During the summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations on Food Security (Rome, 3-5 June 2008), this body announced on June 4 “an unprecedented alliance between front-line elements of agricultural development”, aiming at “giving a strong impulse to the production of food in Africa”. Given this announcement, it would be obvious to include the African farmers into such an agreement. Instead, this is a treaty between the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), promoted by the billionaire Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation; with the FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

Ignoring the real causes and that the problem is not production of but access to food, these people keep on affirming that the “perennial” solution for Africa is to increase the production of food by “modernizing” with a “new green revolution” billions of farmers, who up to now have survived in spite of waves of colonialism and neo-liberalism. That is, the intention now is to make them depend massively on industrial seeds and patented agrochemicals, destroying the already fragile soil and biodiversity, contaminating the water supplies with toxic agrochemicals, all of this accompanied by the imposition of new regulations about seeds and intellectual property in order to protect the businesses who sold them seeds they have never asked for. The objective is to destroy the traditional food systems that are not basically founded upon money and do not follow the rules of free market. What a coincidence: this reminds us of the agricultural policies in Mexico, that have expelled billions of people from their lands and into emigration, leaving the country in the worst food dependency of its history. Could the reason be that ex president Ernesto Zedillo is a prominent adviser of the mentioned Gates Foundation?

The same day, Monsanto, who is hoping to reap great profit out of this, released an announcement promising- without any substantiated base- to double the production of corn, soy and transgenic cotton by 2030 as a solution to hunger and climate change. They announce that, together with the Gates Foundation and the CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, based in Texcoco), they are developing transgenic plants resistant to drought, but that they would not charge the poorest people of Africa for the royalties on their monopolistic patents (at least for the first harvest, until dependency has been created). This is a crude manoeuvre to legitimize transgenics and to open new markets, that will contaminate the Africans (and others who will let them do so), taking advantage of the opportunities their buddies at the United Nations have offered them.

The summit of the FAO, as well as a few weeks earlier the ninth conference of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CDB) held in Bonn, touched on the issue of agro-industrial fuels - which according to numerous sources compete with food production and threaten biodiversity - in order to appear concerned, but without declaring any effective measures to slow down this insane development. The excuse is that these “small errors” can be adjusted with a “second generation”, which in practice would mean huge plantations of trees and transgenic crops.

At the beginning of the CDB conference, the secretary of this body, Ahmed Djoglaf, declared that “the biggest enterprise of the world is not Wal-mart, but nature”, and he congratulated himself because there were so many industries represented, due to the way this official is using the public resources of this organization to facilitate the presence of transnational corporations, the main destroyers of cultural and biological diversity.

The real solution to the food crisis and to the effects global warming has on agriculture are those people who have the knowledge of ten thousand years of experience in producing food, shelter, crops adapted to different climates and circumstances, accessible to everyone; it is the small-scale farmers of the world. However, at the summit of the FAO as well as in the CDB, delegates of Via Campesina have been repressed and expelled in an attempt to hush them. Their crime: at the FAO a peaceful protest, carrying posters indicating facts about the immoral profits that the agribusiness companies have accumulated, thanks to the food crisis, and at the CDB, spreading out banners saying “nature for people, not for profit” and “There is no biodiversity without farmers”. They are not alone, they will not remain silent and above all, they are right.

- Silvia Ribeiro is researcher of the “ETC Group”.

(Traducción: ALAI)