African GMO Grain Dependency
December 27th, 2010 Africa is undergoing an agricultural revolution. The question is what sort of revolution will it be. There is some question as to the reliance on GMO seed that may come back to haunt those who subscribe to it. Europe is generally GMO free. The USA is pushing GMO food that has largely been untested as to the long term effects on humans. Americans and others such as South Africans who have accepted GMO grains are the guinea pigs.
Malawi is an interesting case. After drought in 2005 the president decided to give out subsidized grain and fertilizer which has resulted in bumper crops. But as the article below indicates there has grown a dependency on this subsidized seed and fertilizer that has created a desperate market in slavery and self mutilation for those who do not get subsidies and who cannot afford to pay market prices. This can lead to corruption as supply does not meet demand. Questions about the appropriate nature of this course, following the path of the so called `green revolution' which has been questioned by some based on the experience in India and Pakistan where after initial success the farmers are now deep in debt due to their dependency on chemical fertilizer and fuel.
A sustainable path needs to be developed if Africa is not to become re-colonized by the Monsanto's of the world.
From GMO Free Europe
2010-05-18
COMESA urge GM seeds among members claiming threefold GM yields in MalawiCOMESA secretary general Sindiso Ngwenya has urged member countries to consider genetically modifying their seed to increase yields in the region. Speaking at the Alliance for Commodity Trade in Eastern and Southern Africa (ACTESA) stakeholders meeting on Friday, Ngwenya said modifying seed as Malawi was doing would increase yields threefold in the region. "Malawi tried to do some genetic seed modification and they have now increased their yields threefold," Ngwenya said.
For more of this
http://www.gmo-free-regions.org/gmo-free-regions/netherlands/gmo-free-news-from-the-netherlands/news/en/21973.html
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From World Watch Institute
African Leaders Pursue "Malawi Miracle"
by Ben Block on May 26, 2009
Malawi produced 3.4 million tons of corn last year, more than double its average output in the 2000–2005 seasons.Five years ago, the rains disappeared for a month across much of Malawi, just as the country's corn crop reached a critical growth period. As a result, the 2005 harvest was the worst in a decade. Yet again, millions of farmers were in need of food aid.
President Bingu wa Mutharika decided the next year would be different. Despite World Bank disapproval and intense government debate, Malawi's National Assembly distributed 3.4 million coupons to farmers to subsidize purchases of inorganic fertilizer and improved seeds. To ensure that the US$58 million program would support small producers rather than large commercial estates, households were limited to receiving two 50-kilogram fertilizer bags each.
With the help of heavy rains, the 2005-2006 season resulted in a twofold increase in corn production. The program was repeated the next year. By late 2007, Malawi began exporting its surplus corn to Zimbabwe.
"For four years in a row, a starving country is no longer a starving country," said Pedro Sanchez, an advisor to the Malawian government who directs the Tropical Agriculture and the Rural Environment Program at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
A dozen countries throughout Africa may soon replicate the "Malawi Miracle," as the program is now called, Sanchez said during a speech at the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) annual conference in Arlington, Virginia, last week.
"This is Green Revolution stuff - India, Pakistan in the `60s," said Sanchez, the 2002 recipient of the internationally recognized World Food Prize. "I don't know any other options that are working."
Zambia, Ghana, Senegal, and Kenya have recently announced plans for similar subsidy programs. Still, such top-down reforms may fail, experts warn, without improvements in the countries' commodity markets and transportation infrastructure. Environmentalists are also concerned that the programs may lead to farmer dependencies on synthetic fertilizer and genetically modified seeds.
International donors such as the World Bank and U.S. Agency for International Development originally opposed direct subsidy programs, arguing instead for long-term solutions that rely on the private sector.
"Donors want to see their funding going into investments on roads or research, not paying for income or salaries," said Samuel Benin, a research fellow with the Washington, D.C.-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
But since Malawi's agricultural reforms, the World Bank and other international financial institutions have increased investments in agriculture, including public spending initiatives.
"The private sector cannot do it all. It cannot reach farmers everywhere because [private companies] are looking to make a profit," Benin said. "Donors have always known that supporting farmers is a good thing. It's just the channel of how to do it that has been difficult."
Support for direct subsidies in countries such as Malawi and Mozambique is also driven by concern that fertilizer prices will rise in the future. During last summer's jump in energy prices, urea, the world's most common nitrogen fertilizer, doubled in cost. Diammonium phosphate (DAP), often produced using natural gas, increased by nearly five times, according to the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC).
Public spending initiatives have not always found success in Africa. In Ethiopia, government subsidies for fertilizers and improved seeds helped increase corn production dramatically in 2001, but the country lacked the infrastructure to distribute the harvest to remote communities, leading to a crop surplus and a crash in prices.
