Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push GE Crops on Africa

Tuesday 12 July 2011
by: Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report

http://www.truth-out.org/second-green-revolutionaries-gates-foundation-and-monsanto-push-ge-crops-africa/1310411034


Skimming the Agricultural Development section of the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation web site is a feel-good
experience: African farmers smile in a bright slide show
of images amid descriptions of the foundation's fight
against poverty and hunger. But biosafety activists in
South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates
Foundation a "Trojan horse" to open the door for private
agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds,
including a drought-resistant corn that Monsanto hopes to
have approved in the United States and abroad.

The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program  was
launched in 2008 with a $47 million grant from mega-rich
philanthropists Warrant Buffet and Bill Gates. The program
is supposed to help farmers in several African countries
increase their yields with drought- and heat-tolerant corn
varieties, but a report released last month by the African
Centre for Biosafety claims WEMA is threatening Africa's
food sovereignty and opening new markets for agribusiness
giants like Monsanto.

The Gates Foundation claims that biotechnology, GE crops
and Western agricultural methods are needed to feed the
world's growing population and programs like WEMA will
help end poverty and hunger in the developing world.
Critics say the foundation is using its billions to shape
the global food agenda and the motivations behind WEMA
were recently called into question when activists
discovered the Gates foundation had spent $27.6 million on
500,000 shares of Monsanto stock between April and June
2010.

Water shortages in parts of Africa and beyond have created
a market for "climate ready" crops worth an estimated $2.7
billion. Leading biotech companies like Monsanto,
Syngenta, Bayer and Dow are currently racing to develop
crops that will grow in drought conditions caused by
climate change, and by participating in the WEMA program,
Monsanto is gaining a leg up by establishing new markets
and regulatory approvals for its patented transgenes in
five Sub-Saharan African countries, according to the
Centre's report.

Monsanto teamed up with BASF, another industrial giant, to
donate technology and transgenes to WEMA and its partner
organizations. Seed companies and researchers will receive
the GE seed for free and small-scale farmers can plant the
corn without making the royalty payments that Monsanto
usually demands from farmers each season.

Monsanto is donating the seeds for now, but the company
has a reputation for aggressively defending its patents.
In the past, Monsanto has sued farmers for growing crops
that cross-pollinated with Monsanto crops and became
contaminated with the company's patented genetic codes.

In 2009, Monsanto and BASF discovered a gene in a
bacterium that is believed to help plants like corn
survive on less water and soon the companies developed a
corn seed know as MON 87460. It remains unclear if MON
87460 will out-compete conventional drought-tolerant
hybrids, but the United States Department of Agriculture
could approve the corn for commercial use in the US as
soon as July 11. Monsanto plans to make the seed available
to American farmers by next year.

GE crops like MON 87460 can only be tested and sold in
countries that, like the US, are friendly toward biotech
agriculture. WEMA's target areas could add five countries
to that list: South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and
Mozambique. The Biosafety Centre reports that WEMA's
massive funding opportunities pressure politicians to pass
weak biosafety laws and welcome GE crops and the
agrichemical drenched growing systems that come with them.
Field trials of MON 87460 and other drought-tolerant
varieties are already underway in South Africa, where
Monsanto already has considerable political influence.
Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are expected to begin field
trials of WEMA corn varieties in 2011.

The agency that is implementing WEMA is the African
Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), a
pro-biotechnology group funded completely by the US
government's USAID program, the United Kingdom and the
Buffet and Gates foundations. The AATF is a nonprofit
charity that lobbies African governments and promotes
partnerships between public groups and private companies
to make agricultural technology available in Africa. The
Biosafety Centre accuses the AATF of essentially being a
front group for the US government, allowing USAID to
"meddle" in African politics by promoting weak biosafety
regulation that makes it easier for American corporations
to export biotechnology to African countries. 

WEMA and AATF swim in a myriad alphabet soup of NGOs and
nonprofits propped up by Western nations and wealthy
philanthropists that promote everything from fertilizer to
food crops with enhanced nutritional content as solutions
to world hunger. Together, these groups are promoting a
Second Green Revolution and sparking a worldwide debate
over the future of food production. The Gates Foundation
alone has committed $1.7 billion to the effort to date.

There was nothing "green" about the first Green Revolution
of the 1950s and 1960s. As population skyrocketed during
the last century, multinationals pushed Western
agriculture's fertilizers, irrigation, oil-thirsty
machinery and pesticides on farmers in the developing
world. Historians often point out that promoting
industrial agriculture to keep developing countries well
fed was crucial to the US effort to stop the spread of
Soviet Communism.

The Second Green Revolution, which is focused on Africa,
seeks to solve hunger problems with education,
biotechnology, high-tech breeding, and other industrial
agricultural methods popular in countries like the US,
Brazil and Mexico. 

Africa has landed in the center of a global food debate
over a central question: with the world's growing
population expected to reach nine billion by 2045, how
will farmers feed everyone, especially those in developing
countries? The lines of the debate are drawn. The Second
Green Revolutionaries are now facing off with activists
and researchers who doubt the West's petroleum and
technology-based agricultural systems can sustainably feed
the world.

The African Centre for Biosafety and its allies often
point to a report recently released by IAASTD, a research
group supported by the United Nations (UN), the World
Health Organization, and others. IAASTD found that
industrial agriculture has been successful in its goal of
increasing crop yields worldwide, but has caused
environmental degradation and deforestation that
disproportionately affects small farmers and poorer
nations. Widespread use of pesticides and fertilizer, for
instance, cause dead zones in coastal areas. Massive
irrigation projects now account for 70 percent of water
withdrawal globally and approximately 1.6 billion people
live in water-scarce basins.

Increasing crop yields is the bottom line for groups like
the Gates Foundation, but the IAASTD recommends that
sustainability should be the goal. The report does not
rule out biotechnology, but suggests high-tech agriculture
is just one tool in the toolbox. The report promotes
"agroecology," which seeks to replace the chemical and
biochemical inputs of industrial agriculture with
resources found in the natural environment.

In March, a UN expert released a report showing that
small-scale farmers could double their food production in
a decade with the simple agroecological methods. The
report flies in the face of the Second Green
Revolutionaries.

"Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that
agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical
fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry
live - especially in unfavorable environments," said
Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the
right to food and author of the report. "Malawi, a country
that launched a massive chemical fertilizer subsidy
program a few years ago, is now implementing agroecology,
benefiting more than 1.3 million of the poorest people,
with maize yields increasing from 1 ton per hectare to 2
to 3 tons per hectare."

De Schutter said private companies like Monsanto will not
invest in agroecology because it does not open new markets
for agrichemicals or GE seeds, so it's up to governments
and the public to support the switch to more sustainable
agriculture. But with more than a billion dollars already
spent, the Second Green Revolutionaries are determined to
have a say in how the world grows its food, and
agroecology is not on their agenda. To them,
sustainability means bringing private innovation to the
developing world. The Gates Foundation can donate billions
to the fight against hunger, but when private companies
like Monsanto stand to benefit, it makes feeding the world
look like a for-profit scheme.



This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate