No to GMOs! - a view from IUF Africa

Africa has emerged as a front line continent in the corporate drive to expand the cultivation of genetically modified crops, with field trials underway in at least 7 countries. A concentrated push is under way to secure this expansion through gaining control of seeds, land, water and political power. In this context we are pleased to publish this article by Omara Amuko, IUF African regional coordinator for health, safety and the environment.

The African Union has declared 2014 the Year of Agriculture and Food Security. It will be commemorated across Africa. It will be a year that gives opportunities to communities, states and non-state actors including unions to interact and to shape agricultural policies and practices.

Experience has demonstrated that Africa has a well-crafted, home-grown framework for agricultural development and transformation. Major studies by UNCTAD and UNEP that examined organic agricultural practices throughout Africa concluded these could produce superior yields to conventional practices, increase incomes, reduce poverty and protect the environment. The monumental International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) also drew on African and other experiences to reach similar conclusions.

But agriculture in Africa threatens to be undermined by the G8's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and by Public/Private Partnership (PPP) initiatives led by African governments and African elites fronting for multinational corporations promoting high-input monoculture production, including transgenic (GMO) crops. European officials, policy makers, and pro-GM lobbyists and scientists last month came to Ethiopia to promote this agenda in meetings with African Union officials and agriculture ministers.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 1994, exerts a major influence on global agricultural policy. The Gates Foundation claims to promote "new techniques to help farmers in developing countries grow more food and earn more money" while openly supporting genetic engineering projects in Africa and other developing countries. Along with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation is supporting the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) with huge amounts of funding. AGRA consists of a team of scientists, economists and corporate leaders, including from the biotech industry, with Kofi Annan as the Chair of its Board. AGRA is prising open the African continent to GM seeds and pesticides from the major agrichemical corporations such as Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.

Hunger is being falsely and cynically invoked to justify opening up Africa as the new test bed for GMOs. GM technology is not the solution to hunger in Africa, but rather an extractive investment to extract wealth through patenting selected African crops like cassava, millet, sorghum and others. Transgenic crops will require large expanses of land and displace the local peasants from their land (land grabbing). Farmers will have to buy new seeds every year and buy the toxic chemicals that are required for use with these corporate seeds. This will drive many farmers into debt. Burdened by debt, farmers are likely to lose their farms. Lost farms will mean loss of employment in the rural areas, leading to an exodus to urban areas in the search for jobs. Rather than creating employment and reducing poverty, the corporate model of agriculture will increase poverty and hunger.

Agricultural workers will increasingly suffer from the concentrated use of pesticides and herbicides, increased use of chemical fertilizers and corporate claims on scarce water resources demanded by GMOs in food production.

We should be guided by the IUF 24 Congress Resolution for a moratorium on GMOs. We therefore urge all our affiliates, especially in Africa, to use the 2014 Year of Agriculture and Food Security to demand that our governments resist corporate pressure and not bow to the pressure to introduce transgenic crops in Africa.

In Africa there are already organizations campaigning against GMOs, including the  Coalition for Farmers' Rights and Advocacy Against GMOs (COFAM). Our affiliate the Ghana Agricultural Workers Unions (GAWU) is a founding member of COFAM. We should join the anti-GMO campaigns and target the companies promoting GM technology - from agricultural to retail food chains. We have to educate and mobilize our members to play their part. Our participation in the campaign could win support from groups outside the labour movement, encouraging them to communicate our concerns to a broader public. We can negotiate collective bargaining agreements which commit food processing companies to GM-free production. This increases pressure on the seed companies which are promoting the technology, on the TNCs which are processing them and on national and supranational political bodies in Africa. In all of this work we can be guided by the precautionary principle.