As the most frequently violated human right in the world, the right to adequate food and nutrition is receiving increasing international attention.⁽²⁾ The growing awareness in recent years of the long term consequences of undernutrition for individual and national health, and thus the positioning of nutrition as central to the global health and development agenda, has seen the rise of several global movements for ‘scaling up’ nutrition worldwide. Laudable. But these schemes, all set up by the same handful of multinational companies and rich country governments,⁽³⁾ are being heavily criticised for benefitting wealthy nations at the expense of poor Africans.

Although this international concern regarding the development implications of undernutrition has brought about necessary steps in the fight against hunger, it has given rise to new policy concerns. A fundamental conflict of interest is manifesting in the structures and funding schemes of the supranational initiatives backing government-led nutrition initiatives in Africa. Through the scaling up nutrition initiatives governments are encouraged to form partnerships with companies represented by the initiatives and they are often required to amend policies to facilitate the expansion of agribusiness in exchange for funding and commitments from multinational companies to invest.⁽⁴⁾

This intrinsic conflict of interest presents a twofold market infiltration by international commercial giants. The first dimension relates to the corporate takeover of food production by integrating business into local food systems and introducing bio-fortified crops and agrochemicals for industrial agriculture, instead of sustainable practices like building on Africa’s rich crop diversity and local knowledge.⁽⁵⁾ The second dimension relates to the relaxing of land laws to allow powerful international agribusinesses to gain access to Africa’s land, which ultimately removes access to land and livelihoods of Africa’s millions of smallholder farmers. In response to this inequitable situation, the concept of food sovereignty has been championed as an essential weapon for social movements demanding the redistribution of the means of food production.

This discussion paper analyses the fundamental conflict of interest in the international interventions that are being adopted by African governments in the fight against hunger and undernutrition. As such, this paper assesses the impact of agricultural policy reforms and the integration of global businesses on African food systems and food sovereignty.

Food sovereignty and the corporate takeover of African agriculture

According to the 2013 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report The State of Food Insecurity in the World, despite making considerable gains in its efforts to curb undernutrition, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the highest prevalence of food insecurity and undernourisment in the world.⁽⁶⁾ The rise of the scaling up nutrition indicatives is borne out of the need to ‘feed the world’. These programmes seek to address food insecurity primarily through increasing agricultural production. But in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 20 years leading up to 2011, per capita food production rose by 10%, while the number of people going hungry increased by 40%,⁽⁷⁾ demonstrating that the relationship between increased food production and decreased hunger is not linear. In fact, during the 2007/2008 and 2011 global food crises, agri-food monopolies reported record global harvest and record profits.⁽⁸⁾ According to a research report by the International Food Policy Research Institute, in Sub-Saharan Africa the 2007 and 2008 global food crisis (that was marked by a sharp hike in commodity prices) led to a 63% price increase in staple foods including maize, rice and wheat.⁽⁹⁾ The prevalence of hunger in most African countries is thus not the outcome of low agricultural output, but an outcome of poverty when people cannot afford the food that is produced or lack access to resources for food production.

While initiatives to scale up nutrition through increased production have noble intentions, in a world where food has became a commodity, with access being determined through the market with the objective to maximise profits, the fact that they are creating a profitable investment climate by giving companies easier access to African resources and markets cannot be denied. As the World Development Movement shows in its report Carving Up a Continent: How the UK Government is Facilitating the Corporate Takeover of African Food, the African countries being targeted by scaling up nutrition initiatives like the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (New Alliance), “are not those with the highest levels of hunger or poverty, but those with the best access to export markets and the highest levels of economic growth.”⁽¹⁰⁾ The New Alliance requires African countries to change their policies to facilitate the expansion of agribusiness in exchange for aid money from G8 countries to develop the agriculture sector, and they are being made to reform their trade systems, committing to not restrict exports even during times of domestic food shortage.⁽¹¹⁾ And all the while, as Olivier de Schutter, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has stated, governments have been making promises to investors with “no long-term view about the future of smallholder farmers” and without their participation.⁽¹²⁾ By taking over food production by integrating business into local food systems, the scaling up nutrition initiatives, even with their noble intentions, are threatening Africa’s food sovereignty.

