For your interest – this is a letter I just sent to friends involved with media development in Africa. Feel free to copy & send it to other organizations you feel need to know this. I am alarmed to see almost complete absence of investigative reporting (by any media, not just African) into the African Green Revolution conference, currently being held in Ethiopia. The reportage one finds is all about helping poor farmers and starving people. Those quoted are, unsurprisingly, ministers of agriculture and their ilk, and representatives of agrobusiness. There is a quiet war going on in the world between organisations like Monsanto and those who are trying to build food security through promoting living soil and foodstuffs grown without pesticides and chemical fertilisers. It is a real war nonetheless. One Wikileaks revelation was a cable from the US Embassy in Paris to the State Department urging that a military style campaign be conducted against those EU countries resisting genetically modified seeds. One aspect of this campaign is that almost all US food aid to Africa is in the form of GMO seeds and produce. Monsanto (creator of Agent Orange, DDT, PCBs, dioxins and now the biocide Roundup) has a vast budget. In South Africa Monsanto has bought up practically all the seed companies. Monsanto pretty much controls South African agriculture I was told on a recent visit to Swaziland. Bees are dying around the world because of constant exposure to pesticides. Farmlands around the world are becoming sterile thanks to massive use of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilisers. This is not the place for an essay on the subject. But even a casual glance at the reportage on the Green Revolution conferences (I think the one in progress is the third) indicates that the driving force behind them is agrobusiness. Monsanto and its allies are taking on the whole continent. They plan to own food production in Africa. In Europe there are very active organisations like Millions Against Monsanto, No To Gmo and the like. In the US Monsanto is spending endless millions of dollars on trying to prevent the labelling of foodstuffs, so that consumers will not know whether they contain GMO products. I have only found one article that is not actually praising the Green Revolution conference. It was printed last year and reads in part: What kind of agriculture? Despite all of the good presentations and case studies, the forum failed to address the most important issue for African agriculture: what kind of agriculture should be promoted? The answer is, agriculture based on monocultures with high levels of chemical inputs, patented seeds and GMOs, or diversified and sustainable agriculture based on local resources – an agroecological agriculture. (See more at Ag-transition.org). The lack of such discussions is not a mistake. The role of the forum is to promote and push forward a Green Revolution in Africa based on chemical inputs, improved seeds, and irrigation. No questions are raised about this model, and no examples of successful organic or agroecological farming have been presented at these African Green Revolution conferences and fora as far as I know – and I have attended all of them since it started in Oslo, Norway, in 2006. African Green Revolution Forum 2013: Good examples and policies within a bad model bit.ly/1udwWDD Well, I just wanted to bring this to your attention. /Admin R
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 09:57:59 +0000