Africa needs non-GM agriculture / Africa has spoken, but did any of us bother to listen?

1.What matters more than anything else is agriculture
2.Africa has spoken, but did any of us bother to listen?
3.Geldof declares African empowerment and representation "not important"

Item 1 is a typically incisive article by Dr Colin Tudge, Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and a three-time winner of the Science Writer of the Year Award, as well as former features editor of New Scientist. This article is well worth reading in full.

EXCERPTS: Biotech companies such as Syngenta are lauded for providing modern crops in the form of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) - perceived in high places to be both profitable and necessary. Governments such as Zambia's that have turned them down are seen as backward, if not downright wicked. But, in truth, the ignorance is all on the reformers' side.

The notion that countries such as Angola actually need GMOs to provide sufficient yields is simply a misunderstanding, or a straightforward lie... their introduction suppresses local production and increases the dependency of poor countries on those who supply the new technologies. The argument in favour of GMOs, supported not least by Tony Blair, rests on the assumption that they are necessary. If they are not needed, there is no point in taking any risk at all.

...egged on by governments (beginning in Britain and the US), science is increasingly financed by corporates, for corporates. Hence the illusion grows that without industrialisation and corporatisation there can be no science or modern tech at all: that small farms of traditional structure are bound to be backward. Again, this is just not true.

The task is not to twiddle with World Trade Organisation rules or even to ease up on debt, but to rethink. In the short term, the prime task for the world as a whole, and in Africa in particular, must be to build on traditional agriculture, which alone can maintain landscapes and provide good jobs for the billions who need them: with appropriate-tech, small-scale financial support, and the general ambition not to trash small farms, but to make agrarian life tolerable, and indeed positively agreeable and desirable. Yet most of what seems to be on the agendas even of the best-intentioned seems to be going in different directions altogether.
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1.What matters more than anything else is agriculture
Colin Tudge
New Statesman, 11th July 2005
http://www.newstatesman.com/200507110010

The right support for traditional farming could help Africa more effectively than any amount of "development". It alone can maintain landscapes and provide jobs for billions who need them. By Colin Tudge

Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof are good people, but it seems as if all the best intentions of those in the highest places are misguided - destined to make things steadily worse in Africa. "Development" is a good idea, but horribly misconstrued. Technology is vital, but only if directed at the carefully identified problems of people at large - which, for the most part, it isn't. Extreme poverty is vile, but wealth per se does not necessarily reduce the vileness. New models are needed: for Africa and for the world as a whole. By being the first to enact such, Africa could yet emerge as the world leader.

What really matters, far more than anything else, is agriculture. Build on that in its traditional form - the subtle exploiter of landscape and employer of people - and all of Africa could be both stable and enviable. But who, apart from the farmers themselves and a few eccentric academics, even knows what agriculture is?

Traditional farming is perceived as a disaster worldwide, dragging down the farmers themselves and their whole communities. Agriculture, the mantra has it, must "compete" with everything else, from diamonds to tourism, and so must focus on "commodities" to sell on the allegedly free world market. Biotech companies such as Syngenta are lauded for providing modern crops in the form of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) - perceived in high places to be both profitable and necessary. Governments such as Zambia's that have turned them down are seen as backward, if not downright wicked. But, in truth, the ignorance is all on the reformers' side.

Perhaps the most fundamental error, reflected in a thousand treatises and news reports, is that Africans starve because their farming is bad. It is innately unproductive, we are told. One tonne of cereal per hectare is typical for much of Africa, against the 12 or more one would expect in East Anglia. The native crops have not been bred for high yields. They are too vulnerable as well: they die in the field (typically a third or more is lost) and are spoiled in store (another 50 per cent of what is left). Contrast the misery and poverty of African farmers with the wealth of Norfolk. Clearly, Africa's farming must become more like ours . . .

