cc ILRI Proposing "grandiose solutions without first diagnosing the causes of what ails Africa and her people has never stopped the World Bank, corporations and the odd billionaire from prescribing the wrong medicine for the continent,' writes Joan Baxter, as the Bank makes plans to "unlock' the future of African agriculture.
"A VIVID IMAGE OF RURAL POVERTY'?
The opening line in the World Bank's "World Development Report 2008 --
Agriculture for Development' goes like this: "An African woman bent
under the sun, weeding sorghum in an arid field with a hoe, a child
strapped on her back--a vivid image of rural poverty.'[1]
With all due respect to the team of World Bank experts who put together
this extensive (and no doubt very expensive) 365-page report, there are
problems with this picture. Conspicuously absent are the woman's family
members and other women with whom she may be chatting and laughing as
she weeds. And she may be quite happy to have her baby snuggled against
her back -- where better for both mother and child?
But its lack of context and narrow focus are not the only problems with
this World Bank "vivid image of rural poverty'. It's a one-dimensional
stereotype concocted to arouse pity rather than inspire the respect that
Africa's farmers deserve. It ignores their intricate knowledge of local
resources, the crop varieties they have developed to cope with a wide
range of soil and climatic conditions, their complex and resilient
agro-ecological family farming systems. It misses the bigger picture,
the myriad other crops that the woman undoubtedly cultivates on a very
agro-biodiverse family farm, the valuable trees that she and her family
depend on for income, food, fibre, medicine, wood and that the soils
depend on for fertility and protection. It perpetuates the false notion
that Africa's family farms are inefficient and non-productive.
It ignores the importance of the family unit and the solidarity of the
rural community, its advantages over urban slums. It misses the
enthusiasm, ingenuity and energy of Africa's farmers who continue to
produce their own dazzling array of crops and the seeds for them. The
stereotype doesn't jive with reality of women's farming groups like the
indefatigable women of Petaka in Mali, the determined "Perseverance
Women's Group' in the village of Bongor in Sierra Leone, the exuberant
"Rural Housewives' Group' in the village of Ngalli II in Cameroon
singing and dancing all the way to their agro-forest.
Countless more farmer groups (male and female) across the continent are
working tirelessly to increase their incomes, against all the political
and economic odds stacked against them, and in the face of increasing
hardship of climate change that they are not causing.
But this kind of detail and perspective would spoil the stereotype the
World Bank is promoting of the universally hapless, helpless African
farmer, unable to do much of anything without the wisdom of World Bank
and its corporate friends.
A VIVID IMAGE OF MODERN URBAN WEALTH, HUBRIS AND GREED?
Since the World Bank seems comfortable with the business of stereotypes,
perhaps we should offer them another one: "A clique of very powerful,
well-fed and very rich corporate tycoons and bankers clad in expensive
suits, meeting around a gleaming Board Room table and deciding how to
"unlock' the future of African agriculture -- a vivid image of 21st
century urban wealth, hubris and greed.'
Available from Pambazuka Press In
late January this year, the World Bank hosted just such a high-level
meeting of "experts' at its headquarters in Washington, DC. Their
purpose was to "unlock Africa's agriculture,' "assist African
smallholder farmers to transition from subsistence to commercial
farming' and to "help nurse Africa's baby agricultural industry to
maturity'.[2]
Hosting the confab was the World Bank president himself, Robert
Zoellick, formerly vice chairman of the Goldman Sachs Group, one of the
most powerful and wealthiest investment banks on earth. And who were
these handpicked "experts' that he invited to Washington to decide the
fate of millions of African farmers? Unfortunately, we don't have the
complete list because the World Bank has failed to respond to repeated
requests for this information. So we have only a short World Bank report
on the meeting to give us some idea of which "experts' were present.
What is almost certain is that not one of them has ever looked past the
stereotype they themselves are developing of Africa's family farmers --
and their farms -- as pathetic, immature and unproductive.
Among those represented at the meeting were, for example, the US-based
retail giant, Walmart, and the South Africa-based retailer Shoprite, and
beer maker SABMiller. The report says that they "spoke exciting [sic]
about their belief in the African small farmer'.[3] Also present at the
meeting were Standard Chartered and Cargill.
It is not obvious that these participants are "experts' on Africa's
family farming or understand the very real problems that they face and
therefore, what the solutions would be for them. But proposing grandiose
solutions without first diagnosing the causes of what ails Africa and
her people has never stopped the World Bank, corporations and the odd
billionaire from prescribing the wrong medicine for the continent.
