Community Alliance for Global Justice's critique of AGRA

Four Categories of Problems with AGRA

Political
• uses tax-exempt foundation money to act without accountability
• uses influence to monopolize discussions of development and agriculture
• promotes solutions decided upon undemocratically, by people whose authority has not been conferred by the populace and whose frame of reference is the Global North
• frames the problem as African production, rather than global distribution

Social
• privileges large-scale farmers/landholders
• encourages the purchase of inputs from foreign companies, leading to indebtedness
• intensifies reliance on volatile global economy
• does not address structural and social inequalities
• has the potential to exacerbate women’s poverty in integrated cash economies

Environmental
• encourages higher intensity of cultivation and monocropping, which decreases biodiversity and undermines indigenous crops
• potential for GE crops to be introduced and contaminate surrounding crops
• is uncritical of the first Green Revolution and does not acknowledge that its priniciples were introduced in some countries in Africa, and failed

Ethical
• privileges/asserts Western knowledge systems
• limits self-determination among farmers in Africa
• receives funding from foundations whose wealth is rooted in the maintenance of unequal global distribution
• promotes a racist model of development in which African producers are targets of Western conceptions of linear “progress”
• devalues the systems and knowledge of local peoples and precludes reciprocity and mutuality in exchanging ideas

One.org's Agricultural Policy - Critical Analysis

I am always excited about prospects for linking organic gardening with sustainable development, and appreciate any connection we can make between our own struggles for a sustainable local food system with the subsistence struggles of farmers in developing countries.

That said, I am fairly convinced at this point that One.org is not acting in the best interests of sustainability or resilience--economic or ecological--for Africa or for ourselves. Their long-term plans for developing Africa's agriculture seem by all accounts to be focusing on "green revolution" style improvements, including GM corn crops, subsidized inputs of patented seeds and chemical fertilizers, and partnerships with Agribusiness giants Monsanto and Cargill. There are also indications that the organization supports structural adjustment policies that force developing nations to remove tariffs and open up their ag markets to the fluctuations of global commodity prices.

I took some time to research this before writing, as I wanted to make sure it wasn't just hearsay. The fact is, One.org and their grantmakers and board members -- including AGRA (Gates Foundation) and the U.S. government's "Feed the Future" initiative -- are very guarded about the details of what they are actually doing on the ground in Africa. I did manage to find some good indications that the worst is true. Below are some excerpts and links to the most legitimate of the articles and documents I could find.

Different Shade of Green in Africa

Time article that covers the competing perspectives on sustainable agricultural development, with AGRA (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation→One.org) falling solidly on the Big Ag/GMO/chemical inputs side of the argument rather than the ecological agriculture side; also includes a disturbing indication of the ongoing costs that small farmers will incur under the new system.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Agricultural Development Strategy Overview:

"$39.1 million - Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) - African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) - This project seeks to develop drought-tolerant maize varieties to benefit smallholder African farmers in five countries. A portion of this grant funds research that uses transgenic approaches. (Monsanto is a subcontractor to AATF on this grant.)"

One.org policy brief:

"The private sector is a key component needed to drive growth, create markets, and improve food security by creating employment opportunities and reducing barriers to agricultural trade. The Asian and Latin American "Green Revolutions" that increased incomes and access to food for an estimated 1 billion people was underpinned by public and private investments in research, irrigation, infrastructure and extension. Therefore, investments are needed across the African agriculture sector for improving suitable seeds and fertilizers, farming practices, storage, processing, distribution and marketing…"

Huffington Post article:

"If you had any doubts about where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is really placing its bets, AGRA Watch's recent announcement of the Foundation's investment of $23.1 million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock should put them to rest. Genetic engineering: full speed ahead."

Guardian article:

“South Africa-based watchdog the African Centre for Biosafety then found that the foundation was teaming up with Cargill in a $10m project to "develop the soya value chain" in Mozambique and elsewhere. Who knows what this corporate-speak really means, but in all probability it heralds the big time introduction of GM soya in southern Africa."

Monsanto blog post supporting One.org: 'Nuff said.

