| Seed Aid, Agribusiness and the Food Crisis |
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The current food crisis is not a problem of production as we have been told, but a result of neo-liberal trade policies, which now serve as a catalyst to send seeds and fertilisers to food-crisis-striken countries in the South. By GRAIN. 9th October 08 - GRAIN The world food crisis, rapidly defined by those in power as a problem of insufficient production, has become a trojan horse to get corporate seeds, fertilisers and, surreptitiously, market systems into poor countries. As past experience shows, what looks like “seed aid” in the short term can mask what is actually “agribusiness aid” in the long term. We look at what is going on. Earlier this year, political and economic leaders, abetted by the corporate mass media, were quick to explain the current global food crisis as a “perfect storm” of several factors: weather problems, the diversion of crops into biofuels, oil price hikes and poor people becoming less poor and eating more animal produce. In short, they wanted us to believe that the food crisis was a problem of production. Many have shredded that argument and – while agreeing that production should be improved – have shown instead how current economic policies focused on global trade and deregulation are the real culprits. [1] Yet the supply-siders moved fast to promote their solution to the wrong problem: to boost production, mainly by getting higher-yielding seeds to farmers. What seeds? Where from? With what impact on vulnerable communities and local biodiversity? It is hard to find reliable data, but there is a serious risk that this simplistic production-focused response to the food crisis, which avoids asking the really challenging policy questions, will result in a new wave of genetic erosion and livelihood insecurity by overriding communities’ local seed systems. The consequences for the survival of farming families around the world, and therefore for food production, could be extremely damaging. The “perfect choir” Large amounts of money have been pledged in the last few months to send seeds and fertilisers urgently to food-crisis-striken countries in the South. In May, the World Bank launched a US$1.2-billion emergency finance facility to provide funds for the “rapid provision of seeds and fertilisers to small farmers”. Addressing the Group of Eight (G8) summit of the world’s richest countries, held in Japan in early July, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, told these powerful people that one of the main priorities in fighting the global food crisis was “to give small farmers, especially in Africa, access to seeds, fertilisers and other basic inputs”. In the lead-up to that meeting, the European Commission’s President, José Manuel Barroso, proffered €1 billion to pay for “fertilisers and seeds to help poor farmers in developing countries”. Not to be outdone, US President George Bush announced US$1 billion in food crisis money and told the press that he would convince other world leaders that they should make moves to alleviate hunger by “increasing the shipments of food, fertilisers and seeds to countries in need”. Two weeks later, the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, took the message to the UN General Assembly in New York: “We must act immediately to boost agricultural production this year. We do this by providing urgently needed seeds and fertilisers for the upcoming planting cycles, especially for the world’s 450 million small-scale farmers.” [2] Imagine! Billions of dollars suddenly disbursed to distribute seeds to the poorest farmers on the planet – a group whose needs have never before ranked high in these leaders’ concerns. Earlier the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had launched its own “Initiative on Soaring Food Prices”, meant to “demonstrate that by increasing the supply of key agricultural inputs, such as seeds and fertilisers, small farmers will be able to rapidly increase their food production”. The FAO Initiative already covers 35 countries, to the tune of US$21 million, while another 54 countries are being similarly supported under its Technical Cooperation Programme at the cost of US$24 million. Apart from ensuring immediate seed and fertiliser supplies, the Initiative also aims to “encourage donors, financial institutions and national governments to support the provision of inputs on a much larger scale”. [3] It seems to be working, as organisations ranging from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Red Cross are falling over each other to set up programmes to get seeds and fertilisers to farmers in response to today’s food crisis.
Learning from seed aid experience
The impact of seed aid – which means, in essence, the delivery of seeds
to areas in crisis – has been a topic of hot debate among aid agencies
for a number of years now. Very often in the past, development
programmes focused on replacing what they viewed as poor-yielding local
varieties with just a handful of so-called high-yielding seeds from
research laboratories.
Relief agencies distributing seed aid in
emergency situations often followed the same pattern. Hardly any effort
was made to understand local varieties: why farmers had selected them
and why they continued to use them.
Today, however, the advantages of
local varieties are more widely acknowledged. It has been recognised
that they tend, among other things, to fare better under low-input
conditions, to resist local stresses, to provide other outputs (such as
straw for animal fodder) as well as grain, to have stable yields at low
risk over time and to taste or cook better. In other words, they are
appropriate, both culturally and agronomically.
