GMOs_the_world_View.ppt TABIO and SWISSAID co-hosted a conference on Food Sovereignty and Biodiversity on Tuesday 15 Nov 2011, with Tina Goethe from SWISSAID as key speaker and the Director of Environment from the Vice President's Office as Guest of Honour.
Land deal requires the Tanzanian government to overturn its current prohibition of GE crops
from Pesticide Action Network
What do an American businessman, Iowa State University and 162,000 refugees in Tanzania have in common?
Answer: they are all either directly involved in or soon-to-be impacted by a small group of U.S. investors’ plans to acquire 800,000 acres (1,250 square miles) of land in Tanzania and transform it into large-scale industrial crop, beef and agrofuel production. They plan to use genetically engineered (GE) seed and other inputs supplied by Monsanto, Syngenta and other global agribusinesses.
As you might guess, not everyone is going to benefit from this mega-project! The deal, if it goes through, would force 162,000 former refugees from Burundi off land they have tended for the past 40 years, destroying their livelihoods and the communities they have built to give their children a future.
Follow the money (sigh, yes — again)
So who wins? The Tanzanian government might make a few dollars off the deal, but it won’t be much, once negotiations over a suite of investor incentives (tax holidays, duty waivers, and relaxed rules for repatriation of dollars out of Tanzania) are concluded. The three biggest winners would be Iowa-based AgriSol Energy,Summit Group (a large-scale farming and livestock operation headquartered in Alden, Iowa) and Pharos Global Agriculture Fund. Iowa State University is also a key supporter of the project.
These three private entities stand to gain the most, not only by ramping up lucrative agrofuel production for export, but even more significantly, by requiring — as a condition of the deal — that the Tanzanian government overturn its current prohibition of genetically engineered crops. They are demanding creation of a regulatory framework that allows importation and cultivation of GE crops in that country.
Rewriting Southern countries’ biosafety legislation in order to start flooding the region with exports of U.S. GE crops has long been a tactic of the U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development (USAID). And it’s no coincidence that the Obama administration’s Feed the Future initiative targets Tanzania for “agricultural development” based on public-private partnerships and transgenic biotechnology.
The deal requires the Tanzanian government to overturn its current prohibition of GE crops
And who loses? Obviously, the Burundi people who are getting kicked off the land. But the threats go well beyond the 800,000 acres and 162,000 people in question there. Tanzanian farmers, consumers, their agricultural markets and biodiversity are all at risk.
Until recently, Tanzanians were somewhat protected from the intrusion of transgenic crops by the country’s placement of the precautionary principle at the center of its biosafety legislation. That has shifted, as under intense industry pressure, the government has relaxed its laws and allowed research and field trials of GE corn and cassava, with GE cotton around the corner. The last legal protections against GE crops could fall, if the AgriSol land grab is able to effectively rewrite Tanzania’s biosafety laws. And this is why Tanzanians have formed an alliance to fight back.
Here in the U.S. the Oakland Institute is leading the charge to expose and block the Tanzanian land grab and is calling on concerned individuals to take action and urge the wealthy Iowa investor Bruce Rastetter (who is simultaneously CEO of Pharos Ag and Summit Farms as well as Managing Director of AgriSol Energy) and the Prime Minister of Tanzania to drop the project. Joining the call, the Sierra Club has brought the voices of its one million members to bear, sending its own letter urging Rastetter and the Prime Minister to abandon “this ill-advised project.” It's easy to follow Oakland Institute's lead by sending a letter of your own.
Global policy stalled
The Tanzanian case is one of many such land grabs — more formally described as large-scale land acquisitions — that have been sweeping across the Global South in recent years. The epidemic reached such disastrous proportions, with such gross violations of human rights, that the United Nations finally turned its attention to the issue and began in 2008 to draft “voluntary guidelines” to protect communities from the harmful effects.
Earlier this month, 800 farmers’ rights, environment and development groups joined victims of land grabs inpetitioning the Chair of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on Food Security to swiftly finalize the guidelines. Governments meeting in Rome were to adopt the voluntary guidelines by October 17, but failed to do so.
