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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Gary Nabhan has a petition for those interested
  • Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:13:11 -0600


AGRA is Bill Gates' biotech answer to hunger in Africa. Gary Nabhan has a
petition for those interested:

http://www.garynabhan.com/openletter/

AN OPEN LETTER FROM SCIENTISTS

TO THE GATES AND ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATIONS

A GREEN REVOLUTION FOR AFRICA?



We have been prompted to send you this letter regarding the scientific
fallacies and myths underpinning the plans of the Alliance for a Green
Revolution for Africa (AGRA), because we are concerned about its potential
genetic, environmental, and economic impacts.



THE GOAL

By its own accounts, AGRA is investing heavily in training “the next
generation of African crop scientists” to accept an agriculture based on
bioengineered crops and the economic structures associated with them. It is
already evident that Africa's political leaders are under pressure to tacitly
accept AGRA's initiatives and to cooperate with them. Yet this agricultural
development scheme, in many ways, follows the same failed logic that flawed
the Green Revolution of the 1960s.

Before AGRA begins full implementation of its potentially disruptive
agricultural initiative, the following actions must occur.

• A broad spectrum of scientists and science educators need to fully review
and challenge assumptions in AGRA' planned goals, motives and methodologies.

• Universities need to commit to conducting applied research on alternative
methodologies that may offer Africa more environmentally and economically
sustainable agricultural systems.

• Public debate needs to offer a broader view of African hunger and food
security, while committing AGRA to greater transparency and accountability.



BACKGROUND

The agricultural development schemes proposed by AGRA follow much of the same
failed logic that flawed the Green Revolution in the 1960s, but now the
stakes are higher. Simply put, the AGRA initiative proposes to rapidly
develop, and immediately employ, an entire “arsenal” of new seed varieties in
order to attack the roots of hunger and to guarantee greater food security to
future Africans. Although few scientists today believe that techno-scientific
solutions alone can save the world from hunger, the AGRA initiative reads as
if the solutions will come mainly from outside funds and technology.

The rush to “feed Africa” should in no way excuse crop geneticists and
agricultural development agencies from exercising the precautionary principle
in evaluating their experiments; neither the Africans themselves nor the
diverse African landscapes deserve to be recklessly experimented upon.

The AGRA arsenal of “new” seeds, including genetically modified (GM) seeds,

*

will be placed out into farmers' fields so quickly that they will
likely contaminate locally bred varieties and introgress with weeds and wild
relatives in the centers of origin of cultivated plants such as sorghum;
*

will be monitored haphazardly, given the industry's current record, and
with Africa's high levels of wild and domesticated biodiversity, much more is
at stake if contamination occurs;
*

will set up conditions ripe for the rapid development of resistance
among pests and diseases to the chemicals genetically-engineered into the
crops, potentially increasing virulence and diminishing the African potential
for food security;
*

will likely increase, not decrease, the use of pesticides and
herbicides, including those which disrupt relationships with pollinators,
soil microbes, soil quality and water quality.

The naiveté of the AGRA initiative with regard to such potential biological
and ecological perils suggests that its managers have never considered the
numerous carefully documented case studies compiled over the last five
decades that both social and agricultural scientists from around the world
accept as valid critiques of such naïve strategies.

As ominous is AGRA's reliance on a “silver bullet approach” which assumes
that technological fixes alone will solve hunger problems. If it continues on
its present path, AGRA will sidestep social, ethical and economic issues
regarding the need for greater equity in land, water and food distribution.
As Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has well documented, malnourishment is
not a function of the absolute amount of food available, but rather, of the
inability of the poor to access food. Further, African research institutions
will be more tightly linked to private global seed corporations in ways that
challenge current international treaties protecting farmers' rights and
benefit-sharing.

Africa's farmers have been developing their own locally adapted and socially
appropriate crops varieties, technologies and management strategies for
centuries. Unless their local knowledge is seen as a critical resource
(wealth) useful in resolving these problems, AGRA will rely on a top-down
outside-expert approach that is bound to fail. The African Union also has
model legislation for genetic resources, which proposes farmers' rights,
prior-informed consent, and benefit sharing, all of which the AGRA initiative
ignores.



INVITATION TO AGRA

We as scientists and members of the world community propose that the Gates
and Rockefeller teams delay their “big build-up” long enough to listen to
both agricultural and social scientists who have had at least a quarter
century of experience in documenting the perils of this approach and in
finding suitable alternatives based on social and environmental justice and
food sovereignty. We urge the financiers and staff of AGRA to accept an
invitation to an open forum , to be held in 2008, that addresses these issues
head-on, rather than relegating them to the margins.



QUESTIONS FOR AGRA

A few examples of many questions, which need urgent public attention and
debate, are as follows:

1.) As scientists, we know that public sector plant and genetic research is
increasingly funded by biotech companies, and public research agendas follow
private imperatives. This growing private dominance in the direction of
research and in control of the world's seeds is matched by increasingly
stringent intellectual property regimes.

• Will new seed varieties developed by AGRA for Africa be patented or will
the industry's seed breeders honor farmers' rights?

• As farmers' varieties are used for parent material in breeding, will you
honor benefit sharing of profits back to the earlier breeders of the parent
materials? How will AGRA do this?

2.) Companies in the USA introducing herbicide-tolerant crops must obtain
special permission from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to leave
higher levels of herbicide residue on the crop, thus increasing consumer
exposure to agrochemicals (e.g., glyphosate, glufosinate). Yet
herbicide-tolerance remains the chief focus of agricultural biotech research.
The latest twist is dual herbicide-tolerant crops (Pioneer soybeans tolerant
to both glyphosate and ALS inhibitors). What measures will be taken to
protect consumers from this increased agrochemical exposure?

3.) Genetic engineering has provided only four commercialized biotech crops
(soybeans, corn, cotton and canola) that feature one or both of the following
two traits: herbicide-tolerance (68% of world acreage); insect-resistance
(19%); and corn and cotton “stacked” with both traits (13%). Innumerable
field trials have been conducted to develop biotech crops with other traits,
from enhanced nutrition to drought-resistance, with little or no success.
Given this track record of great expense with high failure, why offer high
finance to this particular technology, while under-funding alternatives?

4.) Research has demonstrated that genetically-modified pollen of some crops
can drift up to 24 kilometers from its source to contaminate other varieties.
What are the ways you propose to reduce genetic contamination of local
varieties, bred over centuries, from GM varieties?

We encourage scientists to direct other questions such as these to AGRA's
leaders, and request that AGRA formally respond to them on its website and at
open forums.



For Reference:

Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA): www.agra.com

Recommendations for a “rainbow evolution” respecting Africa's diverse ecology:

http://www.interacademycouncil.net/CMS/Reports/AfricanAgriculture.aspx

African farmers' rights, priori-informed consent (PIC) and benefit-sharing:

African Union. 2000. “AU Model Law on Rights of Local Communities, Farmers,
Breeders and Access.” Available at
http://www.grain.org/brl/?docid=798&lawid=2132





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