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Agriculture Sovereignty Ghana’s Concerns With The G8 New Alliance For Food Security And Nutrition In Ghana

By Agriculture Sovereignty-Ghana || GRAIN / AFSA
Press Release Agriculture Sovereignty Ghanas Concerns With The G8 New Alliance For Food Security And Nutrition In Ghana
FEB 25, 2015 LISTEN

Agriculture Sovereignty Ghana (ASG), a social movement of small- holder farmers, trade unions, faith based organizations and student associations are vehemently opposed to the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in general, and specifically as it relates to Ghana.

A closer look at this initiative reveals that the stated objective of transforming the face of agriculture in Ghana and in Africa is one of the subtle ways of continuing the pillaging and depletion of African resources in order to benefit mainly foreign multinational agribusiness.

At the May 2012 G8 Summit at Camp David, President Obama announced the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and Ghana one of the three countries from Africa that was invited to the summit committed to refine its policies under the New Alliance Cooperation Frameworks in the areas of seed, tax and land to the benefit of foreign companies in exchange for support for country-developed plans to expand Ghana's agriculture and provide resources and other development tools.

In furtherance of this, Ghana launched the New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Accra on the 29th August, 2012.

Major Concerns:
In Ghana, 65% of the population consists of small scale farmers producing raw materials and cash crops for subsistence and for sale on the market. It must also be noted that Ghana became a leading producer of a large variety of food crops not as a result of industrial agriculture as promoted by the G8 New Alliance but by the productivity and ingenuity of small holder and family farmers and producers.

Geographically, the nature of Ghana's soils greatly favours small- holder farming and not the type of industrial or mechanized agriculture, which is the cornerstone of the G8 New Alliance. In some parts of the Coastal Belt, Secondary Forest, and Tropical Forests and in parts of the Guinea Savannah area, the use of heavy industrial agricultural machinery typical of commercial agriculture has led to severe erosion and destruction of the soil structure. The forest ochrosols and latosols cannot withstand large -scale commercial agriculture without destroying the forest and the soils.

The trajectory already spearheaded by the Green Revolution push in Ghana, which the G8 is a pivotal player, has resulted in much of the fertile agricultural lands necessary to sustain the major food baskets of the country in the North and parts of the coastal belt being acquired by huge multinational corporations. These lands are now under Jetropha, Sunflower and Sugar Cane plantations for the production of bio-fuels to be exported out of the country to Europe and other parts of the world. Thus the land for food farming is now being used for production of crops for bio-fuels, severely negatively impacting on the food sovereignty of Ghana.

As a result, in spite of the capacity of our farmers to produce food to meet the daily requirement of consumers, Ghana is experiencing an artificial food shortage of some of the staple foods in areas where these bio-fuels are grown. Example, the Northern Region and parts of Upper East are experiencing shortage of millet, corn and rice which are their staple foods.

The food security of these areas has been affected negatively and they have to rely on imports from other regions and outside Ghana. The World Food Programme and the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) on several occasions have had to supply them with food.

Numerous studies into the impacts of Jetropha plantations have revealed that although it can grow in any type of soil, huge tracks of fertile and arable land are being grabbed in Ghana for the cultivation of Jetropha production for bio-fuels. Agriculture Sovereignty Ghana is of the opinion that this practice will definitely add to the threat of food insecurity in the country and on the continent. We therefore condemn the practice and call for a moratorium on the cultivation of Jetropha on land, which must be used for the production of food for our country and its people.

In many parts of Africa, experience has taught us that the kind of commercial agriculture viciously promoted by the G8 New Alliance only promotes mono-cropping and the high use of chemicals, which is at odds with small- holder agriculture and food production, which provides mixed cropping and better nutrition for the African people independent of the use of excessive agro chemicals.

IMPACT OF THE NEW ALLIANCE ON SEED SYSTEMS IN GHANA:

The push of the G8NA's agriculture in Africa is to allow for transnational agribusiness and big seed companies to capture the African market for their improved seed varieties including Genetically Modified seeds.

To do this, African countries are changing their seed laws to create a favourable policy environment for foreign seed companies. For instance, The Plant Breeders Bill currently before the Parliament of Ghana will allow major seed companies like Syngenta, Dupont and Monsanto etc, to enter the Ghanaian market, with their improved and GM seeds and repatriate their profits without any hindrance and displace traditional farmers' varieties and farmer managed seed systems by criminalising the age old practices of farmers to exchange and sell seed. Farmers will run the risk of criminal prosecution if certified seeds of the agribusinesses are found on their farms.

ASG is aware that the Chief Executive Officers of Syngenta, Cargill and Yara occupy prime seats on the Leadership Council of the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.