But all the scholars and true aficionados (including farmers) I have spoken to worldwide these past 40 years say the complete opposite. Tropical soils are extremely variable and often poor, and tropical climates are fickle and extreme: traditional farming typically and subtly copes with both. The yields of East Anglia are simply not possible except in exceptional circumstances, and it is better to aim for reliable yields in bad (and typical) years than for highest yields in the best. High inputs are rarely justified, precisely because outputs are innately unreliable. Besides, high outputs are disastrous - they are simply gluts - if markets are not guaranteed. The mixed cropping typical of small traditional farms is highly

desirable in countries with unpredictable climates and with so many pests - as with the 600 different conventional varieties of beans that are still grown in Angola. Angola is among the countries that have failed in recent decades, but not because it cannot produce food. It is two and a half times bigger than France, with a population roughly the size of Rio's, and with every kind of climate and landscape. A 30-year civil war and fields full of landmines do most to explain the shortfall.

In contrast, the industrialisation of farming can pay its way only through mass production, and that means monoculture - highly precarious, and potentially disastrous. The notion that countries such as Angola actually need GMOs to provide sufficient yields is simply a misunderstanding, or a straightforward lie. We should object to GMOs not primarily for reasons of health or environment, but because of economics and politics: their introduction suppresses local production and increases the dependency of poor countries on those who supply the new technologies. The argument in favour of GMOs, supported not least by Tony Blair, rests on the assumption that they are necessary. If they are not needed, there is no point in taking any risk at all.

Of course, traditional farms have drawbacks. The work can be intolerable, and far more crops are lost than is necessary. So new technologies are desirable - small machines of the kind that rich people use on their allotments, and also the highest-tech: IT is always useful. Once the technology is geared to the task, all African countries could feed themselves well, several times over. Yet the world is not geared to provide such appropriate (both low and high) technologies. Increasingly, egged on by governments (beginning in Britain and the US), science is increasingly financed by corporates, for corporates. Hence the illusion grows that without industrialisation and corporatisation there can be no science or modern tech at all: that small farms of traditional structure are bound to be backward. Again, this is just not true.

Then there is employment. In the developing world in general, 60 per cent of people work on the land: that's about two billion worldwide. In Africa, it can be even more. In Angola, it is 80 per cent; in Rwanda, 90. We can all agree that 90 per cent is too many - that leaves too few to do everything else. Even 60 per cent is perhaps too much. But it is ludicrous to suggest that the western model - with only 1 per cent in full-time rural work in Britain and the United States - is intrinsically desirable, or could ever be the norm.

Britain is able to employ so few people on the land because there are plenty of other things for Brits to do - if no longer making ships, then at least selling insurance and cutting each other's hair. If Africa ever develops big urban industries, that would be the time to take people off the land en masse. To force people to leave the land before an alternative is put in place seems very much like wickedness.

Then there is the huge and all-pervasive mistake, which says that Africa and the developing world in general could solve their problems if only world trade were truly free. What nonsense. First, third world farmers cannot compete at all unless they industrialise their farms. If Africa industrialised its farms, that would throw most of its people out of work, and it cannot industrialise without foreign investment, which entails foreign control. This means the cash will mostly leave the continent, and the economy will be administered from elsewhere. Finally, western markets are far from bottomless, and are already oversubscribed. Even if the playing field were level (which it never can be) Africans would soon find it too difficult to compete with the US and Europe and the enormous labour forces of Asia and South America.

Of course, exports of high-value crops from bananas to cardamoms have provided good incomes for many countries for many years - but only for some people. Push exports much further than usual, and we will merely create a global dogfight that will benefit western consumers and traders (such as Tesco), but will leave the world's farmers permanently on the brink. Given that farmers worldwide are the biggest single group of workers, it would be worse than can yet be conceived.

Colin Tudge's latest book, So Shall We Reap, is published in paperback by Penguin (GBP8.99)

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.
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2.Africa has spoken, but did any of us bother to listen?
Joan McAlpine
The Herald (Scotland), July 07 2005
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/42644.html

The sands of Libya may compare unfavourably with the lush surrounds of Gleneagles as venue for an international summit. But the event which took place there this week is every bit as important as the G8 jamboree.

The leaders of the rich world and Russia touched down in Perthshire just as the African Union completed its own meeting in North Africa. The Libyan event was more representative than the Scottish gathering, as it included leaders from 53 countries, not just eight.

While the host nation is hardly a model of good government (no anarchist clowns wrecking the centre of Tripoli), the vast majority of African Union governments are now democratic. This is the organisation which can deliver a brighter future to all those children who die every three seconds south of the Sahara. It has the ability to resolve conflict, promote peace, improve government and tackle corruption.