The Structural Adjustment Programs, for instance, which were then
replaced by Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, have all involved
austerity budgets that have slashed health and education budgets,
agricultural extension services and support programs for family farmers
and rural communities. The Green Revolution supported by the Bill &
Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations emphasises global markets,
imported seed, fertilisers and pesticides, and merely threatens the
diversity and resilience of agro-ecological family farms.[4]
Furthermore, on the advice of so-called "donors', the World Bank Group
and the International Monetary Fund, trade liberalisation has cranked
open African doors to the flooding of local markets with cheap and
imported -- often subsidized -- foodstuffs that undermine local
economies.[5]
All of this leads to ever-increasing hardship for Africa's family
farmers. Even with all the enormous obstacles in their way -- poor roads,
lack of access to markets and basic amenities such as schooling, lack
of storage and processing equipment, unfair competition from dumped
produce from overseas, bad advice from foreign experts, climate change
and a serious lack of respect -- Africa's smallholders still manage to
produce 80 per cent of the continent's food.[6]
But now it seems that the World Bank and its corporate friends have yet
another even more dangerous plan for Africa and her farmers. This
involves taking over Africa's agriculture so that corporations and
wealthy investors will ultimately control the production and sale of
food, agrofuels and other commodities grown on the continent. That same
old corporate strategy that has already decimated the North American
family farms and food system, taking complete control of the food chain
with a "Corporate Food Crusade'.[7]
They don't frame it that way, of course. The "experts' at the World Bank
meeting spoke of boosting "the productivity of Africa's farm sector,
creating jobs, improving livelihoods and alleviating poverty'.[8] You'd
swear that they were kind, compassionate people sincerely interested in
the welfare of Africa's family farmers and food security on the
continent. Until, that is, you examine who they are and what it is they
really have in mind for African agriculture.
WHO ARE THESE "EXPERTS' WHO WILL "UNLOCK' AFRICA'S AGRICULTURE?
Walmart is the world's largest retailer, owned by the Walton family in
the US. The net wealth of the four Waltons is about US$90 billion; on
the Forbes list of the world's billionaires they rank 10th, 20th, 21st
and 22nd.[9] Walmart is known for its extremely low wages and cutthroat
business practises in its global sourcing network, which drive down
prices no matter what cost to producers. Walmart has given rise to the
term "Walmartisation', synonymous with union-bashing and a race to the
bottom.[10] Walmart's foundation has set aside US$1 billion to "invest
in agriculture in Africa'.[11] Given its own record of cutting costs
and increasing profits on the backs of employees and producers, it is
difficult to imagine that Walmart has even a microscopic shred of
interest in the welfare of Africa's farmers.
Another presence at the World Bank meeting was Cargill, the world's
largest agribusiness and food trader, the world's largest privately
owned company.[12] Cargill is not an obvious candidate to be best friend
to family farmers in Africa, or to anyone else for that matter. Among
other things, the company has been sued on behalf of trafficked children
who were abused on cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast,[13] has been
responsible for food contamination [14] and for causing rampant
deforestation.[15]
SAB Miller is a global brewing and bottling giant, a major bottler of
Coca Cola.[16] The company, with profits of over 2 billion British
pounds a year, has been accused of using tax havens to evade 20 million
pounds worth of taxes across Africa and in India.[17] Predictably SAB
Miller "strongly rejects' the allegations.[18]
Standard Chartered, also among the "experts' in Washington to "unlock'
African agriculture, is a multinational financial services company
dating back to colonial times when its profits accrued from British
colonies.[19] Its recent history is chequered with scandals, described
benignly in business circles as "ethical lapses'.[20] Standard Chartered
is now heavily into private banking,[21] a euphemism for socking very
wealthy people's money away in tax havens.
So what on earth were representatives of such corporate giants and banks
doing meeting behind closed doors with the World Bank president to
discuss African agriculture? Their intentions, while shrouded in
corporate-speak, can only be understood by reading between the lines of
the World Bank report.
First, they appear to be after farmland. The World Bank Group, despite
its claim to be promoting "responsible agricultural investment'[22] is
fully behind the land grabbing in Africa. It helps set up investment
promotion agencies and provides consultants to help foreign investors
get their hands on massive tracts of land, often with extremely generous
tax holidays.[23]
At the Washington meeting, participants said there is a need for more
agricultural investment in Africa, where "60 percent of all arable land
continues to lie fallow' or is "uncultivated'. The implication here is
that fallow or "uncultivated' land is somehow unused and available for
investors to gobble up. A beginner's guide to environmental
sustainability and agro-ecological agriculture would teach them that
fallow land is immensely important. It improves soil fertility,
preserves biodiversity, protects precious water and soil resources, acts
as a crucial source for firewood and construction materials, for
medicines, wild annual crops and tree crops, and straight-from-the-tree
delights such as palm wine. Fallow periods are becoming shorter,[24]
suggesting that there is not a surplus of arable land in Africa, but
increasingly a shortage of it.
