Tag Archives: Human rights

Seeds of Controversy: The Battle Over Africa’s Agricultural Future

Posted on October 21, 2023 by | Comments Off on Seeds of Controversy: The Battle Over Africa’s Agricultural Future

Charles W. Elliott

One would not expect the lowly seed to be the object of international controversy. But converging forces — some malign, others benign – have placed food crop seeds into the center of clashing visions of the future of agriculture and the place of smallholder farming in Africa. At issue is control over how seeds are owned, saved, and planted, with implications for the survival of smallholder farms, food crop biodiversity, and the resilience of global food supply in the face of climate change.

Earlier this year, the African Union adopted a free trade protocol that will dictate how food is cultivated and how the seeds of life are managed and owned across the entire African continent. Under this document, with its dry and innocuous-sounding title, “Protocol to the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area on Intellectual Property Rights”, 1 all 54 African nations will be locked “into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia.” Alexander Zaitchik, The New Colonialist Food Economy, The Nation, September 18, 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/new-colonialist-food-economy.

The new protocol, together with other agreements designed to advance the interests of industrial agriculture, biotechnology firms, and large agri-business corporations, creates a system that will pressure African farmers to use genetically-modified seeds protected by intellectual property rights in place of the ancient foundation of human agriculture: the heritage of planting self-replicating seeds from nature’s bounty.2

According to Zaitchik: “A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs. By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food.” Details of the system are to be set forth in an Annex to the Protocol, which has not yet been finalized. However, the protocol will likely reinforce the “plant variety protection” system of the Convention of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which promotes crop genetic uniformity, fails to recognize farmers’ rights, and prevents peasants from reusing seeds.3

While GMO crops were originally touted as the solution to global hunger, conflicting reports on the quality and yield of genetically modified commodity crops4 and local opposition to the loss of control over seed and food production has led GMO proponents to shift their marketing focus to claims that GMO crops are part of “climate smart agriculture.” Zaitchik argues that “[t]his broad rhetorical phrase conjures a suite of practical, climate-driven upgrades to food production that conceals a vastly more complicated and contentious effort to reengineer global farming for the benefit of biotech and agribusiness—not African farmers or the climate.”

Who has pushed African governments to finalize and adopt this model? The major players are unsurprising. Zaitchik’s article says: “[t]he most direct beneficiary of this plan is the four-company oligopoly that controls half the global seed market and 75 percent of the global agrichemicals market: Bayer (formerly Monsanto), Corteva (formerly DowDuPont), BASF, and Syngenta, a subsidiary of ChemChina.”

One cannot easily reconcile this model with the recognition of traditional seed and agricultural systems enshrined in other multinational treaties and United Nations Declarations, viz., the Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Art. 9), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Art. 31), and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (Art. 19). Under Article 19 of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, they have the “right to seeds”, including:

(a) The right to the protection of traditional knowledge relevant to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture;
(b) The right to equitably participate in sharing the benefits arising from the utilization of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture;
(c) The right to participate in the making of decisions on matters relating to the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture;
(d) The right to save, use, exchange and sell their farm-saved seed or propagating material.

They also have the “the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their own seeds and traditional knowledge.” Member States must “recognize the rights of peasants to rely either on their own seeds or on other locally available seeds of their choice and to decide on the crops and species that they wish to grow.” Moreover, Member States “shall ensure that seed policies, plant variety protection and other intellectual property laws, certification schemes and seed marketing laws respect and take into account the rights, needs and realities of peasants and other people working in rural areas.”

The problem is that the Protocol, its Annexes, and its underlying international agreements will represent legally binding obligations of the African Union countries, while the non-binding United Nations Declarations, by themselves, do not. Thus, the Protocol will inexorably accelerate the ascendancy of the biotechnology-industrial model of agriculture, favoring large corporate interests over traditional, smallholder farming.

Since its founding, Buddhist Global Relief has supported smallholder farming around the world and traditional farming practices. Yet, recognizing the need to provide enough food for a rapidly growing global population, we have also encouraged the use of modern sustainable and yield-enhancing ecological agriculture practices using techniques such as the Grow Biointensive system.5 These practices allow smallholder farmers the ability to avoid dependency on industrialized agriculture, with its chemical inputs and the use of patented seeds that cannot be replanted. These practices are deeply harmonious with natural systems.

