adminTapuwa Mashangwa
TATENDWA Mudzimi (fictitious name), a farmer in the outskirts of Bulawayo has just spent months rearing chickens and vegetables and is finally taking them to some supermarkets for sale, only to be told that they don’t need his agricultural produce as they have contracts with regional suppliers and for the deficit they import chickens cheaply from neighbouring countries and abroad.
He returns home to his wife and three children with no sale besides the few he sold at discount prices to compensate his transport costs.
There was no business for him today.
GMOs are easy and cheap to produce and maintain due to the shortened maturity periods and the minimal input costs.
In as much as this may seem advantageous, we should recall that these foods have not been thoroughly verified to be safe for human consumption and they create a serious market competition or market monopolies due to their relatively low selling price something which the average farmer cannot afford to do.
According to Natural News, at the January 2015 G8 Summit held at Camp David in Maryland, the Barack Obama regime met with private industry leaders to announce the launch of the “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition,” a thinly-veiled Green Revolution 2.0 that aims to uproot autonomous family farming systems throughout Africa and replace them with toxic monoculture systems controlled by multinational corporations like Monsanto.
The deceptively titled scheme, which investigative journalist Rady Ananda describes as “a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit,” follows the usual script — all those poor African people need American corporations to take control of their lives so they can be healthy and prosperous.
“They’re future consumers for the United States,” stated Bono during a 2012 interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports who have yet to be assimilated into the beast system.
“The president is talking business. This is good. It’s a whole new development paradigm today. The old donor/recipient relationship… it’s over.”
Owen Paterson, the UK’s environment minister, claimed that GM crops and produce are necessary to help address hunger in developing countries, and that it would be immoral for Britain not to help developing countries to take up GM.
Millions of small-scale farmers in Africa would disagree. African farmers and civil society have repeatedly rejected GM crops, and asked their governments to ban them.
Paterson does not appear to understand the complex realities and challenges of farming in Africa, nor does he grasp the limitations of GM crops. He fails to recognise that farmers in Africa already have effective approaches to seed and agriculture, which are far more environmentally and farmer-friendly than GM.
Most of all, he fails to acknowledge the devastating impact that GM crops will have on African farmers and farming systems.
In the UK, Africa is often talked about as a failing continent where the hungry apparently wait around for northern benefactors to save us. Talk of Africa seems to imply that we have little or no food production, that our farmers are clueless, our seed unproductive.
We won’t go into how patronising and insulting this attitude is. Instead, we will focus on how this failure to acknowledge African farming systems and seed is being used to wipe them out.
Traditional African farming systems have developed an incredible diversity of seed varieties, which are able to deal with the multiple challenges of farming. Seed breeding is a complex art, and scientists who really listen and engage will realise that African farmers have a vast amount of ecological knowledge. Having many different types of seed – bred for their flavours and better nutrition, and which have evolved with local pests and diseases and are adapted to different soils and weather patterns – is a far better strategy of resilience than developing a single crop that is bound to fail in the face of climate change.
It is a myth that the green revolution has helped poor farmers. By pushing just a few varieties of seed that need fertilisers and pesticides, agribusiness has eroded our indigenous crop diversity. It is not a solution to hunger and malnutrition, but the cause. If northern governments genuinely wish to help African agriculture, they should support the revival of seed-saving practices, to ensure that there is diversity in farmers’ hands.
But GM crops and produce pose an even greater threat to Africa’s greatest wealth. GM companies make it illegal to save seed. We have seen that farmers in North America whose crop was cross-pollinated by GM pollen have been sued by the GM Company. About 80 percent of African small-scale farmers save their seed.
How are they supposed to protect the varieties they have developed, crossed and shared over generations from GM contamination? This will be a disaster for them according to the Guardian.
I ask myself where movements and corporations like these will leave the average rural subsistence and commercial farmer.
Let us be continuously cognizant and vigilant of the so called “helpful organizations”.
*The writer is Tapuwa Justice Mashangwa, a young entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Emerald Agribusiness Consultancy. He can be contacted on 0739096418 or email: [email protected]
Sidumisile Mabena