The organisation is particularly important because Africa is excluded from so much global decision-making - no permanent seat on the UN security council, poor representation in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Leaders from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ghana, Senegal, Algeria and South Africa and the AU itself will, of course, attend the Gleneagles summit - but only at the invitation of the eight real powerbrokers.

In contrast, Africans were in charge of the Libyan meeting, and they spoke with one voice. Yet in a week when so many white people were making a noise about their solidarity with the continent, the AU meeting was largely ignored. It is the political equivalent of shunting Baaba Maal and his fellow musicians off to Cornwall last Saturday night.

No wonder so many Africans are cynical, not just about the G8, but about aspects of the anti-poverty campaign as well - or at least the simplified way the message is articulated by some of its celebrity supporters. They find it demeaning, almost like a return to the "white man's burden" view of the continent.

This is sad because the Make Poverty History agenda, like the Commission for Africa report, is a comprehensive plan to empower a continent. It is workable and achievable. So, had we listened this week, what would Africans have told us? They would have made clear that the debt write-off - which the UK government tried to pass off as meeting the demands of campaigners - falls far short of what is required. The plan ultimately aims for $55bn (£32bn) of debt forgiveness for 38 poor countries, not all of them in Africa.

A separate plan cancels $31bn (£17.5bn) of Nigeria's foreign debt - an important development for a country which ought to be the continent's economic engine. However, the World Bank calculates that Africa's total debt burden at the end of 2002 was $295bn (£168bn). Clearly, there is some way to go.

The AU countries did pass a resolution expressing gratitude for the progress which has been made on aid payments and debt cancellation. But they called on the G8 to "establish a fair and equitable trading system". Of the three demands from Make Poverty History, this is the most resonant for Africans themselves.

"Africa doesn't want to see itself as a beggar," said the Rev Robert Aboagye-Mensah, president of the Methodist Church in Ghana and a visitor to Edinburgh this week: "We want to compete like any other nation. If we have a trade system which is just and fair, we'll actually be in a position to determine our future."

Maal, who is from Senegal, has made self-sufficiency the theme of his recent speeches and interviews, repeatedly quoting the Chinese proverb: "Give me a fish and I will eat for a day, teach me to fish and I will eat forever." It's a point repeatedly made by other cultural ambassadors, such as Femi Kuti, son of the late Fela Kuti, the Nigerian superstar. "Africa should learn how to help itself," he says. Dedicated anti-poverty campaigners have always emphasised trade justice as a key part of their agenda, but it has somehow become lost in the outpouring of genuine compassion we have seen in the past fortnight. It can be complicated and technical.

And while it will be discussed at Gleneagles, no decision will be made until December, when the World Trade Organisation meets in Hong Kong. Journalists are being briefed not to expect great things on this issue, despite it being the predominant reform demanded by Africans themselves. Late on Tuesday, George Bush's administration asked Congress to repeal a cotton subsidy which has been declared illegal by the WTO.

It looks suspiciously like a pre-G8 gesture, a meaningless one at that. Congress is likely to reject the measure, which only accounts for 7% of the United States' $3.7bn (£2.1bn) a year subsidy to cotton farmers. One Arkansas agri-business receives subsidies of $6m (£3.5m), which trade justice campaigners say is the equivalent of the combined earnings of 25 million cotton farmers in Mali. The livelihoods of those particular farmers have already collapsed, along with those in the neighbouring countries of Burkina Faso, Chad and Benin. They find they cannot even sell their crop at home, because American imports are cheaper.

It is part of a general and worrying trend. Agricultural exports earned Uganda $110m (£62.5m) in 2001, down by a fifth in five years. Fair trade campaigners, such as Devinder Sharma, warned this week of worse to come.

The economist told a South African news agency that the European Union produced 200% more milk than it needed for domestic consumption. "Where is the market for this? The market is Africa."

Even countries hailed as economic success stories suffer. The charity Corpwatch says the income of 400,000 poultry farmers in Ghana is threatened by the dumping of chicken considered too fatty for European and American shoppers.