We will continue to support smallholder farming in Africa, and to help these communities with sustainable and resilient practices, enabling them to resist this most recent form of corporate colonialism.

  1. The Protocol on Intellectual Property Rights was adopted by the African Union Assembly in February 2023 in Ethiopia. It will enter into force 30 days after 22 countries in the African Continental Free Trade Area ratify it. https://www.tralac.org/resources/infographic/16151-afcfta-protocol-on-intellectual-property-rights-factsheet.html ↩︎
  2. The push to adopt legal structures to lock in this model throughout the African continent could be foreseen years ago. In our blog post More Food or New Colonialism for Africa? posted on July 12, 2013, we said, “We can expect African officials to be targeted by intense pressure and corrupting influences to accept these [GMO] technologies at the expense of traditional, sustainable agriculture.” https://buddhistglobalrelief.me/2013/07/12/more-food-or-new-colonialism-for-africa/#more-855. For more background on this struggle, see, GMOs: Food, Money & Control: Part II, posted on December 21, 2012, https://buddhistglobalrelief.me/2012/12/21/gmos-food-money-control-part-ii/ ↩︎
  3. “What future for seeds under the African Free Trade Area?”, GRAIN, July 2023, https://www.cadtm.org/What-future-for-seeds-under-the-African-Free-Trade-Area ↩︎
  4. Compare: “Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops,” Union of Concerned Scientists, (2009), https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/failure-yield-evaluating-performance-genetically-engineered-crops and “Uncertain Harvest: Doubts About The Promised Bounty Of Genetically Modified Crops”, New York Times, Oct. 29, 2016, with “A Meta-Analysis of the Impacts of Genetically Modified Crops”, PLoS One. 2014; 9(11): e111629, published online 2014 Nov 3. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111629. The Nation article also describes community complaints about the poor aesthetic and functional qualities of GMO crops. ↩︎
  5. “Grow Biointensive® employs a variety of techniques that work well on smallholder farms, are easily adapted to a variety of climates, are ecologically sound, and can easily be taught to aspiring farmers. These include double digging or deep soil penetration to preserve moisture; use of compost to provide cover and add nutrients; spacing plants close together; growing crops that are high in calories; using open-pollinated seeds (which are native to the area and not genetically modified); and “treating all of the elements as parts of a whole system with a focus on long-term, ‘closed system’ sustainable soil fertility.” David Braughton, “Reducing Malnourishment Through Ecologically Sustainable Agriculture in Malawi”, Buddhist Global Relief Helping Hands Newsletter, March 2023. ↩︎

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Urgent Aid to Women and Children in Cambodian Prisons

Posted on October 7, 2020 by | Comments Off on Urgent Aid to Women and Children in Cambodian Prisons

By Patricia Brick

LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights NGO

A BGR project with LICADHO (the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights) provides critical aid to incarcerated pregnant women and new mothers and their children.

The Cambodian prison system is plagued by overcrowding, squalid conditions, and widespread corruption. Detainees’ rights are often neglected, and Cambodian prisons do not provide detainees with essentials, such as nutritious meals, clean drinking water, quality medical care and sanitary living conditions. Children under the age of 3 are allowed to live in prisons with their parents, where they are exposed to gruesome prison conditions and lack essential nutrients at a crucial point in their physical and mental development. As of June 2020, more than 100 children were known to be imprisoned alongside their mothers.

A BGR project with LICADHO (the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights) improves the quality of life for incarcerated pregnant women and new mothers and their children. The Early Years Behind Bars (EYBB) project provides food, including rice, dried fish, and soy milk, as well as hygiene materials such as soap, toothpaste and toothbrushes, and laundry detergent, to pregnant women and mothers with children. The project team also interviews the women to monitor the conditions of the prisons, ensure that the materials provided meet the women’s needs, and determine if any additional medical or legal support is needed. In the project year that ended in June 2020, the project had benefited 205 children and their mothers as well as 90 pregnant women across 16 prisons.

