By Amos Safo
In 2019, Ghana’s President, Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufo-Addo started a campaign for Africa’s transformation “Beyond Aid”, describing it as a must. “Africa is eager, Africa is willing”, he said at the opening of the first leg of the African Caucus Meeting of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Governors in Accra in August 2019.
The event was held on the theme: “Africa Beyond Aid: Enhancing Institutional Capacity and Innovative Finance for Sustainable Growth.”
The African Caucus was established in 1963, as the “African Group,” with the objective of strengthening the voice of African Governors in the Bretton Woods Institutions- the IMF and the World Bank Group- on development issues of interest to Africa.
President Akufo-Addo said working together with the people of Africa and with the educated, skilled and self-confidence, Africa can attain an “Africa Beyond Aid” agenda. “Since assuming the reins of Office, I have been advocating for a “Ghana Beyond Aid, because nobody needs to spell it out to us that the economic transformation we desire will not come through aid”, he stressed.
Food colonization
He continued argued that aid will bring Africa to the status of a developed nation or continent, adding that the fundamental conditions for development are a self-reliant Africa, exploiting her immense resources to provide a dignified, decent standard of living for her people. According to President Akufo-Addo to get to the destination of Africa Beyond Aid, the continent needs to effectively harness its own resources and deploy them creatively and efficiently for rapid economic and social transformation.
Before we can take command over our destiny and become truly politically and economically independent, we must understand that without growing what we eat we will remain under bondage till the end of the world. Without food we will never have the strength and energy to transform African economies. Africa must shift from imports to exports through production and value-addition.
One key resource Africa needs to harness is its land and water resources to produce her own food, rather than overly relying on donations and technology. In the same manner debt has been used to shackle Africa, western countries are now trying to use food to colonise Africa. While Africa can opt out of borrowing, the continent ricks total collapse and extinction, if she allows herself to be subjected to food colonialism.
Agenda of the west
The agenda of the west in Africa is to destroy Africa’s fertile fields, and with that undermine Africa’s capacity and ability to produce her own food and be self-sufficient in food supply. This agenda shrouded in the plan is to supply Africa with genetically modified foods (GMOs) and hybrid seeds. Hybrid and GMO seeds have been created in the laboratories to ensure that they do not reproduce seeds in the succeeding years after the first crops. The reason is that the developers of GMO seeds use terminator genes or a generic use restriction technology that makes a plant incapable of reproducing seed, once it has been planted for the first time.
The most dangerous aspect is that when GMO and hybrid seeds are planted and they start producing flowers, the flowers are able to cross pollinate organics seeds (African seeds) and turn them into GMO seeds. In the process the GMO cross-pollinated seeds develop GMO seeds or terminator genes to stop African farmers from replanting their seeds. This strategy is aimed at making African farmers to depend on the GMO seeds each year to be able to grow their food. The long-term strategy is to make Africa endowed with some of the world’s best water and land resources to perpetually depend on the west for food. At least the COVID-19 pandemic, its attendant havoc on food production, and the ban on foods exports to Africa by western countries should be a timely warning to African leaders that in times of crises, countries protect their populations first.
GMO conditionality
The creeping danger is that many African farmers, such as those in Southern Africa have been persuaded to abandon their traditional seeds and farming technologies and use GMO and hybrid seeds which do not reproduce seeds for replanting. Embracing GMO technology comes at a heavy cost of buying fertilisers and other chemicals to sustain them. The GMO technology in the long term wreak irreparable damage on Africa’s soils and their ability to produce food without fertilizer and chemicals. Thus, the GMO industry is another big business opportunity for western companies to generate foreign revenue from Africa, which is already shackled with unsustainable debts and interest rates. This profit motive explains why GMO adoption in Africa has become a condition for foreign aid and donation. Countries like Zambia and Malawi in the past were threatened with a cut in aid, unless they adopted GMO technology.
Not only has the use of fertilisers and chemicals become expensive to the average African farmer, they destroy the fertility and ecology of African soils over time. In short, farming, which is the backbone of poor families and has the aggregate positive effect on the GDP of poor countries like Zimbabwe has become an expensive venture. This is destroying many livelihoods in some African countries and has become the major cause of food insecurity across the continent.
