Dumping GMOs in Africa.

• Author: Kojo Tsimese, Lawrence
• Position: Bio-Repression

Food insecurity is one of the most terrible manifestations of human deprivation and is inextricably linked to every other facet of development. Poverty is one of the major causes of food insecurity, and sustainable progress in poverty alleviation is critical to improved access to food. It is linked not only to poor national economic performance but also to the political structure that renders poor people powerless.

So policy matters of a general nature, and in particular good governance, are of overriding importance for food security. The adoption of unhelpful economic policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) such as the Structural Adjustment program (SAP) by most African governments has rather aggravated the appalling situation. Farmers and farms are as usual the worst hit by such policies.

Modernization

Africa's lagging agricultural production is frequently blamed on its failure to adopt more productive farming technologies. Proponents of high-input agriculture argue that if the region's predominantly smallholder food crop farmers could be supported to modernize their practices, then yields would increase dramatically as happened in Asia and Latin America with the advent of Green Revolution crop varieties and input packages. The Green Revolution promoted seeds that required chemicals, irrigation and other expensive investments that could only be adopted by larger, wealthier farmers, but not by smaller, poorer farmers. This allowed the larger, wealthier farmers to expand at the expense of the smaller farmers depriving them of land.

During the boom years of the Green Revolution, from 1970 to 1990s, world food production did go up dramatically. Unfortunately, hunger increased in most parts of Africa and other parts of the Third World as well. The Green Revolution created hunger amidst abundance. Production goes up, but that production is in the hands of larger farmers, who expand at the expense of smaller farmers. These smaller farmers eventually lose their land, move to the cities, don't find jobs, and can't afford to buy the additional food that's produced.

Globalization

International trade policies, the domination of the food chain by corporate interests, unequal land ownership and the displacement of small farmers are the major forces driving rural poverty and hunger. For many agencies seeking to alleviate famine and cope with Africa's crippling level of poverty, globalization is a key and controversial issue. Those who favor the process, like the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus, contends that it will lead to the modernization of economies, the removal of trade barriers and to the elimination of want. He says the prospects are good for "achieving more rapid poverty reduction and faster growth." But the argument is that trade liberalization has harmed Africa and that the freer trade, especially in agricultural produce, has worked to "threaten or destroy the livelihoods of millions of farmers" and to keep people poor. The perverse way that farm subsidies work in both the United States and European Economic Community, the US and Europe are dumping agricultural commodities on Third World economies at prices often below the cost of production. Local farmers can't compete. Here is an example using sugar as a commodity in Kenya culled from a BBC report late last year.

Acording to the report Selpha Maende Okweno is an 87-year-old grandmother living in Kenya's Busia district. For decades her family had grown sugar cane and made a good living from it. But now it is threatened by trade policies which enable foreign sugar exporters to sell sugar more cheaply...