Newsletter : African Agroecological Alternatives to the Green Revolution in Africa #10
AGRA WATCH
IFC Partners with AGRA
http://www.i4donline.net/news/news-details.asp?News=IFC-partners-AGRA-to-boost-agricultural-growth-in-Africa&NewsID=15742
http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/agribusiness.nsf/Content/SelectedPR?OpenDocument&UNID=9CA20459D5DC29D88525755C004B6706
16 February, 2009
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has partnered with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in Nairobi to unlock credit and financing for small-scale farmers and agribusinesses across sub-Saharan Africa.
The partnership between IFC and AGRA specifically focuses on developing market-based incentives and tools for agricultural development. Both the organizations will work together in various ways to scale up AGRA's partnerships with investors and national commercial banks to make loans available to farmers and agribusinesses like seed companies, expand and finance agro-dealer networks, and support 'fertilizer value chain' financing, including regional procurement of fertilizer. The partnership will provide credit guarantees to African-based financial institutions in order to leverage significant private sector financing for agriculture. They will also expand AGRAs Agro-dealer Development Program to recruit and train significantly more agro-dealers.
The IFC is the private sector lending arm of the World Bank. Loans from the IFC are public monies used by the Bank to stimulate the private sector. Last year the IFC invested US $1.4 billion in agribusiness projects but only 40% of this went to developing countries.
AGRA’s VP Calls for Increased Investment in Agriculture
http://africasciencenews.org/asns/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1003&Itemid=1
12 February, 2009
Speaking at a meeting hosted by UN Commission on Sustainable Development in Windhoek, Namibia , Dr Akinwumi Adesina, AGRA vice-president warned, ‘the next food crisis must not catch the continent by surprise.’
The meeting participants included ministers of agriculture and development from across Africa , international institutions, donors, farmer groups, civil society and development partners. Dr. Adesina called for African governments to increase their investment into agriculture and called for a Green Revolution in Africa. Dr. Adesina noted problems with previous Green Revolutions. The overuse of fertilizers and pesticides created environmental and health related problems. The reliance on monocultures led to losses of genetic biodiversity. Farmers who took out loans for fertilizers and seed face a bad situation: big debts and little income.
2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates: Introduction
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/Pages/2009-annual-letter-introduction.aspx
January 2009
Bill Gates presents his first annual newsletter on the Gates Foundation. He shares what the goals of the foundation are, where progress is being made and where it is not.
Melinda Gates will be sharing some of her thoughts in a video format each fall. Neither of these communications will replace the full annual report that we publish each year at www.gatesfoundation.org/annualreport.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT
China Marches on in Africa
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LM436738.htm
28 January, 2009
Chinese businessmen are pursuing expansion in African. Beijing and Chinese companies have pledged tens of billions of dollars to Africa in loans and investments mostly to secure raw materials for the world's fastest-growing large economy.
China-Africa trade has surged by an average 30 percent a year this decade, soaring to nearly $107 billion in 2008.
China’s pursuit for land and resources in Africa is just one of many attempts by corporations around the world to secure land and resources for export-based food and bio-fuels production. This neo-colonization of Africa will have vast implications for Africa’s people and environment.
AFRICA:Climate Change Threatens Food Security
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45458
19 January, 2009
According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, one in three people living in Sub-Saharan Africa were chronically hungry in 2007. The region is also hardest hit by extreme poverty, harboring 75 percent of people worldwide that live on less then a dollar a day.
Since 2007, erratic rainfall has led to increased food shortages in southern Africa where droughts damaged and destroyed maize crops in Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Agroecological alternatives help to combat the impacts of climate change by utilizing practices that increase agricultural resiliency, especially through times of climactic variability and uncertainty.
Kenyan Farmers Abandon Fields as Hunger Bites
http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/55866/2009/01/6-144903-1.htm
6 February, 2009
Sheltering under a tree from the scorching midday heat, eyes glued to the clear blue sky, Kiziba Wamwagudu hopes for rain. None has fallen in months.
Crops have withered away in the dry, dusty soil, and food is scarce and costly. Like millions of others in southeast Kenya, Wamwagudu, 68, and his extended family of 18 are slowly being driven into the jaws of hunger.
In mid-January, Kenya's president declared the food crisis a national disaster and asked international donors for $400 million to help 10 million people facing shortages.
Global climate change is putting significant pressure on farmers around the world, especially in Africa. Agroecological practices can help fight the pressures of drought and even reverse desertification.
AGROECOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVES
Desertification Reversed in Northern Ethiopia
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/desertification-reversed-in-northern-ethiopia.html
6 February, 2009
Some of the most severe cases of land degradation in semi-desert areas could be reversed with the right practices and policies, researchers in Ethiopia have concluded. A study of a dry region in the north of the country, whose population had increased ten-fold and whose land had become highly degraded, found that local people have nevertheless managed to mend the land through agroecological practices.
Agroecological practices and national policies that support agroecological farming have helped Ethiopian communities tremendously in their struggle to fight the consequences of climate change.
Fighting GMO Contamination Around the World
http://current.com/items/89752146/fighting_gmo_contamination_around_the_world.htm
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=5755
26 January, 2009
Ever since GMOs were first introduced in the mid-1990s, farmers’ groups and NGOs have warned that they would contaminate other crops. This has happened, just as predicted. This article looks at how communities in different parts of the world that have experienced contamination are developing strategies to fight against it.
When GM crops are planted they contaminate other crops with transgenic material. In places where GM crops are grown on a large scale, it has already become almost impossible to find crops of the same species that are free of GM material. And the contamination spreads even to areas where GM crops are not officially permitted.
Three videos accompany this article which can be viewed here: http://www.grain.org/videos/?id=195
Accelerating into Disaster – When Banks Manage the Food Crisis
http://www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=672&Itemid=38
26 January, 2009
The emergency of today is rooted in decades of neo-liberal policies that dismantled the international institutional architecture for food and agriculture and undermined the capacity of national governments to protect their food producers and consumers. The central cause of the current food crisis is the relentless promotion of the interests of large industrial corporations and the international trade that they control, to the detriment of food production at the local and national levels and the needs and interests of local food producers and communities.
As the vicious food price crisis deepens, transnational companies are moving into southern countries on a huge scale and starting to capture millions of hectares of land in order to bring agricultural production further under their control for industrial agrofuel and food production for the international market. Millions of peasants will be pushed out of food production, adding to the hungry in the rural areas and the slums of the big cities. The few that remain will work under full control of the transnational companies as workers or contract farmers. This is the very model that the World Bank and the AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa) initiative are trying to impose with the funds they have designated to resolve the food crisis.
Contrary to the impression that is given by confused officials, a solution to the crisis exists and is easy to implement if there is sufficient political will. Peasant based agriculture, livestock raising and artisanal fisheries can easily provide enough food once these small- scale food producers can get access to land and aquatic resources and can produce for table local and domestic markets. This model produces far more food per hectare than the corporate model, enables people to produce their own food, and guarantees stable supply.
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