According to figures from our partner, the prison population in Cambodia has increased from 21,900 in 2016 to nearly 39,000 in March 2020, the result of a crackdown on minor drug offenses; nearly three-quarters of people in detention had not yet been given the opportunity to stand trial. In a prison system with a capacity of 26,593, overcrowding was a grave problem even before the Covid-19 pandemic began spreading among incarcerated people worldwide. With as many as 530 prisoners forced into a single cell, with limited access to clean water, “Covid-19 safety measures such as physical distancing and frequent hand washing are impossible,” our partner reports. Government reforms announced this summer to potentially lower the number of prisoners have been slow to take effect.

Our partner reports that following the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in Cambodia in March, for several months the project teams’ access to the prisons was curtailed. Team members were required to leave the food and hygiene materials with prison staff to distribute, and in one case were not permitted to leave food and materials for the incarcerated women for several months. Access was reopened as of late July.

Our partner shared three stories of incarcerated women who benefited from this program. Their names have been changed to protect the women’s identity.

Kunthea, a 32-year-old mother of two, was two months pregnant when she was arrested without a warrant on drug-related charges in July 2019. Our partner writes: “She was forced to confess and thumbprint the record without knowing what the document said … In April 2020, a judge sentenced her to 10 years in prison and fined her 20 million riel, which is equivalent to approximately U.S. $5,000.” She gave birth to her daughter in March 2020 and brought the infant to prison, where she is serving her sentence in a cell shared with seven to twelve other detainees. Kunthea was unable to provide sufficient milk to exclusively breastfeed her daughter, and her family cannot afford to provide additional food for the new mother or her infant. The EYBB project provided milk powder, food, and other essential items for Kunthea and her baby.

Leakhena was arrested on drug-related charges in September 2019 and received food from EYBB during her pregnancy and postpartum to supplement the meager food provided by the prison. She gave birth to a healthy daughter in June 2020. Her sister is currently caring for the baby outside of prison.

Bopha was also arrested on drug-related charges last autumn and also was “forced to confess and thumbprint the record without knowing what it was.” She gave birth to a baby girl in June. With her husband also incarcerated and lacking family outside of the prison who could care for the baby, Bopha had no choice but to keep the infant with her. She shares a cell with thirteen other detainees. The EYBB project provides her with hygiene items and food, which she described as being enough that she doesn’t feel hungry.

Patricia Brick is a staff writer for Buddhist Global Relief. This story is based on reporting from our partner LICADHO, the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.

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Posted in Buddhist social ethics, Ending global poverty, Engaged Buddhism, Global poverty, Projects & programs

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The Persistence of Poverty is a Political Choice

Posted on July 16, 2020 by | Comments Off on The Persistence of Poverty is a Political Choice

By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi

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In a report issued on behalf of the UN’s Human Rights Council, Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, explodes the comforting myth that humanity is finally on the verge of eradicating extreme poverty. The report, titled “The Parlous State of Poverty Eradication,” insists that the belief that we are making good progress in eliminating poverty “is unjustified by the facts, generates inappropriate policy conclusions, and fosters complacency” (p. 1). The author maintains that our good intentions to promote greater economic justice are constantly being undermined by false assumptions about the extent of poverty and stymied by flawed decisions about the most effective means to vanquish it.

The report points out that the optimism among policy professionals and thought leaders rests on the use of a deceptive standard to define extreme poverty. The official standard, the World Bank’s international poverty line (IPL), is arrived at by averaging the national poverty lines employed by the world’s poorest countries, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The line, currently set at U.S. $1.90 in purchasing power parity, is “a standard of miserable subsistence rather than an even minimally adequate standard of living” (p. 1).

On the basis of the IPL, the U.S. in 2016 had a poverty rate of 1.2 percent, though the rate was actually 12 percent. On the IPL South Africa would have a poverty rate of 19 percent vs. a real poverty rate of 55 percent, and Mexico a poverty rate of 1.7 percent vs. a real rate of 42 percent. Setting the line so low, the report maintains, is bound “to guarantee a positive result and to enable the United Nations, the World Bank, and many commentators to proclaim a Pyrrhic victory” (pp. 4–5).

The report points out that much of the progress in eliminating poverty under the Bank’s IPL is due not to any upward global trend but to developments in China, where between 1990 and 2015 the number of people below the IPL dropped from over 750 million to 10 million. If a more realistic poverty line of $5.50 were adopted, the number of poor people globally held almost steady between 1990 and 2015, declining merely from 3.5 to 3.4 billion. That is hardly a reason to proclaim an end to extreme poverty.