Food security can be understood in terms of four key interactive factors namely: availability of food, access to food, stability of food supply and food utilisation. Food sovereignty goes a step further by asserting “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems,” putting the “aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems.”⁽¹³⁾ To this end, food sovereignty places a greater focus on self-determination and the preservation of locally based and controlled food systems. Because food sovereignty asserts that those who eat the food should be able to control and shape its production and distribution, and that those who produce food should have control of the means to do so, it “calls for a shift in power from the hands of dominating governments and rich multinational corporations to the hands of communities and nations.”⁽¹⁴⁾

The impact of multinational agribusiness corporations on local food systems

It is well known that like in many other industries, only a few large corporations dominate the production, processing, distribution and retailing of food. Due to relatively lower household income, until recent years, the growth in the variety and volume of food products that have been marketed, distributed and sold in African markets has been very slow. Nonetheless, due to a continuously growing global demand for food and Africa’s growing economy and population, as well as its rapidly growing and modernising cities, more and more food and beverage companies perceive Africa not only as a resource in the production and processing of food, but also as a consumer market. As stated in a recent World Bank report, “Africa represents the ‘last frontier’ in global food and agricultural markets.”⁽¹⁵⁾ From the corporate view, this is an untapped market with great promise. Driven by a lack of opportunities elsewhere, large corporations are seeking access to resources and new markets in Africa to expand their operations. To achieve this expansion these corporate giants require increased and guaranteed control over what people in Africa grow and how.

According to the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) approximately 80% of seed in Africa is currently bred by smallholder farmers who preserve their seeds within the local food system.⁽¹⁶⁾ Ninety percent of the seeds are local varieties supplied by farmers and are not suitable for big agribusiness.⁽¹⁷⁾ The international seed industry is essentially owned by a few multinational pesticide companies,⁽¹⁸⁾ and through the public-private partnership model being widely adopted in agricultural aid and development, these companies have close ties to many of the scaling up initiatives, such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the G8 New Alliance. These new global partners (as they are presented in the various scaling-up initiatives), under the guise of harmonising seed laws and providing seeds that will produce higher yields, essentially force African governments to change their seed laws in exchange for funding and support, to allow big seed companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta greater access to African markets.⁽¹⁹⁾ AGRA, for example, is comprised of networks of businesses that sell farmers hybrid seeds, which are bred to produce good yields only in the first season, so farmers have to purchase new seeds every year rather than saving or exchanging the seeds they have.⁽²⁰⁾ So far, 8 of the 10 African countries in the New Alliance have committed to changing their seed laws to allow giant seed companies entry into their markets, with Mozambique committing to entirely ceasing distribution of free and unimproved seeds.⁽²¹⁾

The danger here is that through the vast networks in the public-private partnerships, large companies are granted monopoly over seed research and development, production and distribution. There is then a risk that local farmers become dependent on buying seeds produced by the companies, which increases farmers’ costs and reduces choice and biodiversity.⁽²²⁾ Thus food sovereignty will be severely compromised as smallholder farmers will be legally and materially restricted in terms of what and how they plant, a situation which could ultimately lead to the permanent loss of food sovereignty as local food systems are completely obliterated.

Another major impact of the conflict of interest in these international initiatives seeking to provide African countries with solutions for ending hunger and undernutrition is the introduction of mineral fertilisers that will be used together with local organic fertilisers. According to the African Centre for Biodiversity, Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for less than only 1% of the world’s total fertiliser consumption.⁽²³⁾ AGRA claims that the lack of access to and knowledge about the ‘added value’ of mineral fertilisers in African farming systems is one of the reasons for low consumption of fertiliser and hence low production output in the region’s agriculture sector.⁽²⁴⁾