Consensus is also growing about the drawbacks of bringing in seeds from
outside sources. A few months ago, at a workshop on seed aid that
brought together the main players in the business, a report was
presented that underlined what critics had been saying for years: [4]
Somewhat earlier, this change in thinking led to a change of policy in
Afghanistan where a code of conduct on seeds for relief operations was
adopted by a number of the leading aid organisations. It lays down that
seeds should be procured locally, that any emergency seed supply should
not distort local seed systems, and that seeds should be adapted to the
local environment. [5]
There’s no reason to doubt that the small or independent NGOs currently
involved in seed aid projects in response to the food crisis are
adopting this approach. It may be a different story, however, with the
larger relief agencies, especially those paid to take on the work for
governments.
Officials from the FAO assured GRAIN that the seed aid projects that
they have mounted in response to the current global food crisis aim to
source local seeds from local markets and dealers, and that they avoid
hybrids and GM varieties. But the FAO’s own media releases send a
different and more chilling message. They talk of “trucks loaded with
more than 500 tonnes of seed” leaving the Mauritanian capital for the
countryside [6] and “600 tonnes of improved seed varieties being made available to poor farmers in Burkina”. [7]
At the very least, there is a mismatch between the official rhetoric
and what is happening on the ground in some areas. And in the longer
term the situation is even more worrying. With billions of dollars
being thrown at humanitarian agencies to urgently get seeds and
fertilisers to farmers in the name of the food crisis, with FAO calling
for the “provision of inputs on a much larger scale”, and with messages
coming from world leaders and finance institutions that the time is
ripe to get new technologies to small farmers to boost their
production, it seems that farmers’ local seed systems may well be
threatened in many parts of the world.
Giving out to the private sector
The background to all of this is the recent radical transformation in
the way agriculture is organised and supported. Twenty years ago, seed
aid would have been largely reliant on the public sector: seeds would
have come from public plant breeding, production, and distribution
systems, usually supplied for free, and recipient farmers would have
been able to save seeds from the crops and share them with their
neighbours. But since then the public sector has been divided, enclosed
and privatised.
Today, a handful of multinational companies from the
pesticide industry control more than half of the global seed market,
and their control extends through a growing network of private dealers
and smaller national seed companies with political connections. Seeds
are now big business.
Those international agencies that still claim a “public” mandate, such
as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), are
increasingly public–private coalitions with direct ties to the
multinationals. Their research programmes feed into the corporations’
growth strategies and they increasingly adopt elements of the same
companies’ business models. So any talk of seeds today, if it is not
specifically about local or farmer’ seeds, implies private seeds –
seeds that farmers have to buy and that come with tight restrictions on
their use.
At the national level, where the seed aid momentum is being translated
into new government programmes, the link between the official responses
to the food crisis and the agribusiness agenda is evident. For
instance, the initiatives to boost food production in Benin and the
Philippines as a response to the global food crisis are little more
than subsidy schemes for seed and fertiliser companies.
Indonesia, too, is gambling that the private sector’s hybrid seeds will
resolve its long-term rice needs. Despite years of failure with hybrid
rice in the country and no credible studies to back up claims of higher
yields, the government is subsidising the import and sale of hybrid
rice seeds, and even using its farmer field school programmes to
promote it. The few local tycoons and foreign companies that control
the hybrid rice seed market in the country are the only ones whose
profits are guaranteed. [8]
In Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade launched his “Big Agricultural
Offensive for Food and Abundance”, or GOANA, as a response to the
current food crisis. It aims to make the country self-sufficient in
food by 2015, mainly by boosting the production of basic food and feed
crops. Of the US$792 million that the government says will be put into
the project, US$443 million will go to subsidise the purchase of
fertilisers, US$120 million to subsidise the purchase of seeds, and
US$30 million to subsidise the purchase of pesticides.