"Today's scientific evidence,' says the UN Special Rapporteur on Food,
"demonstrates that agro-ecological methods outperform the use of
chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live --
especially in unfavorable environments.'[25] Using agro-ecological
methods, family farmers could double food production in critical regions
in the next ten years and also improve the situation of the
poorest.'[26]
But such evidence seems to have eluded the "experts' meeting at the
World Bank. They spoke not of family farms but of "private farms' --
undoubtedly mechanised plantations doused with chemicals and heavily
irrigated, planted with a handful of seed varieties (including
genetically modified ones), which will be in the hands of enormous
investors -- to "satisfy demand from global retail giants like Walmart
and Shoprite'.[27] These "private farms' can, they say, "provide jobs,
help raise farmers' incomes [as lowly paid farm labourers? tenant
farmers?], improve livelihoods in rural communities as well as provide
health, education and housing services to rural dwellers'.[28]
These are precisely the fallacious arguments being used by foreign
investors -- hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, corporations -- that
have already grabbed tens of millions of hectares of Africa's land to
transform it into giant plantations that are the anti-thesis of the
family farms.[29] These corporations and bankers do not believe in
farming as a way of life; they believe in farming as a very profitable
business that they control. Their goal is not to improve family farming
in Africa, but to eradicate it.
Interestingly, the "experts' from the top end of the private sector,
corporations and banks worth billions of dollars, claim that to
transform African agriculture, they should be able to access public
money. In Washington, they argued that, "Success will come if African
governments and donors worry less about the public dollar finding its
way into the private bottom line.'[30] In their distorted worldview, by
turning Africans into labourers on their own land, they will be
"rendering a public service' and they "should be able to benefit from
public funding.'
One wonders how their "free market' ideology, their disdain for the
public sector and loathing of taxes reconciles with their desire to
suckle from the public teat.
A GLOBAL CORPORATE ASSAULT
The World Bank meeting is just part of a global assault that is being
waged on Africa's farmers by giant corporations and financial interests.
The World Economic Forum in Davos is also in on the act, with its
report "Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture -- A Roadmap for
Stakeholders.'[31] The stakeholders that "championed' the initiative are
17 giant global corporations, "Archer Daniels Midland, BASF, Bunge,
Cargill, The Coca-Cola Company, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods,
Metro, Monsanto Company, Nestlà ©, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever,
Wal-Mart Stores and Yara International'.[32]
These corporations, about as far removed from Africa's family farmers as
one can get and still be in the same universe, reportedly "contributed
tremendous leadership and technical expertise'. The report recommends
"market-based solutions' but would have us believe their real interest
is to help the world's rural poor.
Across the continent, donors and governments echo the same rhetoric,
saying that agriculture must become "agribusiness', that farmers must
produce for the global marketplace, that the private sector (with public
money?) is the answer, the "hoe and cutlass' are no longer viable;
mechanisation on large privately held plots of land are the future.[33]
This is coming at a time that the UN Special Rapporteur on Food is
warning that farmers around the world need to wean themselves off fossil
fuels.[34] Africa's farmers won't need to do that, if they are allowed
to keep their land and their farms -- they've never become addicted to
fossil fuels.
To soften up the public to accept this massive takeover of Africa's
land, seeds, farms, water resources -- this War on Africa's Family
Farmers -- the corporate "experts' and bankers start with stereotypes
that reduce the African farmer to an object of pity and derision as
backwards and dirt-poor. Conjure up that "vivid image of rural poverty'.
Once again, it pays to consider an alternative image, one of the
wage-earning woman turned labourer on land she once farmed. This one is
real and it comes from one of those corporate "farms' in Africa, on a
20,000-hectare lease taken out by Addax Bioenergy of the Addax &
Oryx Group on 20,000 hectares of land in Sierra Leone, for the
production of sugarcane for ethanol to be exported to Europe. A woman,
once a farmer and now a labourer on the Addax plantation, approaches
visitors with open arms, begging them to look at her "diminished' body
now that she is toiling under the hot sun, carrying sugarcane for a
large corporation and earning about US$2 a day.[35] This doesn't even
begin to compensate her for the loss of her farm and the many crops she
once grew to feed herself and her family -- a vivid image of the truly
impoverished life of a lowly paid farm labourer on a corporate
plantation in Africa. But this image -- of the future they envision for
Africa's farmers -- is not one that the World Bank and large corporations
wish to visit.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* Joan Baxter is a journalist, development researcher and award-winning author. Her book "Dust From Our Eyes -- An Unblinkered Look at Africa' is published by Pambazuka Press.