While the use of fertilisers can increase the volume and consumable quality of yields, the introduction of mineral fertilisers, as seen in numerous seed and fertiliser schemes in the past, is likely to create dependency among smallholder farmers because fertilisers damage soil, meaning that more fertiliser needs to be used to maintain production.⁽²⁵⁾ A cynical interpretation of this situation is that it represents great market potential, and it seems that giant agribusinesses are cashing in. Just as the companies in the AGRA network sell farmers seeds, they also sell them fertiliser. Considering that AGRA’s Soil Health Programme (SHP), currently underway in 11 Sub-Saharan African countries, is aiming to involve 15 million smallholder farmers by 2019, boosting the annual consumption of mineral fertilisers to about 1.5 million tons for the duration of the operation,⁽²⁶⁾ AGRA corporate partners could be in for quite the pay day. In another example, under the Rwandan Government’s Crop Intensification Programme (CIP), implemented as part of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development’s (NEPAD) Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), the world’s largest fertiliser company, Yara International ASA (also involved in the New Alliance), the main beneficiary of the CIP, pockets millions of dollars annually.⁽²⁷⁾ The CIP’s mass rollout of imported fertilisers increased the annual application of fertiliser from 4 to 22 kilograms per hectare by 2011.⁽²⁸⁾

Fertile soils are among the most important resources for a sustainable food system. However, the notion that the increased use of mineral fertilisers will produce higher yields is indicative of a short-sighted view that fails to acknowledge the long-term effects. By extending lines of credit to smallholder farmers to enable them to buy fertilisers and hybrid seeds, as is often done within scaling up nutrition initiatives, including AGRA, the same debt-driven agriculture model that has seen farmers in India incur devastating debts, is being rolled out in Africa. Furthermore, fertiliser generally requires a lot of energy to produce. Because production is energy intensive, the price of mineral fertilisers is largely linked to the price of oil and tends to fluctuate with it.⁽²⁹⁾ Exposing African farmers to price fluctuations as volatile and costly as oil prices poses a direct threat to food sovereignty within local food systems. A rise in market mineral fertiliser prices could lead to serious losses because local farmers have to compete in competitive global markets, and even smallholder farmers are likely to suffer if local consumption drops due to lack of affordability.

The issue of land

Under the Nutrition for Growth Compact signed in London in June 2013, several African countries made pledges to increase efforts to end poverty and undernutrition. Benin pledged US$ 144 million to the cause, Malawi pledged to increase the proportion of the budget allocated to nutrition from 0.1% to 0.3% by 2020, and Ethiopia pledged to give US$ 15 million of domestic resources annually until 2020 to tackle undernutrition. Many countries promised to reduce stunting rates. Namibia pledged to increase rates of exclusive breastfeeding for infants under six months of age, and Sierra Leone pledged to increase its number of trained nutritionists by 150%.⁽³⁰⁾ As Aaron Oxley, Executive Director at Results UK, points out, “These pledges matter and show a critical new momentum on undernutrition on the continent.”⁽³¹⁾ But pledges of a different kind are also being made.

Africa is home to 202 million hectares of arable land, and half of the world’s total holdings of uncultivated, fertile land.⁽³²⁾ In the scramble for African natural resources, land is increasingly becoming a hot commodity for foreign investors. Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Sudan are giving up large amounts of their land to foreign corporate investors. South Africa has acquired more than 1 million hectares of land for the cultivation of rice and sugarcane among other crops in Mozambique,⁽³³⁾ which has leased over 29% of its agricultural land to corporations and foreign investors.⁽³⁴⁾ Ethiopia has similarly leased 8%.⁽³⁵⁾ But along with many others, these countries continue to make policy changes that will assist corporations to get yet more land. Among these are the 10 African countries that have joined the New Alliance. For instance, the Government of Ethiopia has announced that it will “refine” its land law to facilitate long-term land leases and strengthen the enforcement of commercial farm contracts. Malawi’s government has committed to set aside 200,000 hectares of prime land for commercial investors by 2015. In Ghana the government has promised to make available 10,000 hectares for investment, also by the end of 2015.⁽³⁶⁾

As corporate conglomerates and wealthy governments take over local agriculture and non-mineral natural resources there is a growing incidence of what some are calling land grabbing in Africa’s poorer nations brought about by growing demand for consumer goods in the global food and beverage industry. The use of sugarcane in energy diversification efforts has also led to a sharp increase in demand.

