issues, says that he does not expect any progress on the Kyoto Protocol in Doha. Courtesy: Professor Patrick Bond

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Nov 27 2012 (IPS)

There is no political will among rich nations to find funding for developing countries experiencing the brunt of changes in global weather patterns, and the current climate change conference will fail to do so, according to Professor Patrick Bond, a leading thinker and analyst on climate change issues.

“The elites continue to discredit themselves at every opportunity. The only solution is to turn away from these destructive conferences and avoid giving the elites any legitimacy, and instead, to analyse and build the world climate justice movement and its alternatives,” Bond, a political economist and also the director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, told IPS.

As the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began in Doha, Qatar on Monday Nov. 26, Bond described past COPs as “conferences of polluters”. He believes COP18 will be no different.

“Qatar is an entirely appropriate host country for the next failed climate conference. On grounds of gender, race, class and social equity, environment, civil society voice and democracy, it’s a feudal zone, and the Arab world’s best mass media, Doha-based Al Jazeera, can’t tell the truth at home,” said the professor and author of the book, “Politics of Climate Justice”.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: What is in it for Africa? What is Africa likely to get or to lose from this conference?

A: The most hopeful opportunity is that with the passing of (Ethiopia’s prime minister) Meles Zenawi a few months ago there is a chance for fresh leadership, unencumbered by revelations about Washington’s influence.

Meles was unveiled as purchasable in the WikiLeaks’ U.S. State Department cables from February 2010 … Meles’ pro-Washington stance meant that though he was the loudest official African voice for climate debt and lower northern emissions, it was hard to take the continent seriously.

Sadly, since the quietening of the eloquent Sudanese voice from Copenhagen, Lumumba di Apeng (Sudanese diplomat and chief negotiator for developing countries at COP15), no African leader has made a positive impression.

And though there is a possibility that adaptation funding may flow a bit more to Africa, evidence so far confirms that the West pays elite Africans instead of the people most adversely affected. The Qatar meeting won’t change these crippling problems.

Q: What progress do you anticipate on the Kyoto Protocol in Doha?

A: None at all. The only hope they have is to boost the Green Climate Fund – but already the main polluters like the U.S. have signalled that in spite of Hillary Clinton’s 100 billion dollars a year promise at Copenhagen in 2009, they won’t support it financially, so it is empty and cannot begin to meet either mitigation or adaptation requirements.

Q: From your writings, you hold quite strong views about the Green Climate Fund. Why?

A: Although a vast “climate debt” payment mechanism from the global north to the global south is urgently required, probably on the scale of a trillion dollars a year, we must be critical of the proposed Green Climate Fund from the outset, because its huge potential was destroyed even at the level of design.

This is in part because African elites like the late Zenawi and (South Africa’s former minister of finance) Trevor Manuel played critical co-chairing roles from 2009 through last year.

Because of their pro-market ideology, Manuel especially bought into the insane argument that emissions trading can provide up to half the fund’s revenues, when in reality, these markets are sputtering to their deaths, as witnessed in 2010 at the main U.S. market, in Chicago, and the collapse of the European market over the past 18 months.

That means that there’s insufficient pressure on the north to raise funds through penalising polluters by fining – and then rapidly banning – emissions. It is also likely that the fund’s tiny revenues will be squandered on what we term “false solutions” – a variety of corporate-designed gimmicks to allow them to continue polluting.

What is needed is wide-ranging investment in a post-fossil society, as well as a reparations mechanism to get resources to people suffering from climate change – such as a “basic income grant” for those in affected areas, without interference by the likes of local tyrants – and one leading pilot study for this comes from rural Namibia, funded by German churches, whose results are most encouraging.

Q: How are we doing then on global climate governance?

A: As the (COP17) Durban disaster proved, the idea of global management of the climate catastrophe, given the present adverse balance of forces, is farcical in general…

It is beyond doubt now that any progress at the multilateral level will require two things: first, a further crash of the emissions trading experiment, so as to finally end the fiction that a market run by international bankers can solve a problem of planet-threatening pollution caused by unregulated markets; and second, a banning of delegations from Washington – the U.S. government and Bretton Woods Institutions – since that’s the city most influenced by climate denialists. Hence every move from the U.S. State Department amounts to sabotage.

Can COP18 in Doha deliver a deal that can save Africa from food insecurity as a result of climate change? Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Q: What of the 2012 climate change negotiations prior to Doha?

A: For every tip-toe step forward taken in Durban – in a context in which during this century, 200 million additional Africans are expected to die early because of extreme droughts and floods – there were reversals by leaps and bounds…

Because of WikiLeaks, we know in great detail that the U.S. State Department is slyly bribing even the occasional courageous delegation, such as the one from the Maldives right after the Copenhagen fiasco. So given the degree of bribery, bullying and corruption from Washington, why would we expect the COP system to suddenly become functional?

Q: What is the future of climate change negotiations?

A: To sum up, the 1987 Montreal Protocol should have immediately been expanded to incorporate greenhouse gases, but instead, because Washington insisted on ineffectual carbon trading a decade later in Kyoto – we have simply not seen an appropriate degree of political will and strategic sophistication, and until this changes, we will not be successful at the multilateral scale.

That means the future of any potentially successful negotiations is actually between activists and the popular support they rally to the cause on the one hand, and governments – and the corporations that often control those governments – on the other.

