“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. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds.
For example, “farmers in northeastern Ghana have been cultivating the cowpea—a protein-rich legume that North Americans know as the black-eyed pea—since the Bronze Age. How was it possible that people continuing to farm in that lineage, some 5,000 years later, could face 15 years in prison for infringing property claims on crop varieties based on the local original?”
“We can’t accept this law,” said Faustina Banakwoyem, a 35-year-old soya and pepper farmer and the only woman in the Paga group. “The companies will try to entice us by saying their seeds are ‘better.’ Then we’ll become dependent on seeds that you can’t replant. Our seeds are from this soil. It’s colonialism to say what seeds we can use and how to use them.
Fuseini Bugbono, a 64-year-old cowpea and cassava farmer in northern Ghana’s Gundoug Nabdam district, laughs at the memory of Obama’s forays into African agriculture. [US President Barack] “Obama came here saying GMOs are good, but his family had an organic garden behind the White House!” he recalled. “All of the Western leaders are like hunters who use poison. They don’t eat that meat. They sell it.”
But farmers and activists in Ghana, Honduras, Colombia and other countries are fighting back.
Throttling small farmers in Africa and ‘the Global South’
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