Editor’s note: The company has already sold a handful of its onshore oil blocks over the past 10 years, citing the need to cut risk due to community unrest and continued sabotage attacks on its oil installations. These blocks had been snapped up by Nigerian indigenous operators including Seplat Petroleum, Aiteo E&P, First Hydrocarbons and NPDC.
Climate campaigners in Africa and around the world on Friday continued demonstrations against Total, with activists accusing the French oil giant of ecocide, human rights violations, and greenwashing in connection with fossil fuel projects in Uganda.
On the 145th week of Fridays for Future climate strike protests, members of the movement in Uganda global allies drew attention to the harmful effects of fossil fuel development on the environment, ecosystems, communities, and livelihoods.
Friday’s actions followed protests at Total petrol stations in Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, and Uganda on Tuesday—celebrated each year as Africa Day—against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), now under construction, and the Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas project.
“Total’s fossil fuel developments pose grave risks to protected environments, water sources, and wetlands in the Great Lakes and East Africa regions,” said Andre Moliro, an activist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during Tuesday’s pan-African protests.
“Communities have been raising concerns on the impact of oil extraction on Lake Albert fisheries and the disastrous consequences of an oil spill in Lake Victoria, that would affect millions of people that rely on the two lakes for their livelihoods, watersheds for drinking water, and food production,” he added.
In Uganda, opposing oil development—an expected multi-billion-dollar boon to the landlocked nation’s economy—can be risky business. On Monday, police in Buliisa arrested Ugandan human rights defender Maxwell Atuhura and Italian journalist Federica Marsi.
According to Energy Voice, Atuhura—who works with the African Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), one of half a dozen NGOs that have pursued legal action against Total—and Marsi were about to meet with local community members when they were apprehended.
Marsi was released Monday and reportedly told to leave the oil region “before bad things happen.” She was briefly rearrested later in the day. Atuhura remains in police custody. The World Organization Against Torture has issued an urgent appeal for intervention in his case.
United Nations special rapporteurs and international human rights groups have previously expressed serious concern over abuses perpetrated against land defenders and journalists in Uganda. Despite the risks, actions against EACOP and the related Tilenga Development Project continue.
“We cannot drink oil. This is why we cannot accept the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline,” Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate, founder of the Rise Up Movement, said during the Africa Day action. “It is going to cause massive displacement of people [and the] destruction of ecosystems and wildlife habitats.”
“We have no future in extraction of oil because it only means destroying the livelihoods of the people and the planet,” Nakate added. “It is time to choose people above pipelines. It is time to rise up for the people and the planet.”
If completed, the $3.5 billion, nearly 900-mile EACOP will transport up to 230,000 barrels of crude oil per day from fields in the Lake Albert region of western Uganda through the world’s longest electrically heated pipeline to the Tanzanian port city of Tanga on the Indian Ocean.
In partnership with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC), Total is also leading the Tilenga Development Project, which involves the drilling of 400 wells in dozens of locations, including iniside the richly biodiverse Murchison Falls National Park.
Total says the project will “generate a positive net impact on biodiversity,” a claim vehemently rejected by environmentalists.
“Imagine a tropical version of the Alaskan oil pipeline,” environmental author Fred Pearce wrote of EACOP last year. “Only longer. And passing through critical elephant, lion, and chimpanzee habitats and 12 forest reserves, skirting Africa’s largest lake, and crossing more than 200 rivers and thousands of farms before reaching the Indian Ocean—where its version of the Exxon Valdez disaster would pour crude oil into some of Africa’s most biodiverse mangroves and coral reefs.”
Although Total claims it chose the EACOP route to “minimize the number of residents relocated,” local residents and international NGOs say the pipeline’s impact will be anything but minimal.
According toMongabay, more than 12,000 families will be displaced from their ancestral lands to make way for the pipeline, two-thirds of which will pass through agricultural zones. Farmers in the pipeline’s path and the Lake Albert oil region have joined civil society groups and international organizations in voicing their opposition to the EACOP and Tilenga projects.
The #StopEACOP coalition, which is made up of local and international activists and organizations, is attempting to block funding of the project by appealing to banks, investors, and insurance companies. A March open letter signed by more than 250 groups urged 25 commercial banks to not finance the pipeline.
In 2017, WWF Uganda published a report warning that the pipeline “is likely to lead to significant disturbance, fragmentation, and increased poaching within important biodiversity and natural habitats” that are home to species including chimpanzees, elephants, and lions.
Wildlife forced from natural habitats by oil development has in turn caused severe disruptions to farming families.
“We have always had a problem of human-wildlife conflict in this village, but with drilling and road construction across the park, the invasions are more frequent,” Elly Munguryeki, a farmer living just outside Murchison Falls National Park, told South Africa’s Mail & Guardian earlier this month.
“We keep reporting the losses to park authorities but nothing happens,” said Munguryeki. “Each night a herd of buffalo, baboons, and hippos from the park would invade my farm and neighbouring plots and eat our crops until dawn. Whatever they left would be eaten by baboons and wild pigs during the day, forcing us to harvest premature crops.”