LAND ACQUISITION FOR THE NEW ALLIANCE:
Under small -holder farming systems, farmers are assured of the right to work on land without land grabbing and the threat of eviction. Commercial Agriculture in Ghana promoted by the G8 cannot ensure this but will lead to the eviction of many farmers.

One of the policy commitments of beneficiary countries to the G8NA programme is the demand of land for commercial agriculture that removes small holders from the land and turns them into contract labourers. Many of these farmers who no longer have access to land migrate to the cities for jobs, which are almost non-existent.

Examples of how commercial agriculture had led to the removal of small holders off the land could be found in the Benso Oil Palm plantation, the Twifo Oil Palm Plantation, Ghana Oil Palm Development Corporation (GOPDC) and the Mim Cashew Plantation in the Brong Ahafo Region.

This situation if not checked is likely to lead us to severe food insecurity in the next few generations. This is because, apart from the land, which is being grabbed with impunity from the farmers for the cultivation of non-food items, food crop farmers are being evicted from their own farms to become workers on these commercial farms. The result is that our food security is attacked from two angles i.e. the land and our farmers and their farming systems.

The Government of Ghana under John Atta Mills, late President of the “Republic”, made promises to the G8 to set aside 10,000 hectares of arable land for commercial investors under the programme of the New Alliance by the close of 2014.

It is absolutely necessary that we interrogate the nature of land ownership in Ghana in order that we can appreciate the social and economic implications of grabbing land to serve the commercial interest of the New Alliance beneficiaries.

Land ownership in Ghana is varied and complex.
The Akans (the major ethnic group) have both stool lands and family lands. However, in Northern Ghana because we have acephalous communities, lands are owned communally or controlled by the earth priest called Tindana or Tengasope.

In other parts of the North, land is held by skins and this practice is found mostly amongst the Dagombas and the Mamprusis.

Land ownership in the South of the country is also held by the family, the stool, or a traditional authority. But land held by the Government are mainly for the construction of roads, schools, hospitals and other social amenities and thus, the Government does not have land at its disposal to give away for large commercial agriculture.

Land held by the government was also divested to the private sector as part of the Structural Adjustment Programme of the country with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the period beginning from 1982.

On Friday, 20th February 2015, Nii Osah Mills, Ghana's Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, swore in a 17-member working group to supervise the development of a Lands Bill.

This forms part of the Lands Administration Project, which aims at easing access to land, ensuring security of title to land and augment institutional capacity for efficient and effective land administration.

Mr Mills said the Ministry was not seeking to undertake any 'radical land reform measures,' but there was the urgent need to engage in reforms to harness the potentials in land to support national development. What he did not add was that, this was part of the scheme to grab land to meet Government's obligation under the G8 Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.

As explained above, and given the nature of land ownership in Ghana, it will be difficult to promote commercial agriculture on a 500 acre size of land without displacing family and individual farmers who mostly comprise small holders. The government will have to use force to drive people off the land in furtherance of the promises to the G8 New Alliance. In consequence, social unrest will inevitably occur.

TAXATION:
Tax is a very important means of revenue generation for many developing countries especially in Africa. Revenue from taxation goes to fund education, health-care, housing, the provision of potable water, the generation of electricity etc.

In the West, because of the influence of capitalism and the dominant ideology of privatization, which frowns on the state engaging in economic activity, the state often relies on taxation as the only means of revenue mobilization for development. Under this situation, companies, which are intent on tax evasion, are moving their companies off shore and to tax havens, which offer tax free incentives for their businesses.

Again as a result of the promises made to the G8, the Ghanaian government seeks to make it a lot easy for transnational agri-businesses under the Alliance programme to operate by loosening export controls and tax laws. These changes in the tax regime will also go to directly benefit the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) between the Government of Ghana and the European Commission.

It must be noted that these demands are made of the Ghanaian Government at a time when there is in existence a Stabilization Agreement in the Gold and Oil Mining sectors where companies who operate in these areas are already enjoying major tax exemptions.

As a result government expenditure is always larger than its revenue. It runs into debt and is compelled to go cup-in-hand borrowing or at worse, cut back on spending on essential services for our people, such as education and health care.

It is the explicit view of Agriculture Sovereignty Ghana (ASG) that the G8 New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition will only deepen the economic woes of small holder farmers and the generality of the Ghanaian people by pushing them into a perpetual bondage of dependence on foreign schemes that only seeks to maximize or make super profits for the multinational companies at the expense of an already poverty stricken people.

John Yaw Opoku
Chairperson
Agriculture Sovereignty Ghana.
Accra, Ghana.

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