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1.AFRICA - CALL TO RESIST GMOS
2.Kenya: GM Will Enslave Farmers And Intensify Hunger
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1.AFRICA - CALL TO RESIST:
GMOS CONTRIBUTE TOWARDS FOOD CRISIS

RESIST BAYER CROPSCIENCE's ONSLAUGHT OF GM COTTON EXPERIMENTS IN LIMPOPO PROVINCE (SOUTH AFRICA)

African Centre for Biosafety, June 2 2008

The African Centre for Biosafety (ACB) condemns Bayer Cropsciences' spate of no less than 8 permit applications for field trials involving 8 Genetically Modified (GM) cotton varieties. These GM cotton varieties are to be tested in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, where the majority of the population is poor and marginalised. The applications come on the first anniversary of Bayer’s US$310 million acquisition of Monsanto’s Stoneville Pedigreed Seed Company - a leading US producer of cottonseeds. We condemn these applications, which will continue to consolidate our agricultural system into the capitalist economy and leave small-scale farmers out in the cold. We also assert that these crops pose inherent risks to human and environmental health.

GMOs DRIVE UP FOOD PRICES AND CONTRIBUTE TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are part of a “Green Revolution” package for Africa where technical and economic solutions are proffered for African agriculture. These solutions, designed by transnational agribusiness, are heavily dependent on inputs such as inorganic fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides and corporate owned seeds. This system is highly energy dependent, directly in the form of fuel for transport and machinery and indirectly in the production of fertilisers and other inputs. Around 500 million kg’s of pesticides are applied annually in agricultural monocultures to deal with insect pests, diseases and weeds globally. Such a system of continuous and increasing utilization of an energy intensive agricultural paradigm not only drives up the cost of food production but also contributes to climate change. In spite of this, the agendas of these powerful transnational corporations (TNC’s) continue to shape African agricultural-related policies, institutions and service providers in service of their bottom line.

GMOs ROB FARMERS OF THEIR OWN FARMING SYSTEMS AND SEED

The Green Revolution system has marginalized farmers, farmers’ knowledge and ecologically sustainable agricultural systems and serves only to consolidate South Africa's agricultural system into the capitalist economy. We strongly oppose Bayer's applications as being part of the capitalist scheme designed to control the very core component of agriculture, namely seeds. By 2006, Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta already owned 46% of the total proprietary global seed market. By 2007, Bayer Cropscience was already the second largest producer of cotton seed in the US. More GM cotton production in Africa will only increase Africa’s dependency on single agricultural products. In any event, the real prices of cotton in Africa have declined substantially on the world’s commodity markets over the last 2 decades.

GM COTTON DESTROYS AFRICAN COTTON FARMERS

As these agricultural TNC’s consolidate and grow evermore powerful, largely poverty stricken African farmers still have to compete with one arm behind their backs heavily subsidised American cotton farmers can sell their cotton unfairly at cut throat prices, destroying African farmers’ ability to make their livelihoods.

BAYER HAS A LEGACY OF DUPLICITY

Bayer Cropscience is a subsidiary of German based transnational company, Bayer and is known for it legacy of dumping toxic waste in the South Durban Basin and the GM rice contamination scandal in 2006 when food aid in Africa was also seriously compromised. In South Africa, Bayer has bankrolled GM sugarcane research in the hope of cornering the GM sugar to ethanol agrofuels market and has applied for a permit to import GM rice into South Africa.

GMOs POSE A RISK TO HUMAN HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT

Last, we condemn these applications on biosafety grounds because of the inherent risks posed by GM crops to human health and the environment. We also reiterate our outrage that the environment of South Africa continues to be used as an experimental dumping ground for multinational agrochemical and seed companies.

The ACB intends to submit substantial objections to Bayer Cropsciences applications and invite civil society organisations to join us in our resistance to this onslaught. A new agriculture is waiting to be born.

See also the Objection to Bayer's Application for Commodity Clearance of GM Cotton (www.cbgnetwork.de/2034.html)

Contact:
Mariam Mayet
Tel/Fax: +27 (0) 11 482 8915
+27 (0) 83 269 4309
www.biosafetyafrica.net <http://www.biosafetyafrica.net/>
Suite 3, 12 Clamart Road,
Richmond 2092,
Johannesburg,
South Africa
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2. Kenya: GM Will Enslave Farmers And Intensify Hunger
Gathuru Mburu
The East African, 2 June 2008
http://allafrica.com/stories/200806021303.html

The news of looming hunger in Kenya are worrying. Hunger has now become part of the news, with a section of Kenyan society experiencing it.

In the current situation, many people have rightly or wrongly attributed this situation to post-election violence, but we did not have violence in the previous years, yet people went hungry in many sections of the country.

Recurrent hunger has now become an annual ritual in Kenya, and this is not fair to ourselves as a nation, for we have everything it takes to be sustainably food secure.

This recurrent hunger is of our own making.

We are faced with a more profound problem than we are seeing here. As a nation, we have accepted the global notion that maize security is synonymous with food security, and that when there is no maize there is food insecurity. At the same time, the diversity of indigenous food crops available in Kenyais under threat of extinction because we have made up our minds that anything indigenous is backward.

As farmers, we have space for planting maize and other exotic crops. Tragically, we have little or no space for yams, arrowroots, sweet potatoes, cassava, pumpkins, millet, sorghum and a host of other nutritious indigenous vegetables and fruits. These crops disappeared a long time ago from our small farms, where we plant maize season in and season out.

As a country, we have failed to take advantage of local biodiversity and the diversity of climatic conditions that support it. We have allowed indigenous floral and fauna to disappear or reduce to near unviable populations as we clear the land for exotic and cash crop farming.

