3 more extracts from 'Voices from Africa'
1.GM Cassava Fails in Africa
2.GM Cotton in the Makhathini Flats:
Exacerbating a Flawed Development Paradigm
3.Monsanto's Seeds of Hope Campaign
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1.GM Cassava Fails in Africa
Source: Mariam Mayet, Director of the African Centre for Biosafety, http://www.biosafetyafrica.net
On May 26 2006, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, whose partners include the Monsanto Corporation and the Missouri Botanical Garden [Director: Peter Raven], quietly announced that GM virus-resistant varieties of cassava had lost resistance to the African cassava mosaic virus (CMVD) and that expert consultants had been asked to review why and how the modified cassava had changed and to assess future plans.
The Center, with funding from USAID, had been heavily involved in research on Disease-Resistant Cassava to develop and deliver transgenic, disease-resistant cassava planting materials to farmers in Kenya. The failure of GM cassava however undermined the Center's claim on its website that "transgenic plants developed at the Danforth Center have demonstrated strong resistance to the disease in greenhouse trials over multiple years."
This turn of events also undermined plans by the Danforth Center's International Programs Office to push the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to test transgenic cassava plants under natural field conditions.
Clearly, the kind of promises held out by the Danforth Center are not credible: "virus-resistance technology will initially be deployed in the East African region’s most popular cultivar - Ebwanatareka - for adoption by the 22,000 Kenyan farming families . . . the project will help 200,000 Kenyan cassava farmers and their families and increase cassava harvests by 50 percent on a sustainable basis. Similar benefits are promised to neighboring Uganda and to millions of farmers throughout Africa."
This is not the first time that these kind of false promises have been held out to KARI, which previously ran field trials on a much-hyped transgenic sweet potato - part of another USAID supported project. The sweet potato had been touted as high-yielding and virus-resistant, but during three years of field trials KARI discovered the virus resistance was no better than for ordinary varieties and the yields were sometimes less. By contrast, a conventional breeding program in Uganda successfully produced a high-yielding virus-resistant sweet potato more quickly and more cheaply, without any recourse to genetic engineering.
The failure of GM cassava, however, does underlie the reason why African governments, save for pro-GM South Africa, have adopted the precautionary principle and not allowed Africa to be turned into a laboratory for an unpredictable technology.
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2.GM Cotton in the Makhathini Flats: Exacerbating a Flawed Development Paradigm
Source: Mariam Mayet, African Centre for Biosafety, http://www.biosafetyafrica.net
Poor Black farmers who have been growing GM Cotton in the Makhthini Flats in South Africa since the late 1990s have become pawns in the numbers games surrounding whether or not Bt cotton results in increases in yields and savings on pesticide use. The GM machinery, ably assisted by the South African government, has peddled the experience of these farmers as a success story, worthy of imitation on the continent. However, beneath the hype lies a tragic tale of oppression and vulnerability, which the introduction of Bt cotton has further exacerbated.
The Makhathini farmers have historically been locked into a system of cotton growing due to a range of economic, political and social forces that resulted in chronic indebtedness. Despite cotton growing sliding into sharp decline in the last decade in South Africa, the government
and a range of corporate agribusiness actors, particularly Monsanto, lured the Makhathini farmers into adopting Bt cotton. They did this inter alia, by providing free production packages, including Bt cottonseeds, duly subsidized with public funds.
Research indicates that the South African government has subsidized the Monsanto-driven Bt cotton ‘success’ story with a staggering sum of R30 million from state coffers to date. Nevertheless, since the arrival of Bt cotton in the Makhathini Flats in 1998 and through 2004, farmers’ cumulative arrears to the Land Bank have amounted to a whopping R22,748,147.55.
Many reasons may be proffered to explain away the abject failure of the GM project in the Makhathini Flats, however, the central critique must concern itself with the inappropriateness
of a development paradigm that seeks to introduce technological solutions to deeply rooted systemic socio-economic problems. Attempts at replicating the Makhathini Flats experience in the rest of Africa, which has also been caught up in an endless cycle of debt, will undoubtedly yield similar results.
