’EU undermining agriculture in Africa’
Inter Press Service | 18 October 2007
’EU Undermining Agriculture in Africa’
By David Cronin
BRUSSELS, Oct 18 (IPS) — Europe is undermining its own efforts to strengthen African agriculture by foisting free trade on the continent, a Ghanaian farm leader has complained.
The European Commission recently issued a strategy paper which commits to giving an unspecified amount of financial and logistical support to programmes for improving agriculture devised by Africa’s own governments.
Titled ’Advancing African Agriculture’ (AAA), the paper also states that the free trade deals or Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) proposed by the EU are meant to "enhance" trade opportunities for farmers. The Commission has called on almost 80 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific to sign EPAs by the end of this year.
But Kingsley Ofei-Nkansah from the General African Workers Union of Ghana suggested that the EPA agenda is in contradiction with the Commission’s stated desire to help farming in Africa.
"The AAA strategy is meant to give African players the policy space to do what is best for them," he told IPS. "It is riding on the back of a very uncertain future because the EPAs will take away a lot of policy space. They will make it more difficult for African growers to have the kind of production they need for food security. With EPAs, African governments will be forced to open up their markets to European goods, knowing very well that European agriculture is extremely subsidised.
"European agricultural and food imports in Ghana increased by 100 to 400 percent between 1993 and 2005. How can we sustain agriculture in Ghana with an increasingly large influx of food and agricultural produce from Europe?"
The AAA strategy has been criticised, too, in a new report by Luisa Morgantini, vice-president of the European Union’s only directly elected body, the European Parliament.
While the Commission has recognised that women play a vital role in agriculture, its paper does not outline any specific measures on how to assist them, Morgantini has said. This is despite how 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty are female.
Her report berates the Commission for failing to address the impact of economic liberalisation on African farming or to suggest policies to counter how heavily subsidised European exports to Africa are damaging the livelihoods of the continent’s food producers.
About 75 percent of the population in Africa lives in arid of semi-arid regions.
Yet Morgantini alleged that the Commission "misses a seemingly obvious point" — that EU aid should be directed as a priority to areas that are less favoured for geographical or environmental reasons.
Furthermore, she warned that the EPAs would restrict the possibility of using tariffs to shield locally grown crops from foreign imports, thereby putting small farmers in jeopardy.
The AAA strategy was debated at a conference held in Brussels Oct. 17.
Angel Elias Daka, an advisor on food and nutrition to the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), said aid donors such as the EU haven’t "paid much attention to the role of women" in agriculture.
He urged that a comprehensive approach should be taken towards assisting female farm workers. Schemes aimed at supporting agriculture should work in tandem with those aimed at addressing major health problems, such as AIDS, he said.
"It is women who look after the sick in hospital, and agricultural work suffers overall because women are so heavily involved in care," he told IPS. "We need to tackle the surrounding issues. Otherwise, all investment efforts will be in vain."
Lluis Riera, director for development aid in the European Commission, said that policy makers require a "more complex understanding" of rural society in Africa.
"Agriculture is not about deciding what the price of rice is," he said. "It is much more complicated. We have to integrate health and education issues because we need to have healthy farmers."
Hansjörg Neun from the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), an EU-financed body promoting farming in ACP countries, argued that Africa should use public funds to help increase its production.
Among the key reasons why Brazil, India and China have achieved considerable progress in agriculture is that each of them has devoted some 20 percent of national budgets to supporting it. "Brazil is now a world leader in ethanol," he noted.
John Okidi from the International Food Policy Research Institute in Addis Ababa said that some African countries have displayed the benefits of "targeted subsidies".
Malawi’s most recent grain harvest, for example, has reported a surplus production of 1.2 million tonnes, 400,000 tonnes of which is being given to Zimbabwe to address food shortages there.
"This is because Malawi has decided to go back to subsidies," said Okidi. "Two years ago, five million people were living on food aid in Malawi. Today it is producing surpluses."
COMESA’s member states have agreed to allocate 10 percent of their national budgets to farming by 2015. Okidi said that Ethiopia is one of the few African states to have already hit that target, as a result experiencing an agricultural growth rate of 4 percent.
Despite the continent’s dire poverty, some African countries are doing well in terms of farm output, according to Steve Wiggins from the Overseas Development Institute in London. "No less than 17 of the fastest growing agricultures in the world over the last 15 years came from Africa," he said, adding that Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia and Benin have performed better than China. "Africa is not a place of agricultural disappointment. In fact, Africa is a world leader."
Still, he called for a greater focus on addressing hardship in rural communities. "We need a new start for new generations. That means nutrition for under-three-year-olds, schools and healthcare, so that new generations have a better chance than their parents and grandparents have had."