The U.N. body came close to approving the guidelines, explained U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, but foundered over the specific provisions affecting large-scale investments in farmland. The Committee on Food Security will meet again in early 2012 and de Schutter expects that the guidelines could be ratified later in the year. Civil society groups and farmers’ coalitions like La Via Campesina continue to play a critical role in these negotiations, pressing for strong and enforceable language.
Stand with Tanzania
While adoption of the voluntary guidelines in 2012 is urgently needed, every additional week of delay puts hundreds of thousands of farmers’ livelihoods at risk.
Take Action » Join Oakland Institute’s campaign to block the Tanzanian land grab. Send a letter to AgriSol’s Bruce Rastetter and the Tanzanian Prime Minister urging them to abandon the land deal.
Tanzanian land grab threatens GM Safety Laws.
Act Now: Stop Imminent Land Grab That Threatens More Than 162,000 People in Tanzania
Read the Letter from Sierra Club US and Sierra Club Canada to AGRISOL
Iowa-based investor Bruce Rastetter and fellow investors in the industrial agricultural corporation AgriSol Energy have their sights on 800,000 acres (325,000 hectares) of land in Tanzania that is home to 162,000 people.
The proposed site is inhabited by former refugees from neighboring Burundi. Most of the residents, several generations of families who have successfully re-established their lives by developing and farming the land over the last 40 years, will be displaced against their will. They will lose their livelihoods and their community. Once they are gone, Agrisol Energy will move in.
Despite rising international criticism of the proposed plan to evict the residents in the proposed lease areas for foreign investors, the Tanzanian government plans to move forward with the project.i
We need your help today to make sure that won’t happen. Please send a message to Bruce Rastetter, other principal investors, and the Prime Minister of the United Republic of Tanzania, to urge them to drop this project.
AgriSol has promoted this large-scale land acquisition as a project to transform Tanzania into a “regional agricultural powerhouse” by combining the country’s abundant agricultural natural resources with “modern” farming practices, including the use of genetically modified crops.ii Unfortunately, AgriSol’s plans--which include seeking Strategic Investor Statusiii from the Tanzanian government that would grant them tax holidays and other critical investment incentives (including waiver of duties on agricultural and industrial equipment supplies, export guarantees, and certainty for use of GMO and Biotech and production of biofuels), while generating tremendous profit for the investorsiv--will do little, if anything, for Tanzanians. On the contrary, it is likely that if this land deal goes ahead it will set a precedent for future land rights abuses.
More details can be found in the Oakland Institute Brief, AgriSol Energy and Pharos Global Agriculture Fund’s Land Deal in Tanzania.
We fear that this project could move quickly forward unless the Tanzanian government and the US investors realize that the world is watching. We ask that you join the Oakland Institute in holding Bruce Rastetter and AgriSol team accountable and send them the message that proceeding with their plans is not “socially responsible agricultural investment.”
i Dan Rather Reports. Trouble on the Land. September 27, 2011. H.D. Net
ii AgriSol Report to the Prime Minister of the United Republic of Tanzania. Jan. 7, 2011 p 39, 40.
iv AgriSol Tanzania – Draft Business Plan. June 2011.
Read More: Experts Question Land Laws in Agricultural Investments in Tanzania
TABIO Member ESAFF has just published this declaration:
East and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Federation
ESAFF Declaration on the current state of food and agriculture policy in eastern and southern Africa
We the small scale farmers (crop growers, livestock keepers and fisher folk) of the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) region met recently in Morogoro, Tanzania, including delegations from Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho South Africa, Madagascar and Seychelles.