"Without investing in complementary services, [the program] actually did not help by investing in fertilizer and seeds," Benin said. "You need good agricultural systems to move foods to less-developed areas and connect with other markets. By not investing in other areas, that was a failure."
Replicating the "Malawi Miracle" may bring additional problems that have become associated with agricultural success in both developing and developed countries. Agricultural subsidies have resulted in greater crop yields, but farms have often become reliant on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and irrigation in areas often prone to drought, critics say.
Reliance on genetically modified seeds can also threaten the availability of locally adapted seed varieties for future generations. About 700 local crops were once cultivated worldwide, enabling communities to turn to drought-resistant crops during droughts or other seed varities that can withstand severe weather conditions. Yet 15 crops now supply an estimated 90 percent of the world's food, said Louise Jackson, a soil scientist at the University of California at Davis and a co-chair of the DIVERSITAS network on agro-biodiversity.
"The reality is that in many places of the world, local people are no longer reliant on local [crop] varieties," Jackson said at last week's AIBS conference.
Organizations such as the United Nations and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa are attempting to increase agricultural yields through systems that do not rely entirely on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Sanchez said that Malawi is attempting to use nitrogen-fixing trees or other organic methods, but the financing of organic or ecosystem-based agriculture alternatives simply do not exist in much of sub-Saharan Africa.
For more of this
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6119
From Terraviva
AGRICULTURE: Desperation Over Subsidies
By Claire Ngozo
LILONGWE, Malawi, Dec 27, 2010 (IPS) - As the rains start to fall in Malawi, marking the beginning of the growing season, government is continuing to implement the fertiliser and seed subsidy programme which has since made the country a bread basket in the Southern African Development Community, SADC.
The programme, introduced in 2004, is for smallholder farmers who cannot afford farm inputs such as seed and fertiliser at the normal market price. But many needy farmers are being left out, and are employing desperate measures in order to access these commodities – ranging from attempting to sell a parent, to selling their own private parts. Some people have also been shot as they scrambled for these much-needed inputs.
A 21 -year-old man, Jolam Ganizani, from Malawi's central district of Ntchisi, is in police custody after he attempted to sell his own mother to use the money to buy fertiliser and seed.
Police prosecutor Sub Inspector Peter Njiragoma told local journalists last month that Ganizani had confessed to the police that he was so poverty- stricken that he felt that selling his mother would be the solution to his problems.
"He had wanted to use the money obtained from selling his mother to buy farm inputs which would assist him to grow a lot of crops and harvest more," explained Njiragoma.
Malawi is highly susceptible to human trafficking because of high levels of poverty, low literacy levels and HIV/AIDS, according to a local NGO, the Malawi Network Against Child Trafficking, MNACT.
But Ganizani is not the only person desperate to access inputs for his agricultural activities. Another man, 22-year-old Pilirani Lazarous, is receiving medical care after he cut off his private parts in November and was offering them for sale in order to use the money to buy fertiliser for his one- hectare garden.
Speaking from his hospital bed at Kamuzu Central Hospital in the country's capital, Lilongwe, Lazarous, a father of one, told IPS he was not on the list to access the subsidised fertiliser as he had failed to register and had to find a way of buying the "expensive fertiliser".
According to the police both Ganizani and Lazarous are sane. However, without access to the coupons that allow people to access the subsidised fertiliser, many people continue to be desperate. The beneficiaries in the subsidy programme receive two coupons - one for accessing cheap seed and the other for buying fertiliser at a subsidised rate.
With a coupon, one is able to buy a 5 kilogramme bag of seed at just 65 cents and a 50 kilogramme bag of fertiliser at only $3. The normal market price for the same amount of seed is $12 and a 50 kilogramme bag of fertiliser is $33. Up to 60 percent of the country's 13.1 million population lives below the poverty line, according to the United Nations. They cannot therefore afford to buy the inputs at the normal price and end up fighting tooth and nail to access the commodities.
During the December 2010 sitting of Parliament, legislators took Minister of Agriculture Peter Mwanza to task on why the commodities were not available in many areas. Mwanza blamed the problems on "transportation problems".
Principal Secretary in Ministry of Agriculture also said many farmers are rapidly buying the inputs and that this is putting pressure on the supply logistics to the outlets selling the subsidies.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, 1.6 million farming households are to benefit from this year's subsidy.
Despite challenges at home with the agriculture subsidy programme, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi's president, who is also African Union chairperson, is urging African ministers of agriculture and finance to lobby for subsidies in the agriculture sector. "I urge you ministers of agriculture and finance to stand up and fight for subsidies.
