Africa: Is Africa About to Lose the Right to Her Seed?

ANALYSIS

Seed and the control of seed lies at the heart of agriculture.
In Africa around 80% of seed comes from local and community saved seed resources. This seed is adapted to local conditions. It forms an integral part of community food security and agricultural integrity. This entire traditional system is now under threat.
A broad front of commercial interests, aided and abetted by the World Bank, the American Seed Association and government agencies, along with front groups, academics and so-called philanthropists, are endeavouring to alienate this crucial resource.
The international seed industry, owned by massive multinational pesticide companies involved in promoting hybrid and genetically modified (GM) seed, is both a primary beneficiary and protagonist of this thrust. While the motivation is ostensibly to assist the development of African agriculture, the impacts will be widespread and dire.
Simply put, the proposal is to create a harmonised system of control around the presently fragmented African seed trade regime and create a system based on what is projected as modern best practice.
This includes uniform adherence to the strict 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties (UPOV), across the board, for Africa. Because of the stringency of UPOV, the real impact of this will be the loss of control of the seed supply by indigenous small farmers. The consequences for food production and social cohesion across the continent will be dire.
Once locally adapted seed varieties are lost, dependence on outside seed suppliers will rapidly become unaffordable. The implications will reverberate far beyond food production.
Indebted farmers are at direct risk of losing land tenure. On the one hand this causes accelerating urbanisation and social dislocation. On the other, good agricultural land is appropriated by large conglomerates. There is already a massive thrust by nations and corporations to gain land tenure in fertile tropical African agricultural zones.
The impetus behind this change in the seed regime has been building for some time. Consolidation within the powerful South African seed industry - the biggest in Africa - was recently finalised.