RECALLING African governments’ initiatives to invest in agriculture as per the Maputo Declaration of 2003, the Dar es Salaam Declaration on agriculture and food security of 2004 and Sirte Declaration of 2009 on investing in agriculture for economic growth and food security:
COMMENDING efforts to support agriculture through the AU/NEPAD- Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) in various countries:
AWARE that the CAADP Compact agreements signed by our countries are leading to increased resources in the agriculture sector and have the potential to increase the involvement of smallholder farmers in agriculture policy processes;
NOTING that despite the commitment to increase national agriculture budgets to 10% by 2009 and to ensure annual growth of the sector by 6%, few countries in the ESA region have reached these goals. Moreover in most countries where there is a significant increase of the budget, the growth of the sector is still less than 6%;
CONCERNED that national agriculture development programmes mostly depend on external funding, hence the local agendas become heavily influenced by funders from China, USA, EU with emphasis on exports cash crops and dependence upon fossil-fuel based inputs;
FURTHER CONCERNED that the neo-colonial global agrochemical companies are capturing African agriculture, from seeds through to markets, by introducing genetically modified seeds (GMOs), pesticides and chemical fertilizers. This further threatens farmer independence on seed production that has already been eroded by hybrid seed and jeopardizes African agricultural biodiversity and food sovereignty;
OBSERVING the negative trend in which many foreign multinational companies and foreign states influence our leaders to cede our land for production of export cash crops, biofuels and carbon credits which are not beneficial to the local populations;
ARE THEREFORE CALLING FOR
1. East and Southern African governments to focus their support on small scale farmers because we are the major producers of food as well as industrial raw materials for our local industries and for export. The promoted model of monoculture agriculture will not benefit smallholder producers; instead “agriculture investors” will mine the fertile soils which are still available in Africa and leave our environment degraded and polluted. Governments must regulate agribusiness instead of offering tax breaks for ecological plunder masquerading as economic development.
2. We demand all governments to increase agriculture budgets to the committed 10% of their national budgets as per their Maputo Declaration of 2003. We feel that this it is a mockery that this level was supposed to be reached by 2009 but has been extended to 2015 following the Sirte Declaration.
3. We call for Regional Economic Groupings (RECs) in our region: COMESA, SADC, and EAC to sign and domesticate CAADP COMPACT as the ECOWAS has done. The RECs should set goals and have clear monitoring tools towards achieving the 10% budget allocation and 6% growth. EAC and SADC have never signed CAADP and some regional action plans.
4. CAADP programme implementation should involve small scale farmers, our opinion and observations should be taken into account to realize sustainable agro-ecological agriculture development which is meaningful to Africa. All these initiatives must widely inform and include opinions of the real practitioners of small scale crop, livestock and fish production.
5. We call on CAADP processes and finance to give special attention to gender and especially women who are the majority (70%) of food producers in our region. We need access to usage and ownership of land, together with appropriate technology
6. African governments must to increase public investment from within our national budgets to support small scale farmers who are the majority of food producers in our eastern and southern Africa region. Resources from foreign donor should support the implementation of the national programmes.
7. African governments and civil society should monitor the multinational agro-chemical corporations with their various strategies for penetrating their technologies into our production systems, for example by funding our research institutions various agriculture projects with the long term objective of imposing Bt cotton, cassava and genetically modified maize in our region.
8. Agriculture research funding should prioritise research into indigenous seed and breed varieties that can withstand climate variability and are prized for their taste and nutritional value.
9. Authorities must ensure that the agriculture budget is reaching and benefiting small scale farmers in the villages and not consumed in recurrent expenditure which benefits only government officials.
10. We are convinced that agro-ecological agriculture is the answer to future food security as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter has demonstrated in a series of reports since 2009. These reports show that agro-ecological farming model can double agricultural production in 10 years and reduce hunger in Africa whilst protecting and even enhancing the natural environment.
Produced at the General Summit of Small Scale farmers in Eastern and Southern Africa, in Morogoro, Tanzania
Moses Shaha, ESAFF Chairperson,
Tel. +254724281610
E-mail: esaff@esaff.org, Website: www.esaff.org
The press conference has so far generated over 10 media slots, including:
http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php?l=29280
and an editorial in the Citizen:http://thecitizen.co.tz/editorial-analysis/-/11083-tread-with-caution-on-gmo-technology
and the second article in the Daily News http://dailynews.co.tz/home/?n=19933&cat=home
The Alliance launched with a fabulously successful press conference this morning. With around 40 participants, plus 10 Alliance members, including BBC World Service and most of the national daily newspapers. After Aida from Action Aid presented the press release there was a lively question and answer session, then lots of individual interviews with Alliance members. More media coverage tomorrow when Abdalah from Envirocare, and Aida from ActionAid are interviewed on TV (Jambo programme) and Radio (Asubuhi programme).
Heres the first of the articles that came out of the press release:http://www.dailynews.co.tz/business/?n=19905
Monsanto GM drought tolerant corn no better than conventional says USA' Dept of Agriculture.
The Tanzanian National Biotechnology Policy is a very scary document with biotech industry written all over it.