Aid Money Benefiting Agribusiness Companies, Not Farmers

We must stand up against trade agreements which give corporations new powers to grab land, monopolise seed distribution and benefit from an export-to-the-West model of growth.

It’s a good thing that the aid budget should be enshrined in law, but that aid money seems to have become increasingly about facilitating western multinationals in accessing and restructuring markets in countries in Africa, rather than aiding vulnerable communities. This is becoming especially apparent in the context of food production and agriculture.

Africa is seeing a new wave of colonialism as multinational corporations, aided by rich governments and financial institutions, vie to increase their control of land, seeds, water and other resources. The continent has been described as the ‘last frontier in global food and agricultural markets’ by the World Bank, and private sector and corporate investment is seen as both a good investment opportunity as well as the only way of boosting agricultural production and helping to lift people out of poverty.

The reality is that sustainable small-scale farmers produce over 70 per cent of the food consumed in Africa, on less than 15 per cent of the agricultural land available on the continent. Despite this, donors, development agencies and multilateral financial initiatives, like the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (New Alliance) and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, continue to push a one-size-fits-all industrial model of agriculture and make exorbitant claims about their aims.
The New Alliance initiative, launched in 2012, aims to achieve ‘sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years’.

What it doesn’t mention is that some of the projects it finances, such as agricultural growth corridors in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania (which the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) has spent almost £70 million financing), have been described as ‘likely to facilitate the appropriation of land and the displacement of small-scale farmers, while imposing high-input, industrial agriculture using hybrid and GM seed’.

DfID is currentlychannelling £600 million of aid money through the New Alliance to support agricultural development and improve food security in Africa.

This is nothing to do with helping Africa feed itself; it is about further empowering an already very powerful and bloated agribusiness sector. Clearly this needs to be challenged – to bring an end to the latest crusade for Africa’s resources. This means a radical reform of the aid system, which is currently doing more to entrench, than to break, corporate control.

 By Ian Fitzpatrick and taken from here

Zimbabwe Government Failing To Pay Farmers For Food Produced

A Zimbabwe state mechanism designed to promote food security is being blamed for exacerbating the country’s chronic food shortages.
The failure by the 83-year-old state-run Grain Marketing Board (GMB) to pay producers for their grain in recent years has short-circuited the ability of small-scale farmers to generate cash flow to fund agricultural inputs for the following season - a problem recognized by President Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party.

The Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee, with a membership drawn from the government, the UN World Food Programme and other partners, estimates that 2.2 million people, or a quarter of the rural population, require food assistance during the 2014 “lean season” - the few months before the harvest in March.

Small-scale farmers are the backbone of the country’s food security and provide about 70 percent of its staple crop, maize, according to agricultural analysts and government estimates. Denford Gwara, 48, a small-scale farmer who used to produce wheat and maize on 40 hectares of land in Mazowe, Mashonaland Central province, told IRIN the GMB owed him US$9,000 for produce he had delivered in the past two harvests.
“I have visited GMB on numerous occasions but they keep telling me that government has not given them money to pay me. Last year, they offered to pay off part of the debt with fertilizer and maize seed, but only gave me a few bags, which were too little for me to make any meaningful farming,” he said.
As a result, he has had to reduce the area of land he tills to only five hectares, and had to sell his old truck to raise money for inputs.

 The GMB’s primary role is to ensure national food security by promoting crop production - mainly cereals - as well as the procurement, free distribution and sales of harvested grains, and managing the country’s strategic grain reserves. It also has a commercial department that processes and sells agricultural products such as oil seeds, rice, groundnuts, coffee and popcorn.

At a recent media briefing in the capital, Harare, minister of agriculture Joseph Made said, “At the moment, most farmers are using limited financial resources. They need the money that GMB owes them. Government cannot expect farmers to produce when it is failing to pay them for their produce.”
Made acknowledged that the GMB owed farmers more than US$6 million. He said his ministry was “battling with treasury” and hoped the finance ministry would “assist, so that farmers have the money they need to finance their operations”.

 Even before the land reform programme in 2000, when about 4,500 white-owned farms - accounting for about 39 percent of the country’s land - was redistributed to an estimated 245,000 black farmers, small-scale farmers were a central pillar in the nation’s food security.
After independence from Britain in 1980, price controls on maize increased the trend by white commercial farmers to resort to cash crops like tobacco, paprika, cut flowers and cotton, and growing yellow maize for stock feed, entrenching cereal production as largely the preserve of communal black farmers.
In the aftermath of the land reform programme, large-scale agro-businesses collapsed, as did the access of small-scale farmers to cheaper agricultural inputs facilitated by the large-scale demands of commercial farmers. The imposition of sanctions for human rights abuses further squeezed an already fragile economy.


Eddie Cross, a farmer, agricultural consultant and member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, told IRIN the failure by GMB to pay farmers timeously was “a serious issue that requires urgent government intervention”.
“In the old days, farmers would get their money within a week after delivering produce. The farmers would then start planning for the next farming season and know how much to set aside for personal consumption. They would be able to buy inputs on time and before prices shot up, unlike now,” Cross said.
He estimated the number of small-scale farmers in Zimbabwe - those on communal land as well as those resettled through land reform - at about 700,000, noting that about half of them had been “severely affected” by non-payment or delayed payment from the GMB.
“It is confusing that the government is prepared to annually hunt for money to import food, when it should be prioritizing raising money to allocate to GMB for farmers’ payments as a way to ensure that production improves,” he said.

Wonder Chabikwa, the ZCFU president, told IRIN, “Granted, drought and the delayed distribution of inputs are also behind poor agricultural production - particularly that of maize - over the years,” he said. “But one untold story is that GMB’s inability to pay farmers is a major factor that has affected their capacity to prepare and produce meaningful yields, leading to recurrent food insecurity.”


Whole article here