According to the Corpwatch report, 26,000 tonnes of the stuff was dumped in the West African country in 2002 alone - and this had almost doubled by last year. As a result, the domestic poultry market shrank from 95% in 1992, to 11% a decade later. Increased aid, combined with debt reduction is supposed to make it easier for African countries to invest in health, education and infrastructure. The idea behind this is to allow the continent to achieve something like a level playing field whereby it can compete with the rest of the world, emulating Asia by selling quality products and providing skilled labour.

Much has been said about the danger of that money being spent instead on fleets of luxury cars by corrupt officials. But what if the income is swallowed up buying cheap European and American imports which simply keep these countries poor and dependent. Aid for unfair trade. That would be unforgivable.
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3.Geldof declares African empowerment and representation "not important"
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/07/316924.html
Steve Peake 06.07.2005

Today, Bob Geldof finally put on the record what many development campaigners have suspected for a while - namely that the empowerment of African people to represent themselves and solve their own problems, rather than relying on rich, guilt-ridden celebrities to save them, is not important to him.

Press Release
Wednesday, 06 July 2005

Bob Geldof confirms that, for him, African representation and empowerment is "not important"

At midday, a group of spiritual and community leaders met in Cramond, just outside Edinburgh, to hold a vigil in advance of the opening of the G8 summit in nearby Gleneagles. At the vigil organised by Christian Aid, a group of traditional drummers from Ghana, Kakatsitsi, performed a Libation Ceremony in which they called on their ancestors to lend their spiritual support to the Make Poverty History campaign. After their ceremony, Bon Geldof made a short speech before talking informally to the assembled media, dignitaries and local people.

During his speech, Geldof announced that in Ghana, people think of him as a King, referring to the village of Besseasse in the Ashanti region of Ghana, which Geldof visited while making his BBC documentary series. At the end of the vigil, Geldof was approached by members of Kakatsitsi asking him to arrange for them to perform a similar ceremony at the Murraryfield Live8 later that evening. Kakatsitsi had performed such a ceremony in partnership with Drop the Debt in Genoa in 2001, at the opening of Edinburgh City Councils events in the run up to the G8 and at the front of the Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh on Saturday. Their proposal was to spend one minute leading the assembled crowd in a simple call and response interplay, summoning the spiritual power of the Ancestors to focus the minds of the G8 leaders on the negotiations ahead. The ceremony was to provide much needed African cultural and spiritual leadership within Live8, which has been the subject of considerable criticism for the predominantly Anglo-Saxon and celebrity line-ups, resulting in the exclusion and marginalisation of African voices or the inclusion of mere token representation.

Geldof replied that he had been bombarded by numerous Hollywood stars and other celebrities wishing to be included in the line-up and that it was therefore not possible to include the African drummers. At this point, the manager of the drummers intervened to point out that the purpose of the Make Poverty History campaign was not to support Hollywood stars or rich music-industry celebrities but to tackle the poverty and marignalisation facing African people. Surely, he suggested, empowering African people to

speak for themselves and empowering them to solve their own problems rather than this being the remit of the "white mans burdena" of guilt ridden super-rich rock-stars was of the utmost importance.

Geldof, apparently surprised by this criticism, replied that this was not part of his agenda. Just to clarify matters, Kakatsitsis manager asked again. "Do you not think that issues relating to African representation are important?". Geldof replied "Not for me."

This latest episode confirms a growing consensus within the Make Poverty History coalition that Geldof is becoming increasingly arrogant, self-obsessed and caught up in the cult of his own personality. Several of the Christian Aid campaigners attending the vigil complained of the total lack of accountability of self-appointed leaders such as Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis of Comic Relief and that issues relating to the empowerment of African people as a primary means of poverty relief, taken for granted by most development campaigners, were being ignored. Concern was also expressed about some of the images from SaturdayÃ¢ys Live8 performances in London - Geldof posing on stage, fist in the air and looking out over the assembled masses and the obscene parading of the Ethiopian woman saved by Live Aid. Combined with the marginalisation of the African artists in Cornwall, campaigners are coming to draw parallels between Live8s agenda and that of the colonial project of saving and civilising the Dark Continent.

The leader of Kakatsitsi, Nii Kwartei Owoo, expressed his frustration at Geldofs failure to support African people saying "Bob Geldof claims to want to help African people. Yet he does not respect our culture or give us the right to speak for ourselves. He is using African people and African poverty as camouflage."

Kakatsitsi can be contacted on 07766 5666691