Will the White House change course on the New Alliance?

Medium_actionaid
Amelia Mwawa, a smallholder farmer from Zambia, at her market stall selling vegetables she has grown. (Photo: ,Jason Larkin/Panos Pictures/ActionAid)
ActionAid | 14 January 2014

Will the White House change course on the New Alliance?

by Doug Hertzler

Last week I participated meeting at the White House held by the Obama administration to get feedback on the summit with over 40 African head’s of state and dozens of business executives held in Washington DC last summer.  Our meeting with Presidential Special Assistants Gayle Smith and Grant Harris was “off the record.” Respecting the rules they laid out, and I can’t really tell you what anyone else said, but I will tell you what I talked about!

I discussed an interview given by one of the business executives at the summit, Martin Richenhagen, CEO of AGCO, a company based in the US state of Georgia that sells Massey-Ferguson and other brands of tractors and specialized equipment for large-scale farming. AGCO is one of the founding companies in the Obama sponsored G8 New Alliance, in which donor governments pledged aid and private companies offered investment in in return for African governments giving tax breaks and changing land and seed rules to create incentives for large agribusiness.  

In the interview, Richenhagen described their mechanized “Future Farm” in Zambia which AGCO, according to the New Alliance agreements, plans to bring to many additional countries. Richenhagen expressed a desire to work with smallholder farmers, but said it would be up to governments to organize them into cooperatives, and that it would take about 100 farmers to buy one tractor. On the other hand, Richenhagen said that their Future Farm Training Center was well prepared to train real estate investors with no experience in agriculture to teach them what kind of equipment to buy and how to use it.

What Obama administration officials need to realize is that the G8 New Alliance is fueling a rapidly growing trend where investors based in African cities (politicians, hotel owners, other business people) are rapidly grabbing up land in rural communities by whatever means they can. When you add these countless land grabs of tens, hundreds, and thousands of acres to the better publicized and extremely large land grabs of tens of thousands of acres being done by some companies, we have an enormous threat to the food security of rural people in Africa.

I encouraged Obama’s staffers to pay attention to widely-respected agricultural economist Thomas Jayne who presented research on this problem at the World Bank last year. Jayne’s research makes it clear that in many countries “emergent farmers” are not small farmers who are increasing their production, but they are city based investors, who are getting into agriculture and taking land away from rural communities.  As Jayne put it:

“Continued rapid alienation of land to medium- and large-scale investors is likely to exacerbate localized land scarcity, restrict the potential of smallholder-led development, and put unrealistic pressure on the non-farm economy to absorb Africa’s rapidly rising labor force”.

The New Alliance gives a lot of lip service to helping small-scale farmers, but its focus on tax breaks and incentives for companies like AGCO, privileges new agricultural investors who grow at the expense of small-scale farmers. I encountered more marginalization of small farmers when I engaged in a recent online training session organized by USAID and led by the same company AGCO which is also marketing its grain storage silos in Africa. It was clear from the presentation and the responses to questions that they are marketing silos mostly to grain dealers and the “emergent” investors described above. While the silo technology can result in important reductions in grain losses, it will also strengthen the position of traders and wealthier farmers who can invest in it, and in spite of questions raised the company provided little clarity on how much small-scale farmers would benefit.

It’s been observed by many researchers that small farmers can grow more food per unit of land, and provide better care for the environment than large farms, but this is true only if there is public investment in necessary infrastructure, markets, extension services, and sharing of appropriate technologies.

I left the meeting feeling like the Obama administration has heard what ActionAid is saying in regard to the wrong direction of the “New” Alliance.  The question is will they change course and work with other governments, civil society, and new and smaller private sector actors to develop a new strategy to support small-scale farmers?  I think that they will, but only in response to the continued to growth of the movement in solidarity with small farmers in Africa.
  • Sign the petition to stop Industria Chiquibul's violence against communities in Guatemala!
  • Who's involved?

    Whos Involved?


  • 13 May 2024 - Washington DC
    World Bank Land Conference 2024
  • Languages



    Special content



    Archives


    Latest posts