* Please send comments to Email address removed or comment online at Pambazuka News.
NOTES
[1] World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. 2007.
Washington, DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development / The World Bank. p 1
[2] World Bank. 29 January 2011. Concessional funding key to unlock Africa's agriculture. Washington, DC: The World Bank. http://bit.ly/fzQlXO
[3] Ibid
[4] Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy. Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) Fact Sheet. http://bit.ly/fj39uO
[5] Christian Aid. June 2005. The economics of failure: the real cost of 'free' trade for poor countries
http://bit.ly/i3SY09
[6] See: Steering Committee of the Pan-African Campaign: We Are the
Solution: Celebrating African Family Farming. 7 February 2011. Dakar
Declaration. Available at: http://bit.ly/ftQqKs: AND: Altieri, Miguel A. 2009. Agroecology, small farms and food sovereignty. Monthly Review. http://bit.ly/hL5S2Y
[7] Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy. 3 February
2011. Onward Corporate Soldiers: colonizing the poor for their own good.
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/3288
[8] World Bank. 29 January 2011. Op. cit.
[9] Forbes. 9 March 2011. The World' Billionaires. http://www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires/list
[10] Colin McGranahan, analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Company,
cited in: Stohlman, Joseph. 4 March 2011. Walmart enters Africa. Think
Africa Press. http://thinkafricapress.com/article/walmart-enters-africa
[11] World Bank. 29 January 2011. Op. cit.
[12] Forbes. Andrea Murphy, Private Eye. 8 February 2011. Private companies: 2011's top spot? http://blogs.forbes.com/andreamurphy/2011/02/08/private-companies-2011s-top-spot/
[13] Keating, Gina. 16 July 2005. ADM, Nestle and Cargill sued to end
trafficking, torture and forced labor on African cocoa farms. Reuters.
Available at: http://bit.ly/hdpXx3
[14] United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection
Service. 6 October 2007. Wisconsin Firm Recalls Ground Beef Products
Due to Possible E. coli O157:H7 Contamination. http://1.usa.gov/exxiyQ
[15] Astor, Michael. 19 July 2006. Amazon port in stormy waters
U.S. company finds resistance by environmentalists. Associated Press. Available at:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/4058727.html
[16] SABMiller, Overview. http://bit.ly/h2nQsA
[17] ActionAid. November 2010. Calling Time -- Why SABMiller should stop dodging taxes in Africa. http://bit.ly/hIJvh7
[18] SABMiller News. 26 November 2010. SABMiller reacts to ActionAid's report on tax in developing markets. http://bit.ly/hv3wXy
[19] Standard Chartered. History. http://www.standardchartered.com/about-us/history/en/index.html
[20] Lee, Yoolim and Menon, Jon. 4 November 2009. Standard Chartered 79% return overtakes HSBC with Asian rebound. Bloomberg. http://bloom.bg/hfL4Xb
[21] NEWSGD.com. 29 May 2007. Standard Chartered Bank sets up private banking HQ in Singapore. http://www.newsgd.com/business/enterprise/200705290048.htm
[22] Deininger, Klaus and Byerlee, Derek. 2011. Rising global interest
in farmland: can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?
Washington, DC: The World Bank. p xiv
[23] Baxter, Joan. 6 May 2010. Protecting the investors -- but what about the people? Pambazuka News. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/64224
[24] Franzel, S. 1999. Socioeconomic factors affecting the adoption
potential of improved tree fallows in Africa. Agroforestry Systems: 47:
305--321
[25] United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner. 8
March 2011. Eco-Farming Can Double Food Production in 10 Years, says
new UN report. http://bit.ly/f6Sn1Z
[26] "Agroecology and the Right to Food', Report presented at the 16th
Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. 8 March 2011. http://bit.ly/f6Sn1Z
[27] World Bank. 29 January 2011. Op. cit.
[28] Ibid
[29] For a collection of articles on the "farmland grab' worldwide and in Africa, see the special website created by GRAIN: http://farmlandgrab.org/
[30] World Bank. 29 January 2011. Op. cit.
[31] World Economic Forum. 2010. Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture --
A Roadmap for Stakeholders, prepared in collaboration with McKinsey
& Company. Davos, Switzerland: World Economic Forum. http://www.weforum.org/issues/agriculture-and-food-security
[32] Ibid. p 3
[33] Interviews conducted in Mali and Sierra Leone in 2010.
[34] Henshaw, Caroline. 8 March 2011. Farmers must be weaned off using oil, days U.N. expert. Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704758904576188220051993828.html
[35] Interview conducted in Sierra Leone in December 2010.
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