Statement by Dr. Hans Herrens, chief editor of the most comprehensive survey of agricultural development strategies to date, the 600 page “Agriculture at a Crossroads” report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD):

"More revealing than what is said (or not said) in Feed the Future, is how it is interpreted. According to USAID, FTF will “build on breakthroughs in science and technology,” to be "delivered to" small-scale agricultural producers - which seems to belie the words about participation and recognizing local and Indigenous knowledge that appeared in the Summary document (the Country Investment Plans). There is no mention of agroecological farming or ecological agriculture and neither any of the IAASTD, the most comprehensive assessment of agricultural knowledge, science and technology published in the past couple of years, or actually anytime. There is no mention of addressing inequity in trade arrangements or within or between countries. Rather, the emphasis is on "agriculture-led growth" through "trade and other mechanisms," "seeking reductions in government controls on commodity prices,” and “protecting intellectual property.” The focus throughout is rather vaguely on building partnerships with everyone -- with the World Bank, IFAD, private sector, NGOs, etc. Special emphasis is given to investing in the WB's Global Ag & Food Security Program (GAFSP) which allows only minimal and carefully controlled inputs from civil society and which many see as the WB's way of funneling more investments towards transgenic, nanotech & other converging technologies."

And for your perusal, if you're as much an Ag nerd as I am: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD):

The objective of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was to assess the impacts of past, present and future agricultural knowledge, science and technology on the
• reduction of hunger and poverty,
• improvement of rural livelihoods and human health, and
• equitable, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development.

The Value of Semi-Subsistence Farms according to the European Network for Rural Development

ENRD seminar on the undervalued public goods provided by semi-subsistence farms. These include biodiversity, cultural richness and stability, and social welfare.

Vinay Gupta - Infrastructure for Anarchists

audio here.

32.10 - "I think America's odds of a really, really severe political crash are massively higher than Britain's and Europe's in general, primarily because the consensus in the American population on fundamental issues is gone - they can't agree on drugs, they can't agree on guns, they can't agree on gay marriage, and the can't agree on abortion... The population is split right down the middle on all of these issues. They're unwilling to agree to differ. They're constantly using the power of the federal government to force their views on each other and the federal government is turning into this blundering beast of an institution, largely because Americans keep trying to use it to coerce each other."

37.42 - "Americans... are four or five generations out from people who came to virgin territory, set up a shack, and started growing vegetables. There's a kind of durability there...that's very, very strong in America once you get out of the city, and fully half the population lives outside the city... The willingness of the European to trust their government to take care of them against violence in situations of critical infrastructure failure is part of why Europe is likely to be more stable, but it's also really really stupid considering previous history. Why Europeans are willing to go without weapons I have no idead. When you look at the Warsaw ghetto... !! ... Why was firearms not an integral part of the reconstruction of Europe? Well, the answer is it wasn't, and fortunately we've stayed out of the gutter on this one, and I think we'll be very glad that we did, because fundamentally a disarmed society is more stable than an armed one. We all know that at some level. But at the same time, with the American model, it's not at all clear why individuals should be in a position where a government you can't trust can disarm them."

58.55 - "I think it's possible to maintain a pretty much Western standard of living on about 20-30 watts of electricity per person."

~1.00.00 - "My concern is that the governments are going to collapse before we have any kind of meaningful alternative in place... the governments that we're working with, all these systems of government were designed a hundred to 200 to 500 to 1000 years ago when change was much slower, so the speed of events has increased by a factor of 500, 1000 or 10,000, but the speed of government might have gotten faster by a factor of 5... Governments are not designed to handle this kind of rapid change environment, and the things that governments are doing are drifting further and further away from what actually needs to be done."

1.02.40 "The bottom line is that governments are enormously limited in their ability to handle the big problems, I have no hope of changing that whatsoever. I hope they continue to limp along, but if you want to understand how we're really gonna take care of this business, look at wikipedia... We're gonna solve this stuff by developing institutions that are more effective than the current institutions because they're designed for the technology platform we have now."

Appropedia - 10,000 articles on appropriate technology and sustainability.

Links

Food Policy Journal here.

Quick chapter on economics of the labor market, labor unions, minimum wage, etc. Easy to understand with a lot of basic Supply and Demand curves.

The Right to Say No. Or Yes.

The going socialist theory (as expressed by folks like Kim Moody here) sees the capitalist class abolished by a worldwide democratic uprising of workers, who seize power over the means of production and redistribute assets equally among people.