Africa intellectuals
The danger is that many of Africa’s intellectuals were sponsored by the GMO companies have been deplored to entrench the use of GMO technology in Africa. These Masters and PhD holders have been nurtured and brainwashed into believing that Africa has no comparative advantage in producing her own food and seeds, and cannot survive without the west and its GMO technology. This notion is the contrary. The fact remains that since the creation of the world, Africa has used her own traditional agricultural technology and other cultural systems to feed herself.
The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), sponsored by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations are some examples of western organisations trying to enforce the use of GMOs across Africa using our own intellectuals. Sadly, some of Africa’s intellectuals brewed in western universities see no hope in Africa have become the willing tools for western powers to use to brainwash Africa and to promote food colonialism in Africa. AGRA was popularized in Africa by our own Kofi Annan (the former UN Secretary General) to engender an African acceptance. But the agenda has always been to promote and sustain food colonialism in Africa by encouraging Africans to either stop producing subsistence food or use GMO technology and hybrid seeds. In both cases the result is to get Africa to depend on foreign food and seeds eternally.
Though Africa has an agenda for economic transformation, titled “Agenda 2063”, I dare challenge our leaders to wean the continent from foreign aid and pursue the “Africa Beyond Agenda”, as President Akufo-Addo is pushing. Yes, the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a bold step to integrate African economies into one trading block; however, no amount of free trading will succeed if Africa continues to be a net importer of basic foods. In other words, economic emancipation of Africa must and should start with food self-sufficiency. There cannot be any economic and political emancipation if Africa continues to overly rely on the west for agricultural technology, whose aim is to destroy our indigenous cultural systems and to make Africans develop our taste on foreign goods.
Natural endowments
Africa cannot continue to go cup in hand begging for food and money when God has endowed the continent with some of the world’s best arable lands and minerals and natural resources. Geological and economic studies show that Africa is the richest continent in the world, in terms of its natural and mineral resources.
According to the United Nations, Africa is home to about 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves, 12 percent of the world’s oil and 8 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves. The continent also holds 40 percent of the world’s gold and up to 90 percent of its chromium and platinum – both valuable metals.
Besides, Africa has a large quantity of other natural resources, including diamonds, sugar, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver, petroleum, and cocoa beans, but also tropical timber and tropical fruit. Africa supplies up to 31 percent of the world’s demand for bauxite, cobalt, gold, manganese, phosphate and uranium. Recently discovered oil reserves have increased the importance of the commodity on African economies. However, why the continent continues to be the world’s leading “beggar” continent, instead of the world’s leading supplier of food is the biggest question, yet to be answered.
In my view the dilemma of Africa is rooted in, firstly the western ideology to keep Africa below the water, and presenting her in the western media as dependent on the west forever, and secondly a failure of leadership. After the attempts by Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Amical Kabral, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere etc to decolonize and dewesternise Africa in the 1960s, subsequent African leaders have pandered too much to western dictates and even became stooges of western systems. Characteristically, it was our African brothers who were used by western powers to destroy these pioneering Pan Africanists. The cancer of betrayal, greed and selfishness remain the bane of Africa’s development and transformation.
I need to emphasize that true emancipation cannot be attained if our food is controlled by western powers. For this reason, it is important for Africa to maintain her traditional seed and food production techniques. It is equally important for Africans to consume food from seeds that can be reproduced, else we are doomed as a people and culture. Any power with the genuine desire to help Africa to attain food sovereignty must do that within our traditional system. There is no bigger agenda for economic emancipation than food self-sufficiency for Africa.
GMO adoption in Ghana
Eight years ago the National Biosafety Act 2011, was passed by Parliament to usher the country into commercializing GMO crops. Besides in 2019 the Biosafety Regulations 2019 was promulgated to operationalize the parent law and allow for the introduction of GMO foods into the country.
These regulations pave the way for the commercial use of insect-resistant “Bt cowpea”, which will allow farmers to dramatically reduce their use of pesticides and boost their yields. Researchers are also ready to experiment NEWEST rice, which has been engineered to require less nitrogen fertilizer, tolerate drought conditions and grow in salty soils — and still give good yield.
I only hope that our government, legislators and scientists are acting in the best interest of the country and have the end in mind, where the end means the adoption of GMO technology will not promote food colonialism. Posterity will never forgive our current leaders if they allow Ghana and Africa to be recolonized through food.
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The writer is a Development and Communications Management Specialist, and a Social Justice Advocate. All views expressed in this article are his personal views and do not represent those of any organization(s).