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3.Monsanto's Seeds of Hope Campaign
Source: Mariam Mayet, African Centre for Biosafety, http://www.biosafetyafrica.net
The aim of the New Green Revolution for Africa is eerily similar to Monsanto's Seeds of Hope Campaign. During the 1990s, Monsanto introduced Combi-Packs - boxes of materials designed specifically for smallholder farmers with access to 5 hectares of land or more in the Eastern
Cape, one of South Africa’s poorest provinces. The boxes contained a package of hybrid maize seed, some fertilizer, some herbicide, and pictogram instructions for illiterate users. The Combi-Pack claims to increase the yield of maize crops and to be less labor intensive than conventional farming. These productivity gains are said to give farmers extra time and, in some cases, extra income for other entrepreneurial activities.
Another important component of the Seed of Hope Campaign is the promotion of no or low till farming. This is meant to be a minimally invasive conservation farming technique, in that farmers do not plow or till the land and instead cut small furrows for the seeds. This farming practice entails negligible soil disturbance, maintenance of a permanent vegetative soil cover, direct sowing, and sound crop rotation. It is particularly beneficial for smallholder farmers, because there is no need to use a tractor, which provides major cost savings. However, using this technique requires the increased use of herbicides, since weeds are not removed by tilling the land. Monsanto is therefore a fervent supporter of this technique, despite several studies that have shown that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide is a threat to human health. It is both a hormone-disruptor and associated with birth defects in humans.
In most areas, these packs were sold through private agents. Following the introduction of the Combi-Packs, Monsanto introduced its patented GM maize varieties: Roundup Ready (herbicide tolerant) and Bt (insect resistant) maize seeds. Monsanto was also extremely astute in ensuring that massive public funds were allocated to subsidize the purchase of expensive hybrid and GM seeds, herbicides, and fertilizers.
It is important to note that the price for a Combi-Pack with conventional seed is R232, the Roundup Ready GM maize seed is R343, and the GM Bt variety is R328, whereas the estimated income of farmers in the Eastern Cape areas is often no more then R1000 a month. Clearly, GM technology is not affordable by resource-poor farmers, and the withdrawal of substantial state support will leave these farmers out in the cold.
Sub-Saharan Africa represents an extremely lucrative market for seed companies. On their face, the development interventions by AGRA appear to be benevolent. However, not only will AGRA facilitate the change to a market-based agricultural sector in Africa that would replace traditional agriculture, but it will also go a long way toward laying the groundwork for the entry of private fertilizer and agrochemical companies and seed companies, and more particularly, GM seed companies.
Hybrid and GM technologies have been designed for large-scale intensive monoculture production, while most arable land in various African countries is generally unsuitable for this system of agriculture. Using new technologies such as hybrid and GM seeds in African regions may not dramatically improve farmers’ yield compared to that received from farming with traditional, open pollinated varieties. In addition, in comparison to using open pollinated seeds, which are often saved by the farmers themselves, hybrid and GM seeds are expensive inputs, which need to be bought every planting season.
Furthermore, with farmers changing to hybrid and ultimately GM seeds, the availability of saved seeds declines, leaving the farmers no opportunity to go back to their conventional way of farming. A scarcity of open pollinated seeds among smallholder farmers will have catastrophic consequences on agricultural biodiversity in Africa.
As the Makhathini GM cotton project shows, technological fixes such as improved seeds, pesticides, herbicides, inorganic artificial and GM crops merely serve as stop-gap measures that deflect attention away from the structural problems facing small-scale farmers. The Green and Gene revolutions are nothing more than red herrings to avoid sustainable development interventions that address historical inequalities and give farmers real choices within an ecologically sustainable framework built on people-centered and traditional and cultural value systems.