April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

Exporting crops for overseas consumption while Africans go hungry is a
historical pattern all too familiar on the continent. It is certainly not the
hope of 21st century African agriculture.
MARKET FAILURES IN AGRICULTURE
The dominance of the ‘willing seller–willing buyer’ market approach to
land redistribution dates only from the 1980s. The serious problem of
treating land simply as a commodity is best illustrated by the case of
Namibia. At independence in 1990, only 4,000 white farmers owned about
50 per cent of all arable land. Abiding by the ‘willing seller–willing buyer’
principle, the rate of land transfers over the first 20 years indicates it will
take 100 years to acquire just 25 per cent of the commercial land. And this
market approach offers no land use plan nor agrarian reform policy.
By 2002, the Namibian government concluded that the market failed to
address land inequities, poverty reduction or environmental conservation.
Both Namibia and South Africa are moving towards expropriation of land as
a necessary means to correct this economic apartheid. Southern Africa is
learning from the negative experience of land grabs in Zimbabwe, yet the
commodity market approach can be similarly inequitable and destructive
of livelihoods.
Studies from Southern Africa offer data about the additional failure of
markets to provide farm inputs and services for smallholder farmers. As
one report from Malawi summarises, ‘Ten years on, it is evident that the
expected benefits of the liberalization of both input and outputs markets
has failed to penetrate the remote rural markets.’[5] In spite of the World
Bank,[6] the history of market failure in agriculture is now reviving African
government regulation.
Agreeing with this African reversal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right
to Food, Olivier De Schutter, this month gave the decisive conclusion:
‘Agroecology [sustainable mixed cropping] is a knowledge-intensive
approach. It requires public policies supporting agricultural research and
participative extension services. States and donors have a key role to play
here. Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that
cannot be rewarded by patents and which don’t open markets for chemical
products or improved seeds.’[7]
BIOPIRACY OF AFRICAN BIODIVERSITY WEALTH
The agroecology of Africa is characterised by complex agricultural systems
mainly dominated by smallholder farmers who grow a range of diverse
crops in a single field. There are about 18 recognised farming systems in
Africa that can be grouped as a maize-dominated system, a cereal/root
crop system, a root crop system and an agro-pastoral millet/sorghum
system, all within overall mixed cropping. Part of Africa's food heritage,
this genetic wealth offers important contributions towards making Africa a
well-nourished continent.
The unspoken but central goal of AGRA is to attain access to African
genetic wealth by requisitioning the expertise of African scientists and
tapping indigenous knowledge in order to select a few varieties from
thousands available. From this African knowledge and wealth, the global
corporations will develop new plant varieties. However, these plant
materials, instead of being freely shared, will be patented. Such
privatisation of genetic material, without recognition of all those who bred
the species for centuries, is biopiracy.