There is no way an African farmer can survive without subsidies," Mutharika told an Africa Agriculture ministers' summit which took place in Malawi in October 2010
For more of this
http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=53965
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From Christian Science Monitor
How genetically modified seeds can help - and hurt - Africa's farmers
Proponents say genetically modified seeds arm Africa's family farms in the war against pests, droughts, and depleting soil. Critics cite concerns about biodiversity and health.
By Drew Hinshaw, Correspondent / September 23, 2010
Dakar, Senegal
Just how controversial can a sweet potato be?
Well, if you're talking about the Nairobi-bred Bt Sweet Potato, which is genetically-hotwired to sheen itself in an antiviral protein coat, it's hard to fathom a more contentious root vegetable.
Unless, perhaps, you're discussing the sweet potato's subterranean cousin, West Africa's Bt Cassava plant. Geneticists rewrote that crop's DNA to fight an endemic virus. Then there's Tanzania's Bt Cotton, which conveniently secretes its own toxic bacterial pesticide. The toxin shoos flies, but is that the kind of thing you want your tube socks made of?
Proponents of these lab-perfected plants say they arm Africa's family farms in their war against pests, droughts, and depleting soil. Climate change, they add, has hit the arid and famine-prone areas of Africa harder than most other regions of the world, altering regular rainfall schedules and causing failed harvests. Also, say backers of genetically modified (GM) seeds, without hardier seeds, the planters of the continent are essentially being asked to foot America's gigantic carbon bill.
But in its latest report, the African Center for Biosafety in Johannesburg, South Africa argues the counter case: Far from sowing prosperity for small farmers, South Africa's adventure into genetically modifying corn has bankrupted its agriculturalists.
The breadbasket's corn planters, the report says, have been left with a surplus of corn that they can't sell, thanks to international bans on GM crops.
"They are unable to really compete," Director Miriam Mayet says.
For the moment, such concerns are confined to South Africa, the continent's only country where GM seeds are commercially planted. But many of Africa's less food-secure countries are cozying up to the technology.
The European Union maintains a de-facto ban on GM foods.
In America, the seeds are blamed for sprouting a crop monoculture, where whole once-sundry states have been reduced to sprawling cookie-cutter corn fields, and everything from apples to gas tanks to your soda-slupring stomach is coated in corn.
But Mr. Alhassan says new seeds would be widely welcomed in arid areas of West Africa, where food security issues are hot politics.
"African farmers have to spend a lot on inputs, especially in agro-chemicals which present health hazards to them," he says. "To combat the effects of climate change, we need to go easy on biochemicals. Using biotechnology we can reduce the quantity we use."
But Mayet worries that foreign agro-corps could stamp out Africa's splendid plant diversity, surrendering whole swaths of some the world's richest farmland into endless rows of untested Frankencorn.
That wouldn't just be unhealthy for the economy, she says, but for the human body.
"There has been no robust, independent, postcommercial testing [of most GM crops]," she says. "In South Africa, GM maize is consumed daily by millions of vulnerable people."
Moreover, Mayet worries that Alhassan's GM revolution would make the continent's family farms dependents of multinational seed corporations like the St. Louis-based Monsanto.
"The true beneficiaries of GM technology," she writes "are not farmers but those supplying seeds, external inputs, the grain traders, and the animal feed industry."
For a hungry world, this is no small potatoes. Africa is hogging 60 percent of the world's unfarmed arable land. The question remains how those gorgeous stretches of leafy Congolese riversides, and sandy Senegalese steppes will be sown: By family farmers subsuming new techniques into their centuries-old farming routines, or by 21st century megafarms, sowing seeds on the behest of Monsanto.
For more of this
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/Africa-Monitor/2010/0923/How-genetically-modified-seeds-can-help-and-hurt-Africa-s-farmers
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From Mindfully.org
`Green Revolution' in India has Farmers under Severe Debt
Jaspal Singh Sidhu / UNI 16dec01
New Delhi — The farmers of northern states that grew bumper crops during the Green Revolution are now reeling under heavy debt, finding themselves incapable of changing the dominant cropping pattern that is proving a big drag on their economy as well as soil fertility.
Though the output in the post-Green Revolution era is still high in these areas, profits are declining because of rising cost of inputs and inadequate increase in the price of outputs, according to recently-conducted studies in two select pockets of Punjab and Western Uttar Pradesh.
Both pockets, which present the same family land- ownership pattern, small fragmented holdings and intensive cultivation, has shown indebtedness of farmers crossing 90 per cent. Besides, the increasingly dependence on tube wells for irrigation has led to over-exploitation of ground water, the level of which is continuously falling.