Those companies
involved in the production and distribution of these inputs, many of
them foreign-owned, will be the first to profit from this scheme,
particularly given the radical investment and fiscal deregulations that
accompany GOANA. [9]
Senegal’s main farmers’ organisation, the National Rural Exchange and
Cooperation Council (CNCR), which was not consulted about the
Offensive, says that farmers will be at risk of not being able to pay
back the credit for the purchase of inputs, even with the subsidies,
because the project has done nothing to address the long-standing
structural problems that prevent farmers from getting a fair price in
the market for their crops. [10]
In Mali, the National Coordination of Peasant Organisations (CNOP) says
that it had also been excluded from the development of the government’s
response to the world food crisis — the Rice Initiative (originally
dubbed Operation Rice Commando), which aims to double domestic rice
production in a few years. As in neighbouring Senegal, Mali’s Rice
Initiative focuses on subsidising so-called high-yielding seeds and
fertilisers, with CNOP protesting that this will channel all the
benefits into the pockets of the input dealers. [11]
In many West African countries, the emphasis is put on the rapid
production and distribution of Nerica™ rice seeds, developed by the
CGIAR, and not on farmers’ varieties.
The national food crisis programmes in Africa, geared to the rapid
deployment of new seeds and crop chemicals to farmers, mesh perfectly
with the strategy of AGRA and the CGIAR for the continent. These groups
have been moving centre stage and presenting themselves as saviours
with the right solution to boost food production. On the sidelines of
FAO’s food crisis summit, a deal was signed between AGRA and all the
Rome-based food agencies, in which AGRA will have a pivotal role in
developing and promoting new seeds and establishing a commercial seed
sector in Africa. [12]
A week later, AGRA signed yet another agreement, this time with the US
government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation, to “provide Africa’s
farmers with technologies, infrastructure and financing”. [13]
In the same vein, FARM, a multi-million-euro initiative of the French
Presidency and some of France’s corporations, including the seed giant
Vilmorin and global supermarket powerhouse Casino, has launched
projects in Burkina Faso and Mali that aim to counter the effects of
the food crisis by helping farmers’ organisations to finance the
purchase of fertilisers and seeds. [14]
FARM is specifically mandated to help poor countries to gain access to
the “benefits” of European agricultural technology, such as seeds. [15].
When agricultural development becomes agribusiness development
To understand fully how today’s top-down mobilisation to get seeds to
farmers lays down a red carpet for agribusiness to walk into developing
countries and hit the jackpot, one has to look at the changing
landscape of corporate activity in the food system.
The surge in
agricultural commodity prices has triggered a corresponding rush by big
business to take greater control over the entire food chain.
Multinational food companies and retailers are moving deeper into food
production, particularly through contract farming, in order to reduce
procurement costs and guarantee supplies.
Concerned about the long-term
impact of high food prices on national food security, the cash-rich
governments of countries such as China and Saudi Arabia are working
hand-in-hand with their domestic business sectors and newly created
investment vehicles to outsource food production.
And the hot money
concentrated in the world’s financial centres, reeling from the impact
of the credit crunch, is looking to agricultural commodities and
farmlands as a place for fast returns. All of this means that control
over farming is increasingly moving out of the hands of farmers and
into boardrooms.
And board members on agribusiness corporations have
very different priorities from farmers: they want control over a
uniform supply of seeds to produce crops that feed into global
agriculture commodity markets; they are not interested in local seeds
or the preservation of biodiverse food systems.
Two of Asia’s biggest food corporations – Sime Darby of Malaysia and
Charoen Pokphand of Thailand – are now moving into rice production as
part of their home country’s responses to the global food crisis. They
are starting their programmes with the production and commercialisation
of their own hybrid rice seeds – developed with the support of the
public sector. [16]
Similarly, Chinese foreign investment in rice production, whether in
Laos or in Cameroon, is invariably based on Chinese hybrid rice
varieties, often initially tested and introduced through bilateral aid
arrangements. [17]
Sub-Saharan Africa has suddenly become a magnet for this agribusiness
invasion (see Box 3). But around 90 per cent of the seeds used in
Africa are local varieties supplied by farmers, not suitable for big
agribusiness. Corporate investment thus hinges on the introduction and
spread of varieties suited to corporate needs – the equivalent of the
Roundup Ready soya bean that paved the way for agribusiness to colonise
rapidly the southern cone of Latin America.
Local food systems depend
on the opposite: diversity. And so the seeds and the seed aid
programmes emerging from today’s food crisis are situated at the heart
of a fundamental struggle between competing models of food production:
a corporate-controlled and globalised industrial food system versus a
diversity of efforts to maintain, develop and expand food sovereignty.