Even under the Bank’s line, between 1990 and 2015 the number of people living in extreme poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East rose by 140 million (p. 9). Using this weak criterion, some 700 million people worldwide live under $1.90 a day, which is morally abhorrent in itself, but if we were to take a more realistic measure the extent of global poverty would turn out to be vastly higher and current trends discouraging.

According to the report, efforts to eliminate extreme poverty are bound to run up against two factors that will inevitably increase the numbers of the poor. One is accelerating climate change, which we are hardly addressing with the urgency required. Over the next decade an altered climate is projected to push 100 million more people below even the weak standard of the IPL.

The other major threat is COVID-19, which over the next three years will drive 176 million people into poverty at the $3.20 poverty line. The report calls COVID-19 “a pandemic of poverty” which lays bare the parlous state of social safety nets for low-income people around the world. Rates of illness and mortality expose racial and class divisions, and access to health care and financial assistance is also skewed along racial, gender, religious, and class lines. Those hit hardest by the pandemic are the “essential workers” who do not have the luxury of “sheltering in place” but are compelled to work under precarious conditions, becoming “sacrificial lambs” to keep the economy functioning (p. 9).

The primary guideposts the international community relies on for tackling poverty are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first of the goals is an “end to poverty in all its forms everywhere” by 2030. Taken in isolation the goal sounds ambitious enough, but the specific targets proposed to meet this goal are “patently inadequate to actually end poverty, and the prospects of achieving them are rapidly receding” (p. 10). The tenth goal calls for reducing inequality, but the plan of implementation relies on the premise that the key to reducing inequality is continued economic growth—a shaky assumption, since history shows that the benefits of unregulated economic growth disproportionately go to the affluent.

The only viable way to end poverty, according to the report, is wealth redistribution, which would require more aggressive governmental control over the economy. However, the reigning paradigm of neoliberal ideology dictates that the market must be allowed to operate on its own, without government interference. Current attempts to achieve the SDGs therefore marginalize government action in favor of private investments and “public-private partnerships,” which usually optimize the interests of the investors over the needs of the poor (p. 12).

The report does not reject the SDGs themselves, but calls for reflection on “ways in which the overall package, including targets and indicators, can be re-shaped and supplemented in order to achieve the key goals which otherwise look destined to fail” (p. 14). One flawed premise that underlies the formulation of the SDGs is the idea that the most effective way to achieve them is through economic growth. While this premise is considered sacrosanct in neoliberal economic circles, the fact remains that the benefits of growth disproportionately go to those in positions of wealth and power. While the poor may see some small improvements in living conditions, economic disparities widen to a still greater degree and thus the old bugbear of inequality remains.

The staggering levels of wealth and income inequality in today’s world should dispel any inflated notion that the world is moving toward greater economic equity. The bottom 50 percent of the world’s population now owns less than 1 percent of total global wealth, while the top 1 percent holds 45 percent of the total (pp. 15–16). Reduction in economic inequality requires a redistribution of wealth, but figures like these remind us how far we have to go to overcome global poverty.

The report recommends global debt forgiveness as a critical factor in establishing a just international economic order. Another measure the author proposes is fair and equitable taxation, which “must be front and center in any set of policies to eliminate poverty.” Fair taxation has a significance that transcends mere economic pragmatism, standing as “a symbol of solidarity and burden sharing” and “a reflection of deeper values” (p. 16). Just tax policies would call upon wealthy individuals and successful corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, and this would require an end to tax evasion through the use of tax havens, for which the U.S. has been “the global trendsetter.” At present there are hundreds of thousands of tax havens worldwide, depriving states of as much as $650 billion in tax revenue (p. 16).

On the positive side, the project of ending poverty calls for the implementation of programs that provide universal social protection, helping people deal with the adversities brought on by sickness, disability, unemployment, and old age. Shockingly, four billion people—over half the world’s population—completely lack any level of social protection, while for many others the support available to them is far from adequate. This, according to the report, is “an extraordinary indictment of the global fight against extreme poverty” (p. 17) Continue reading →

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Posted in Ending global poverty, Engaged Buddhism, Global poverty, Poverty, Social justice

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