Tanzanian farmers are facing heavy prison sentences if they continue their traditional seed exchange!
In
order to receive development assistance, Tanzania has to give Western
agribusiness full freedom and give enclosed protection for patented
seeds. “Eighty percent of the seeds are being shared and sold in an
informal system between neighbors, friends and family. The new law
criminalizes the practice in Tanzania,” says Michael Farrelly of
TOAM, an organic farming movement in Tanzania.
Brutal
corporate onslaught against third world - Part 7 - Choosing between
grandmother and industry
“Doing
nothing and thinking that you can continue with what your grandmother
grew, is a guaranteed catastrophe”, says Kinyua M’Mbijjewe
from Syngenta. “The reason we have hunger in Africa is that
there are insufficient agricultural inputs.”
Abel Lyimo,
the CEO of the Tanzanian Rural Urban Development Initiatives, a NGO
that focusses on the development of small-scale farmers through the
private sector, thinks the same: “Tanzania is one of the
countries with the lowest use of farm inputs and the lowest
productivity in the world. There is a link between proper use of
inputs and productivity. Use only half, and you’ll produce only
half.”
Janet Maro
contradicts that. “In the Mlali Region, there were projects in
which they gave the farmers parcels of land to grow tomatoes. It went
really well for a while and they produced a huge quantity of
tomatoes, but this year things went wrong. The price of a bucket of
tomatoes ranged between two and three Euros. Nowadays, because of the
overproduction, you have to consider yourself lucky if you get 40
cents. Now, the farmers can no longer afford those expensive
fertilizers and chemicals.”
“And I
haven’t even started to mention the environmental damage and the
deterioration in soil fertility that these projects cause. The
government has asked us to train farmers because the quality and
quantity of the water from the Mzinga and Ruvu Rivers have
considerably worsened because of the government’s agricultural
projects. They want to save the situation before it is too late and
have seen that the projects of SAT have a much better impact on the
environment.”
Even the
United Nation’s former Special Rapporteur for the Right for Food,
Olivier De Schutter, stresses the importance of more research and
investment in agro-ecological methods in a report in 2011.
According to
FAO figures, more than 80 percent of the food in Asia and Sub-Saharan
Africa is produced by small-scale farmers. If they cannot afford
commercial inputs, they can still make progress with agro-ecological
methods. The methods are not immediately patentable and therefore the
industry treats them shabbily. An unfortunate consequence of this is
that insufficient research is being done into such methods.
Source:
http://www.mo.be/en/analysis/tanzanian-farmers-are-facing-heavy-prison-sentences-if-they-continue-their-traditional-seed
Big corporations are grabbing huge
cultivable areas especially in the developing countries in order
to control food production.
|
Comments
Post a Comment