Spread Message of Food Sovereignty as the Solution to Africa's Hunger Crisis
By: John E. Peck, FFD executive director
While Bill Gates and others may be pushing patented biotech seeds and associated toxic agrochemicals as the "cure" for the current hunger crisis, grassroots voices from Africa are just as busy challenging the "Gene Revolution" and letting the world know that sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty constitute a much better alternative.
From Oct. 15th - 18th, 2009 Family Farm Defenders was proud to host two African food/farm activists whose visit to the U.S. was facilitated by the National Family Farm Coalition and Food & Water Watch. Josphat Ngonyo from Kenya is the founding Director of Africa Network for Animal Welfare and won the Eastern Africa Environmental Leadership Award in 2003. He also sits on Kenya's National Steering Committee responsible for wildlife conservation, is a member of the Global Task Force on Farm Animal Welfare and Trade, as well as an honorary warden with the Kenya Wildlife Services. Joining Josphat, was Seremos Kamuturaki, Chairman of the Ugandan Fisher’s and Fish Conservation Association (UFFCA) and advocate for sustainable fish production. Seremos is also the Vice President of the Agricultural Council of Uganda and Treasurer of the World Forum of Fishermen. When not fishing, his family also grows pineapples and bananas.
Prior to visiting Wisconsin, Josphat and Seremos participated in several workshops and panel presentations with FFD president, John Kinsman, both at the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) conference in Des Moines, IA and later at the Univ. of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. As part of Via Campesina's International International Day of Action Against Transnational Corporations, they also joined a rush hour informational picket on Thurs. Oct. 15th outside the experimental greenhouses of Monsanto's subsidiary, Agracetus, in Middleton, WI.
That evening they spoke to several dozen UW-Madison students, faculty and community members on their effort to defend African food sovereignty from corporate agribusiness. Josphat spoke about the threat to native wildlife and indigenous farming posed by patented GMO varieties that lead to loss of biodiversity and genetic contamination. For instance, the open pollinated maize varieties originally brought to Africa by the Portuguese from the Americas almost 400 years ago and carefully adapted to localized climatic conditions are now being threatened by biotech monocultures. When these GMO crops fail - as happened in South Africa last year with 82,000 acres of Monsanto's patented maize – farmers have little left to fall back upon. Josphat also noted that food aid was not helping Africa since it was just another means to dump subsidized commodities and undermine food sovereignty while perpetuating a culture of neocolonial dependency. Africans are also well aware of the health problems – obesity, diabetes, etc. - that come with eating imported industrial junkfood.
Seremos spoke about the destruction of the indigenous fishery of Lake Victoria with introduction of the Nile Perch in the 1960s and the advent of global free trade that shifted the local subsistence oriented economy towards export markets. He described how cargo planes now arrive with weapons for the Congolese civil war and depart with tons of fish for fancy European restaurants, a disturbing story graphically depicted in the 2004 documentary, Darwin's Nightmare. Because of the voracious invader, nearly 400 cichlid fish species native to Lake Victoria have now gone extinct, and the fishermen able to catch the remaining Nile Perch can't even afford to eat the fillets themselves and are left with the scraps. Traditional management that once respected spawning areas and limited fish catches has been undermined by an industrial style extractive model, reminiscent of industrial agriculture. The obvious alternative is to reclaim community food sovereignty through locally-controlled fishing cooperatives such as are found in the Philippines, Maine, and Japan. Prof. Elinor Ostrom just won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her research supporting the notion that local people are often the best managers of such common property resources.
On Friday Oct. 16th Josphat and Seremos were joined by several other interested folks for a tour of sustainable agricultural operations across south central Wisconsin. The tour included visits to Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain with its innovative “living machine” waste water treatment system; John Kinsman's organic forestry and dairy operation near Lime Ridge; Hilltop Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Farm near La Valle operated by Rob McClure and Erin Schneider, Hirschberger's Amish Sugar Grove Chocolate Shop, and Greg and Vicki Brickner's sheep farm (with guard llamas) near Wonewoc. Fri. evening culminated in a welcome dinner reception at Just Coffee, Madison's 100% fair trade coffee roaster, which was able to debut their latest coffee from the Gumutindo Cooperative in Uganda! Before leaving Madison, Seremos and Josphat were also able to experience the Dane County Farmers Market – the largest in the U.S.
Such international exchanges are an essential part of Family Farm Defenders' food sovereignty work. Farmers, as well as eaters, can no longer allow global free trade regimes and corporate agribusiness to speak for us and distort our reality. By learning from each other's experiences and sharing our grassroots successes, the distance between Africa and America is really not as great as it might seem.