The pervasive impact of large scale land deals in Africa is significant. Although commercial investments in usable, uncultivated land can have a positive impact on an economy, land grabs in African countries in the past have had negative effects on the residents of the land in question. Due to weak land administration systems in many African countries, residential areas are often not registered. When these land acquisition deals are made with foreign investors, the inhabitants of these lands are often not consulted and whole communities are evicted. As a result, the corporate takeover of land leads directly to loss of access to land, means of food production and income, and thus impacts on locals’ food security and sovereignty.

The large scale corporate takeover of land is often justified by the notion that the massive corporations involved will not only ramp up production to combat hunger and undernutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also by the promise of jobs and skills development, as well as ‘business partnerships’ with smallholder farmers. However, the employment opportunities offered by these investors are generally limited and/or insecure with low pay ⁽³⁷⁾ and business partnerships never materialise. Thus, Africa’s smallholder farmers lose their land and livelihoods and often get nothing in return.

Conclusion

The fundamental importance of tackling undernutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa is not in question. Ending hunger on an impoverished continent is a mammoth task that will require increased government and donor funding, but corporations could also have a role to play in this essential endeavour. However, the current profit-driven model of public-private partnership seen in scaling up nutrition initiatives is cause for concern. Under international law, states are obliged to protect and promote their citizens’ right to food and nutrition.⁽³⁸⁾ Curtailing a state’s capacity and ability to do so through forcing reforms that effectively not only relinquish the state’s power to private companies, but also infringe on people’s food sovereignty is a clear violation of this obligation.

Increased production does not guarantee access to food. Nutrition initiatives will fail at achieving their stated aims of reducing hunger or malnutrition as they do not address poverty and, if anything, are more likely to exacerbate it by causing smallholder farmers to lose their land and livelihoods, creating insecure and poorly paid jobs, producing for export markets, creating dependency on imported seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, and causing farmers to accrue huge debts in the bid to acquire these technologies. Rather than focusing on increasing output by selling the necessary inputs to farmers, leading to dependency on them, food sovereignty should be the focus of nutrition projects. If there is place for public-private partnerships in the task of ending undernutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa, they must be carried out with greater transparency and with a greater focus on empowering small-scale farmers themselves. The focus on profit currently exhibited by public-private partnerships in nutrition projects should be to the benefit of farmers, not corporations. With the right support, small-scale farmers can increase their incomes so that they can feed themselves, their families and their communities.

Governments must take more action to improve nutrition through avenues other than increasing production, such as the pledges mentioned earlier. It is also the responsibility of African governments and the various local development agencies and organisations to consider the long-term effects of the policy reforms being proposed in public-private partnerships designed to end undernutrition. Africa’s experience with foreign investors in the natural resources sector offers extensive lessons that ought to be heeded if African nations are to develop new status quo for development that does not victimise ordinary citizens.

Written by Refiloe M. Joala and Claire Furphy ⁽¹⁾

NOTES:

(1) Refiloe M. Joala is a Research Associate with CAI with a particular interest in development economics and African geopolitics. Claire Furphy is CAI’s Africa Watch unit Research Manager. Contact Refiloe and Claire through Consultancy Africa Intelligence's Africa Watch Unit ( africa.watch@consultancyafrica.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).Edited by Nicky Berg.
(2) Clover, J., 2010. Food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. African Security Review, 12 (1), pp. 5-15.
(3)Haigh, C., ‘Carving up a continent: How the UK government is facilitating the corporate takeover of African food systems’, World Development Movement, April 2014, http://www.wdm.org.
(4) Haigh, C., ‘Food and farmers: When public-private partnerships become corporate takeovers‘, Think Africa Press, 3 April 2014, http://thinkafricapress.com.
(5) ‘African food sovereignty under attack by corporate interests’, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, 16 August 2013, http://www.waronwant.org.
(6) High food prices and food security – threats and opportunities’, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 2008, ftp://ftp.fao.org.
(7) Haigh, C., ‘Food and farmers: When public-private partnerships become corporate takeovers‘, Think Africa Press, 3 April 2014, http://thinkafricapress.com.
(8) Giménez, E.H. and Shattuck, A., 2011. Food crises, food regimes and food movements: Rumblings of reform or tides of transformation? Journal of Peasant Studies, 38 (19), pp. 109-144.
(9) Minos, N., ‘Transmission of world food price changes to markets in Sub-Saharan Africa’, International Food Policy Research Institute discussion paper 01059, January 2011, http://www.ifpri.org.
(10) Haigh, C., ‘Carving up a continent: How the UK government is facilitating the corporate takeover of African food systems’, World Development Movement, April 2014, http://www.wdm.org.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Provost, C., Ford, L. and Tran, M., ‘G8 New Alliance condemned as new wave of colonialism in Africa’, The Guardian, 18 February 2014, http://www.theguardian.com.
(13) Nyéléni 2007 website, http://www.nyeleni.org.
(14) Jackson, R.R., ‘Food sovereignty: A prerequisite for Africa’s food security and sustainability in a warming climate‘, Consultancy Africa Intelligence, 4 April 2014, http://www.consultancyafrica.com.
(15) ‘Growing Africa: Unlocking the potential of agribusiness’, World Bank, January 2013, http://siteresources.worldbank.org.
(16) ‘Africa’s food system under attack by corporate interest’, War on Want, 13 August 2013, http://www.waronwant.org.
(17) Nyéléni 2007 website, http://www.nyeleni.org.
(18) Ashton, G., ‘Is Africa about to lose the right to her seed?‘, GRAIN, 23 April 2013, http://www.grain.org.
(19) Ibid.
(20) Ibid.
(21) Haigh, C., ‘Carving up a continent: How the UK government is facilitating the corporate takeover of African food systems’, World Development Movement, April 2014, http://www.wdm.org.
(22) Ibid.
(23) Wanzala, M. and Groot, R., ‘Fertiliser market development in Sub-Saharan Africa’, paper presented to the International Fertiliser Society at a Conference, Windsor, UK, 24 May 2013, http://www.ifdc.org.
(24) ‘A proposal for a soil health program of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’, Terrafrica, 24 July 2007, http://knowledgebase.terrafrica.org.
(25) Haigh, C., ‘Carving up a continent: How the UK government is facilitating the corporate takeover of African food systems’, World Development Movement, April 2014, http://www.wdm.org.
(26) ‘The true beneficiaries of AGRA’s Soil Health Programme’, African Centre for Biodiversity, 2013, http://www.rtfn-watch.org.
(27) Milz, M., ‘The authoritarian face of the Green Revolution: Rwanda capitulates to agribusiness‘, GRAIN, 8 August 2011, http://www.grain.org.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Kotschi, J., ‘A soiled reputation: Adverse impacts of mineral fertilizers in tropical agriculture’, Heinrich Böll Stiftung and WWF Germany, 22 May 2013, http://www.boell.de.
(30) Bhandari, R., ‘Nutrition for Growth Summit: Ending malnutrition or neo-colonialism?‘, Think Africa Press, 28 June 2013, http://thinkafricapress.com.
(31) Ibid.
(32) Makhtar, D., ‘Fixing Africa’s land ownership issues’, This is Africa, 25 July 2013, http://www.thisisafricaonline.com.
(33) Rullia, M.C., Savioria, A. and D’Odoricob, P., ‘Global land and water grabbing’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, January 2013, http://www.pnas.org.
(34) ‘Stop the corporate takeover of Africa’s food’, World Development Movement, http://www.wdm.org.uk.
(35) Ibid.
(36) Provost, C.l., Ford, L. and Tran, M., ‘G8 New Alliance condemned as new wave of colonialism in Africa’, The Guardian, 18 February 2014, http://www.theguardian.com.
(37) ‘Land grabs‘, Oxfam International, http://www.oxfam.org.
(38) ‘Voluntary guidelines to support the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security’, November 2004, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations,http://www.fao.org.