Even public consciousness has shifted quickly, as a result of extreme weather in the most backward regions of the world, like the northeastern U.S. These are the only bright lights in the world’s efforts to halt climate change, and I feel that if more people know these stories, they would lose their despondency and take action against both their local polluters and crony-corporate governments.

Smallholder farmer Susan Godwin employs three women to help her process the peanuts she grows and was named by Oxfam International as the 2012 Female Food Hero in Nigeria. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
DES MOINES, Iowa, USA, Nov 16 2012 (IPS)

Give a woman a hand-out and you feed her for a day. But teach her to farm, and how to add value to her product, and you feed her and her family for a lifetime. And if she happens to be Nigerian smallholder farmer Susan Godwin, she in turn will also provide jobs for her community and become a national food hero.

Instead of turning to financial hand-outs when her crop failed four years ago, Godwin went back to the classroom to learn new farming methods, how to add value to her product and how to draw up a business plan to access credit.

“Some of the women I trained with gave up after realising that the training had no financial hand-outs, but I wanted to see it to the end,” Godwin told IPS.

The following harvest, Godwin’s yam and groundnut yield doubled. From the sales she bought a peanut shelling machine and began processing them into oil and groundnut cake, something a few people in her community have done.

Today, her family is food and financially secure. Not many smallholder farmers in her village of Tunduadabu in Nasarawa State in central Nigeria can make that claim. While Godwin employs three women to help her process the peanuts she grows, many farmers in the village are struggling. This is because, unlike Godwin, they have not been educated about adopting new farming methods and still rely on traditional techniques.

“Training is very important for smallholder farmers, especially in Nigeria, because without the training they would not know about new farming methods. Adopting new methods has helped lift me out of poverty to a new life where I have enough to eat, to give to people around me and to sell. I am now able to send my children to school,” the mother of five said.

According to a March 2012 report titled “Oxfam in Nigeria”, by Oxfam International, some 70 percent of the country’s women contribute to the West African nation’s agricultural output. But Nigeria is vulnerable to food insecurity despite ranking first in agricultural output in Africa. Only 50 percent of the country’s arable land is farmed.

Godwin now has five shelling machines and employs three women to operate them. She also lets her community use the machines for a small fee. “From the daily takings from the shelling machines I give each woman half of what she makes that day; 200 Naira (1.27 dollars) makes a difference when you have nothing,” said Godwin, who is also the chairwoman of the United Movement for Small Scale Farmers.

By sharing the profits of her business, Godwin has empowered her employees. Some of them have now been able to start up their own businesses.

“Smallholder farmers can feed the world if we give them the tools and support them,” she said

A continent away from her village, Godwin was recently feted as a farming role model at the 2012 Borlaug Dialogue held in the Midwestern U.S. state of Iowa in October. Godwin was also named by Oxfam International as the 2012 Female Food Hero in Nigeria.

Sithembile Mwamakamba, manager of the Women Accessing Realigned Markets project at the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), bemoaned the high level of illiteracy among smallholder women farmers on the continent.

“With the right support, smallholder women farmers can identify their needs, package relevant messages and effectively communicate them to policymakers,” Mwamakamba told IPS.

“There is a need to establish local-level dialogue platforms that capture the voice of women farmers in the process of policy formulation and implementation. Furthermore, there is a need for specially-designed extension and training services targeting smallholder women farmers in order to improve their productivity.”

Mwamakamba emphasised that these programmes must be complemented with improved access to inputs and markets if they are to have a lasting impact on farmers’ livelihoods.

Director of global public policy at CropLife International, Tracy Gerstle, told IPS that women were the backbone of the rural economy, comprising 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries and an estimated two-thirds of the world’s 600 million poor livestock keepers.

“We cannot overlook the central role of women in global food security and economic growth,” she said.

“Within poor households, women are essential to breaking the cycle of poverty, given that women tend to invest a significantly higher portion of their income on food and education for the family. Yet women struggle to reach their potential, given globally persistent gaps in their access to extension (services), agricultural inputs, land and finance vis-à-vis men. (This is) underpinned by persistent inequalities in their basic human rights in terms of access to education, land and equality.”

Gerstle said that providing educational support for girls and women through training facilities, scholarships, mentoring, extension services and other forms of technical assistance would help bridge the equality gap.

Happy Shongwe is leading the fight against food insecurity in her homeland, Swaziland. Shongwe, a commercial seed grower and winner of the FANRPAN 2011 Movers and Shakers Civil Society Award, agreed that smallholder farmers hold the keys to food security.

“Smallholder farmers can feed the world, if you capacitate them and give them all the tools,” Shongwe told IPS in a telephone interview from the southern African nation.

Shongwe grows certified legume and maize seeds under conservation agriculture techniques on her farm on the Lubombo plateau in the Siteki region, 150 kilometres east of the capital, Mbabane.

After noticing that farmers were constantly short of seed, Shongwe ventured into the competitive, yet lucrative, market of seed production.

“Financial support is important for smallholder farmers. I have the energy and the passion for farming, but not the money to kick-start some of my projects,” Shongwe, a mother of two, told IPS.

Her income has tripled since she started the business, which in a good season can bring in 2,500 dollars. Her success has even attracted the Swazi royal family, which has consulted her on growing legume seeds.

Shongwe is also passing on her wealth of knowledge to others.

“I am currently mentoring 60 farmers keen to go into seed production and have another group of 10 who I am training on conservation agriculture because knowledge and information is key if smallholder farmers are to contribute to food security,” said Shongwe.