By CHRISTINE MUNGAI The EastAfrican
IN SUMMARY
With increased enforcement of intellectual property rights, the activists fear that the rich pool of Africa’s indigenous seed varieties could soon be in private hands.
High-input agricultural model that is being pushed by Agra together with multinational agribusiness firms and donor agencies, locks poor farmers into a cycle of dependency, reducing their rights and food sovereignty.
The organisations recommend that governments rethink the one-size-fits-all approach to boosting agriculture and improving food security, and work towards guarding Africa’s biodiversity and protecting small scale farmers.
Agnes Mutiso has been a farmer for more than 30 years, and in that time, she’s seen it all — harsh droughts that used to occur every five years, but are now giving just a two-year respite; the El Nino floods of 1997-8 that engorged Masinga Dam near her farm until it spilled over; six parliaments and two presidents, who have passed laws and given directives on agriculture, alternately promoting and abandoning various policies.
In that time, Mrs Mutiso has tried to use hybrid seeds from a seed company in Embu — the closest big town, 50km to the north — to grow maize on her 10-acre farm in Kivaa, in Kenya’s Eastern Province, as they promised higher yields.
But the harvests kept falling short when the rains failed, and Mrs Mutiso had to contend with not just less food, but creditors on her back.
“I used to buy the hybrid maize, but the problem is that you can’t keep some of the harvest to replant the following year; you have to go back every year and buy new seed,” she says.
“You also have to buy a chemical fertiliser to use when you plant the hybrid seeds, or else you won’t reap anything. It was too expensive for me.”
Mrs Mutiso explains that she needed at least 32kg of maize seed for her farm, and each 2-kg bag of hybrid seed retails at Ksh400 ($4.6), which means she would spend at least Ksh 6,400 ($74) on seed alone.
She also needed at least four 50-kg bags of fertiliser, and although they are government-subsidised — 50kg bags can be bought in government stores at Ksh 2,500 ($29) — they are hardly ever available.
Thus she had to rely on private retail outlets where the cost can be as high as Ksh5,800 ($67) — bringing her total planting costs to over Ksh20,000 ($230).
“You can take the seeds and fertiliser on credit, and pay back when you sell your harvest. But we are afraid of loans, because in this area the rains are not reliable. If it doesn’t rain, you don’t harvest as much, and you are forced to pay back that loan out of your pocket,” she says.
Mrs Mutiso says she eventually abandoned the hybrid seeds and reverted to planting traditional varieties of maize. She also plants traditional strains of millet, sorghum, pigeon peas and green grams — all of which she says are resilient to drought.
“The yield of the traditional maize is lower than the hybrid one, but at least it is reliable,” she says. “And I don’t have to keep buying seed and fertiliser every season, I can just keep part of my harvest to plant next time.”
But a coalition of civil society groups is now raising the alarm that small-scale farmers like Mrs Mutiso could soon be edged out of planting traditional varieties, as big agribusiness firms appropriate these plant varieties, hybridise them, and then patent the hybrids.
With increased enforcement of intellectual property rights, the activists fear that the rich pool of Africa’s indigenous seed varieties could soon be in private hands.
Intervention
The coalition of civil society organisations, which includes Action Aid Tanzania, Action Aid Uganda, African Biodiversity Network, Rights Food Alliance Uganda and the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, are protesting, in particular, against the policies of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), which focus on hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and credit.
“We are concerned that our biodiversity is under threat. The Green Revolution was touted as a success in Asia, but it also resulted in the complete destruction of indigenous plant varieties as hybrid rice and wheat were adopted wholesale. We don’t want that replicated here,” says Gathuru Mburu, co-ordinator of the African Biodiversity Network and Director of the Institute for Culture and Ecology.
The Green Revolution in the 1960s and 70s was anchored in irrigation, hybrid seeds and plenty of chemical fertilisers and pesticides; and focused on intense monocropping of rice, wheat and maize.
Under the programme, India increased its wheat production tenfold and its rice production threefold, and the new varieties of wheat, rice and maize quickly spread through Asia, replacing local varieties.
But these hybrids only produced the desired results if there was irrigation, and chemical fertilisers and pesticides were used.
Although there was a push for African governments to adopt the intensive, high-input model, it wasn’t well suited for Africa.
African soils are some of the oldest and most depleted in the world, and the continent has many different soil types, which meant they did not respond well to uniform fertiliser treatment.
The focus on intensive monocropping was also doomed to fail, considering Africa’s agricultural system is a mosaic of diverse farming, forestry and livestock ecosystems where one-size-fits-all formulas cannot work.
Mr Mburu argues that the high-input agricultural model that is being pushed by Agra together with multinational agribusiness firms and donor agencies, locks poor farmers into a cycle of dependency, reducing their rights and food sovereignty.
“People have been selecting and breeding crops for centuries. But this kind of hybrid plant breeding makes sure that you cannot replant the seed of the harvest — you have to buy the seed afresh every season, as well as a chemical fertiliser,” he says.
“It is trapping farmers in an expensive system — and making sure that people cannot freely share seeds as they have always done.”
Officials from Agra authorised to comment on the concerns raised by the civil society groups were not available to speak with The EastAfrican, according to Sylvia Mwichuli, Agra’s director of communications and public relations.
Different approach
Statistics from Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture show that almost 80 per cent of farmers plant with seed saved from the previous harvest, or obtained from community seed banks.
Kenya’s Seed and Plant Varieties Act, as amended in 2002, requires testing and certification for the sale of most crop seeds.
This is also imposed on farm-saved seed if farmers decide to sell the seeds, as opposed to sharing them freely.
The organisations recommend that governments rethink the one-size-fits-all approach to boosting agriculture and improving food security, and work towards guarding Africa’s biodiversity and protecting small scale farmers.
“The push for hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers has been tried before in Africa, and it didn’t work,” says Mr Mburu. “What we need is our indigenous plant varieties protected and developed for local conditions — and to make sure that our people have free access to them.”
“Whoever controls the seed controls the food,” says Joe Mzinga, the regional co-ordinator of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum.
“Our food sovereignty will be jeopardised if we continue to push this model that favours the big corporates over the small scale farmer.