My own observations of the world suggest that, with rare cooperative exceptions, someone generally organizes productive capacity (material resources and other people), and some people have more vision, drive, and capability for doing so than others. These people, of course, are certainly not the ones that always end up in these positions. Inheritance, class entrenchment, etc. ensure that idiots or assholes or otherwise undeserving folks end up at the top all the time. But if workers did succeed in seizing and equally distributing the assets of the capitalist class, the need would arise again for someone to organize people and assets and shape it all somehow, to manage cooperative projects. People would offer their assets and their labor to "buy into" someone's suggested project, or people would come up democratically with a project they'd like to pursue, and put the best individual or team on the job. This again ends up with more power and more resources in the hands of some people than others.

I am not anti-capitalist, in that I am not against some people having more than others. Greed is disheartening and inequality is ugly, but to attempt to manage human beings to ensure consistent levels of equality in all regards among them sounds like a tedious and frankly oppressive project, and one that is stacked too tenuously against the organic motion that is living and being.

So I am not anti-capitalist, in this regard at least. What I am is for accountability and power-sharing. I am for people having a say, and having the power to really have a say. I think that workers have the right to surrender some of their autonomy to "buy into" collective endeavors, and that includes both unions and private business firms. In other words, they have the right to sell their labor. That said, it's obvious there are some preconditions to making that right practicable.

Where the arguments of the socialists gain traction is in pointing out that workers often have very little decision in how or by whom they are employed because they have to be employed. The industrial, urban, mercantile economy we have surrendered to over the last several hundred years has severely limited peoples' ability to provide for themselves, thereby limiting their ability to say no to bad employment when it's the only employment option to be had. Again, we can trace this back to the expropriation of the peasantry in 17th century England, one of the first clear motions by the burgeoning capitalist class to ensure a dependable supply of low-wage labor - a.k.a., those that don't have an option to say no.

So this is where I end up in my political and economic orientations: I believe in strengthening the capacity of people to say no to shitty employment. Sometimes this means changing employment conditions, and sometimes it means increasing options through developing external or internal resources. While ideally this would entail mostly attentive, dedicated local work, the reality of the globalized age is that it often demands coalition and coordination with actors far and near. I suppose it can take a lot of shapes.

All peoples that exist in the world once had their own land or equal access to collective land. They could grow food, fuel, and textiles on it. Few chose to leave these original holdings; most were forced off. This is the history of labor. In my ideal world, we would all be well-organized smallholders, providing for ourselves and our communities and living freely. The complexities and realities of the modern age preclude this from becoming a reality anytime soon, if ever. But it shapes my policy inclinations nonetheless.


(images from maggieblanck.com)

Capital-ish and Social-ish

Suggest reforming a shitty health care system and you're called a socialist. Suggest that a private business can create public value and you're called a capitalist.

This is bothersome.

To begin with, even if I espoused an unfettered free-market ideology - which those that call me a socialist know I do not - I still couldn't be a capitalist. A capitalist is someone who owns capital. Not me.

Beyond this, while it's easy to see the socialish aspect of an idea or policy, or the capitalish aspect - and I believe it's worthwhile to note these aspects and include them in any worthwhile discussion of an idea or policy - it seems truest to me that most of the time there's a bit of both. It's like anima and animus. Hemingway contains both masculine and feminine energy. The proportions change from individual to individual and for one individual over time, but there's a little of both in everyone.

In examining policies I would like to simultaenously (1) not jump to any foregone conclusions based on the ishness of a policy, but (2) DO consider the complexities over time that said ishness implies. In other words, if a policy has a socialish aspect, let's consider what that might do to the motivation of the policy beneficiaries (for example). Let's consider it IN CONTEXT. I'm a big fan of this in-context thing. And, contrary to the presumptions of a lot of people, I don't think it's impossible to think in context while also considering the long-term implications and theoretical complexities of the thing you're thinking about. As a matter of fact, I think it's necessary.

"Further, an informed respondent is one who knows the benefits and negative externalities of a public good, and it therefore becomes easier for the respondent to accurately assess the maximum amount he/she is willing to pay for a good. Research has also demonstrated that informing respondents of the negative externalities of a good on society prior to surveying has a higher impact on the marginal WTP estimate than does informing respondents of the societal benefits of the good (Marette et al., 2004) That is, people respond more to the harm a good can cause than to the benefits that good may bring to society."

From here.

This makes me think about creating negative laws - can't do this, can't do that - rather than positive laws - must do this, must do that. This bears some resemblance to libertarian or Hayek-style laws for regulating the economy and other human affairs. There's some sense to it. Not being able to do something doesn't feel as controlling to people as having to do something.

With the exception, perhaps, of gun control. Hm, this needs further consideration....