We are in addition faced with an even bigger problem - that of climate change. It is now evident that our country is warming up and seasons are no longer accurately predictable. Our small scale farming system has been thrown into disarray as it rains when we are expecting a dry spell and vice versa. Farmers are continually being caught unprepared by changing weather patterns.

What is worse, while some indigenous foods are known to be bridging crops that assure food security in times of adverse weather, we are not planting these in sustainable quantities. Maize does not have this capacity and quickly withers when subjected to a short period of water stress.

OUR RIVER WATER VOLUMES ARE declining with astonishing rapidity, thanks to our equally astonishing zeal to deforest the very water catchment areas that replenish our rivers, and a misguided passion to plant eucalyptus trees, which extract large quantities of water from soils, leaving them dry. In the face of this threat, little if anything is being done to respond to the visible impacts of climate change. We are yet to link climate change to loss of biodiversity and loss of livelihoods.

Until we make this connection and take appropriate action, we will continue facing hunger and will continue begging for food every other year.

Our soils are now dead after being fed with tonnes of chemical fertilisers and sprays for decades. Our farming continues to be dominated by high-external input agriculture, but the farmers do not get enough returns from the same farms to buy these inputs. Our farmers rarely participate in setting prices for their produce while inputs, including seeds, come with fixed prices. It is easy to create demand for farm inputs, but it's difficult to create a demand for farm produce. When it comes to farmers, the law of supply and demand applies to the letter.

This lopsided agri-business is worsening the hunger situation in Kenya. Honestly, fertilisers and chemical sprays are not the answer to our food problems.

While trying to remain relevant at an international level, such institutions are increasingly becoming irrelevant nationally. Externally sanctioned research always inclines towards the funders' agenda, at the expense of Kenyan farmers.

Since the 1990s, when Kenya's agricultural extension budget was drastically reduced, farmers have been at the mercy of agri-business. Farm produce has declined significantly and the soils have been depleted by increased use of chemical fertilisers and sprays. Even when extension services existed, these concentrated more on technical advice than on the social and attitudinal liberation of the farmers' minds.

Kenyans still regard anything exotic as superior to indigenous materials. Our extension services crystallised this self-defeating notion and the trend continues to date, with an over-emphasis on exotic seeds. There is still no talk from government quarters of how farmers can use local knowledge of local biodiversity to improve their livelihoods.

There is minimal research happening on indigenous food biodiversity and our extension officers miss this knowledge. "Scienticising" our indigenous knowledge is the basis for endogenous development, which is what Kenya needs now to liberate our agriculture from the grip of profiteering multinationals.

Food production is now faced with another agribusiness threat called agro-fuels. With global fossil fuel reserves declining at an alarming rate, and on the false premise that agro-fuels will reduce climate change, Kenya is now being wooed into agro-fuel production. Investors are coming in and the government has set up a committee to explore opportunities for Kenya in this newly found, purportedly quick-money and climate ameliorating endeavour.

Huge tracts of virgin land, especially in the drier eastern regions of Kenya, are the target for the diesel-guzzling bulldozers of agro-fuel investors. Kenya is fast buying into this climate amelioration falsehood, which is transforming cropland into agro-fuel plantations in other countries, reducing farm produce and aggravating the hunger situation. Yet we are all too eager to embrace this hunger-producing investment.

SINCE INDEPENDENCE, SUCCESSIVE governments have failed to lay strong foundations for Kenya's development, whose key pillar is food sufficiency and food sovereignty. Kenyans need enough food produced through a system of production that liberates rather than enslaves them. There can be no food sufficiency without food sovereignty, which is a continuum starting at seed acquisition, planting and management right through to harvesting and post-harvest handling.

Today, our food production is not sovereign at all. There are no options left for farmers who want to grow safe food. Our agriculture has been developed on high external inputs that are not locally available. With prices of these inputs sky-rocketing, Kenya has no option but to explore, sooner rather than later, farmer-friendly, ecological and biodiversity-based farming techniques that provide safe and affordable food.

Until Kenyans have sustained and diversified food reserves at household level, Vision 2030 will remain a mirage.

At policy level, our seed laws discriminate against community knowledge and ownership of seeds. As a nation, we have perfected the art of legalising discrimination against communities by recognising individual innovations and knowledge and not what is within the communal realm. Indigenous seeds are communal and the knowledge about them is communally held.

Kenya requires legal tools that recognise and protect this communal phenomenon so that we can support recuperation and sharing of indigenous knowledge of seeds to cushion ourselves from recurrent hunger.

OUR LEADERSHIP MUST RESIST being induced into placing our national hopes on maize, genetically modified seeds, fertilisers, chemical sprays and agro-fuels. We must diversify, but in the right manner! We must turn to what is available locally to revitalise our dead soils and use local seeds. We must recognize the space for indigenous knowledge in creating local resilience against the climate challenge.

Our institutions of research and higher learning must be reclaimed to provide the much needed leadership in research for endogenous development, with support from the government through increased budgetary allocations for research.

Our extension education must be improved to enable extension officers to assist farmers to come down from their delusional comfort zones of "exotic is progress, indigenous is backward." We must strongly hold to what is good of our cultures and improve it through community-led research in conjunction with our research institutions and universities.

We must decolonise our minds, 45 years after political independence, and realise that we have a country to protect. By failing to take charge of our food agenda we are offering ourselves to be recolonised. For there is no freedom in hunger - we will dance to the tune of those who feed us.

Gathuru Mburu is director of the Institute for Culture and Ecology based in Thika near Nairobi