Looking at the available evidence, especially at the national level, it
seems that most of the seed aid is landing on the agribusiness side of
the fence.
Polarising possibilities
Across the board, from ministries of agriculture to the World Bank,
this fundamental struggle over who controls food is camouflaged by an
ignorant discourse that says: (a) that farmers don’t have seeds – or
they don’t have “good” seeds; (b) that to provide farmers with “good”
seeds, governments need to adopt the right market structures, including
seed certification systems, lax biosafety rules and intellectual
property regimes.
The emphasis that is ceaselessly placed on the
superiority of “good” seeds has an almost eugenicist feel to it: “good”
seeds are hybrids, GMOs, certified or improved varieties, all of which
are the “only” ones sure to give high yields and therefore are the
“only” way out of the current food crisis; “bad” seeds – or “flawed”
seeds, as aspiring industry leaders in Ghana call them18 – are farmers’
seeds, uncertified seeds, peasant varieties, anything that has not gone
through a research laboratory and gained a government stamp of
approval.
At the end of the day, the response to the world food crisis that says
“we need to boost production!” steers the world away from the profound
political discussion that is urgently needed about the mess we are in
and how we got here. It leads to knee-jerk responses, such as the
world’s biggest powers pouring billions of dollars into the
distribution of new, “improved” seeds to hundreds of millions of small
farmers.
These responses permit private capital, including purely
speculative investment, to take over what used to be called
agricultural development and to transform it into straightforward
agribusiness development. It is already abundantly clear that, unless
this invasion is stopped, the supposed beneficiaries – the small
farmers – will be the victims.
References
1 See GRAIN, “Making a killing from hunger”, Against the grain, May 2008.
www.grain.org/articles/?id=39
2 BBC News, “UN warns on biofuel crop reliance”, 18 July 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/3qrujx
3 FAO newsroom, “Initiative on soaring food prices now covers 54 countries”, 9 July 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/3ohbxz
4 Louise Sperling, David Cooper and Tom Remington,
“Moving towards more effective seed aid”, Journal of Development
Studies, Vol. 44, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/4gl5rx
5 FAO newsroom, “Code of conduct on seeds for Afghanistan reached”, 30 May 2002,
http://tinyurl.com/3sphbl
6 FAO newsroom, “FAO starts seed distribution in Mauritania”, 13 June 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/3l3yb2
7 FAO newsroom, “Planting under way in Burkina Faso”, 11 July 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/4c8t2z
8 GRAIN, “The food crisis and the hybrid rice surge,” 12 May 2008,
grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=202;
Biotani and GRAIN, “Indonesia: more hype than hope on hybrid rice”, 26 October 2007,
grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=196
9 Five guides for investors in GOANA were published
by the Minister of Agriculture and APIX SA. All five guides are
available in French (with a summary in Spanish by the Embassy of
Spain), http://tinyurl.com/3ttewu;
To facilitate the entry of private investment, the Senegalese
government has instituted special tax breaks, customs duties and VAT
exemptions and the lifting of currency exchange controls.
11 CNOP, “Forum des riziculteurs sur l’Initiative Riz”, June 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/47fmfa
12 FAO newsroom, “Boosting food production in Africa’s ‘breadbasket areas’ ”,
http://tinyurl.com/3zngrz
13 AGRA, “AGRA and the Millennium Challenge
Corporation launch a historic collaboration to provide Africa’s farmers
with technologies, infrastructure and financing”, http://tinyurl.com/3zh46p
14 La Fondation pour l’agriculture et la ruralité dans le monde,
http://www.fondation-farm.org/
15 La Fondation pour l’agriculture et la ruralité dans le monde. See
http://tinyurl.com/4rzu5l
16 GRAIN, “Malaysia: Nestlé, Sime Darby lead corporate push into padi”, 1 February 2008,
grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=198;
Kamol Sukin, “Farmers add hybrid grains to their list of fears,” The Nation, 20 June 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/538mfk
17 GRAIN, “The food crisis and the hybrid rice surge,” 12 May 2008,
grain.org/hybridrice/?lid=202
18 Ghana News Agency, “Seed producers worry about poor use of improved seeds”, 21 August 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/4ubz73
GRAIN is an international NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge.
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