One of the "`Diagnostic Study"` was conducted by the National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research (NACP) in association with the Society for Education and Social Welfare, an NGO, in Muzaffarnagar District of Western U.P.–one of the most agriculturally-productive areas of the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. The study team of farm experts surveyed 150 farming households in several villages including Allum, Bhaneda, Bharsi, Kanaiyan and Nala. The other study was conducted by CRRID, an NGO, with experts drawn from Punjab Agriculture University, Ludhiana, and Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi, and with active association of panchayats in villages including Baluaana, Bucho Kalan, Poohla, Rai Khana, Mari, Doomwali and Pathrala. The survey covered 308 farming households.
Both studies, encompassing a long stretch of contiguous Green Revolution area covering Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, however, draw almost similar conclusions on availability of farming information and technical know-how to farmers by their governments. For the choice and use of inputs, the farmers depend on "dealers" (private traders) with no or inadequate availability of information from their state governments on technology, prices, selection of right inputs, value-addition, alternative crops and enterprises, credit and market channels.
The farmers are facing various constrains which include lack of adequate bank credit, adulteration of fertilisers and pesticides, and inferior quality of seeds. The governments also provide either no or ineffective mechanism to monitor or regulate the deteriorating quality of seeds and inputs which contribute to declining profits in farming.
Against the backdrop of farming communities fast running into economic crisis that could result in social unrest in rural areas sustaining 60 per cent of the population, the two studies see only certain alternatives left for the state governments. These are to help and encourage the farmers form self-help groups relevant to the regions in garnering credit, to go for cooperative marketing of milk, to operate and maintain canals, to go for collective purchase of select seeds, pesticides and other inputs, and to adopt advanced farm operations.
For more of this
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/India-Green-Revolution.htm
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From IPS
Africa's Future Lies in a Green Energy Grid
By Stephen Leahy*
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Dec 14, 2010 (IPS) - Development in Africa could falter as climate change grips the continent, increasing the length and severity of droughts and floods by altering precipitation patterns, among other impacts.
The region needs a major shift in its economic development policies and thinking towards decentralised, green economic development, experts now say.
"The world's big economies are largely living off financial transactions which are unconnected to development," warns Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary-general of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
"Export growth does not automatically result in green economic growth, we must look at trade for development," said Panitchpakdi.
In a rejection of failed neoliberal economic policies, Panitchpakdi said strong national policies on investments, taxation, protection of local industries, including subsidies, and changes to less restrictive intellectual property regimes are what is needed to green economies in Africa and elsewhere.
"Green economic development underpins environmental protection, economic growth and development," he said.
The tentative global economic recovery this year is largely a jobless recovery because the current economic growth model is designed to make "people redundant", said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).
"It favours large concentrated power grids, for example, which require very few people," Steiner told IPS.
A low-carbon economy is not for the rich countries, it is for the poorest because it is more resource-efficient, employs more people and brings development at a lower cost, he said, adding, "We have to grow the economies of Africa but only through green sustainable development, delinked from increasing resource use."
"After 50 years of development, 80 percent of Kenya's population had no access to electricity. Now, after a 2008 shift to renewable energy, more Kenyans have access to electricity than ever before," he noted.
"More than half a billion people in rural Africa have little or no access to electricity," noted Nebojsa Nakicenovic of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
"They pay a large part of their incomes for some kerosene lighting or diesel electric at a cost that is twice that of what the average European pays," Nakicenovic, a leading energy economist, told IPS. "Or worst of all they are forced to rely on flashlights, which is the most expensive form of lighting available."
Universal access to modern energy services globally has been estimated to cost between $80 and $100 billion a year in a number of recent studies, including those by the International Energy Agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation in Vienna.
"That seems like a lot of money but it is significantly less than the $300 to $600 billion being spent annually to subsidise the fossil fuel sector," Nakicenovic pointed out.
Technically, it is doable, representing roughly 20 gigawatts of energy generation - less than what countries like Brazil and South Africa have been able to add in recent years.
Increasing energy access in Africa has a huge range of benefits, he says. It would drive economic development, improve the health of millions by reducing indoor air pollution from kerosene and biomass burning, reduce emissions of greenhouse gases like black carbon and reduce deforestation.
Local technology and local energy distribution in the form of small-scale hydro, biomass, biogas, solar, wind and other forms of production are best suited to Africa. The challenge is mobilising the investments needed, he said. These should be national programmes with long-term financial commitments from the international community.
"We don't need international climate treaties to do this," said Nakicenovic. "Doing things right will bring green growth and prosperity."
For more of this
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53856
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