A 2020 Oxfam report (pdf) noted the EACOP “will cross poor, rural communities in both Uganda and Tanzania that lack the political and financial capital of the project stakeholders.”
“The lopsided complications of this power dynamic are well-documented in similar extractive industry projects,” the report stated. “Powerful companies are often able to hide their operations behind local contractors and permissive government authorities. Often the only hope that local communities have for remediation or justice is through local government bodies that are often weak, fragile, or captured by corporate and national interests.”
Mary, an Ugandan farmer in Rakai near the Tanzanian border who was interviewed for the report, said that “when this pipeline project came, they promised us too many things. Up to now they have done nothing.”
“What makes me worried is that they took my land but I have not yet been compensated,” she claimed.
A community member from Rujunju village, Kikuube District in Uganda told the report’s authors that “the government and oil companies have not informed us about the negative impact that the EACOP will have on our well-being. All they tell us are good things that the EACOP will bring like roads and jobs. We also want to know the negative impact of the pipeline so that we can make informed decisions.”
Featured image: An elephant bull strides through Kimana Sanctuary, with the iconic Mount Kilimanjaro in the background. Image by Kang-Chun Cheng for Mongabay.
KiliAvo Fresh Ltd seeks to establish water-intensive commercial farm that would obstruct wildlife corridor adjacent to Amboseli National Park.
Majority of landowners of the former Kimana Tikondo Group Ranch area working together to preserve free movement of wildlife and livestock in this dryland ecosystem.
April 26 ruling dismisses the farm’s appeal against revocation of its licence by National Environment Management Authority.
An April 26 ruling against a licence for a commercial farm near Kenya’s Amboseli National Park will help to preserve free movement of both Maasai livestock herders and wildlife. The National Environment Tribunal’s dismissal of an appeal by KiliAvo Fresh Ltd confirms the importance of ecological concerns in determining appropriate land use in the semi-arid region.
The farm’s owners initially applied for a licence in August 2019, but this was denied by the National Environmental Management Authority because it fell in an area zoned for livestock under the Amboseli Ecosystem Management Plan. The plan aims to preserve free movement of both domestic animals and wildlife across the Kimana plain, which has largely avoided the gradual fragmentation of ownership, growing permanent settlement, and agriculture in other areas surrounding Amboseli National Park.
Tracking data from three collared elephants showing their movements through the Kimana area, a vital wildlife corridor and rangeland for herders. The KiliAvo farm is shown in red. Data from the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and Save the Elephants.
Movement the lifeblood of pastoralism
For 60 years and more, a series of changing legal boundaries has fallen across this dryland ecosystem. While the ecological demands of this arid, beautiful territory have remained the same – seasonal availability of grazing and water prompting both wildlife and herders to move freely across it – until recently, the legal framework had increasingly divided the land up, assigning legal title to steadily-smaller plots which individual owners were tempted to sell off to private developers.
In 2013, two thirds of landowners of the former Kimana Tikondo Group Ranch pooled their plots, establishing the Amboseli Landowners Conservancies Association (ALOCA). In concert with the Kenya Wildlife Service and the ministries of environment and tourism and wildlife, ALOCA designed a management plan intended to ensure revenue streams for members, covering lease fees, bursary, livestock breed improvement, and livestock compensation lost to predators.
Kenya has come a long way in mitigating human-wildlife conflicts. Carefully developed strategies have allowed threatened lion populations to make a comeback despite growing human populations and pastoral needs for livestock grazing. Big Life Foundation, a nonprofit organisation focused on preserving wildlife and habitat, works to support local communities through the collaborative protection of wildlife. Advocating for coexistence can be a challenging process, one that will persist into perpetuity, but a meaningful one. Jeremy Goss, a conservation manager at Big Life, emphasized their mission statement: “We see wildlife and domestic livestock as inherently compatible.”
Land use in Amboseli has long accommodated the needs of both livestock and wildlife, whose fates are inextricably linked. For both, mobility is essential – survival depends on constant movement to viable resources. Rangers and herders alike understand how these animals constitute the local economy and Maasai culture. The vast bush of Amboseli may seem undeveloped in the conventional sense–underutilized to the inexperienced eye–but it is this very land that has supported some of the world’s most renown wildlife and the livestock that supports local economies.
ALOCA’s management scheme formally recognised that movement is the lifeblood of pastoralism, helping to avoid overgrazing and allowing the landscape to support livestock herds and wildlife more sustainably while building in the flexibility needed to survive and recover from periodic droughts.
KiliAvo Fresh Ltd seeks to establish water-intensive commercial farm that would obstruct wildlife corridor adjacent to Amboseli National Park. Image by Kang-Chun Cheng for Mongabay.
‘Soon, this area will be covered with farms’
KiliAvo Fresh Ltd’s project moves in the opposite direction. The 72-hectare (180 acres) farm is situated in the middle of the Kimana wildlife dispersal area; its electrified fencing partially obstructs a wildlife corridor linking Amboseli National Park with Kimana Sanctuary and opening into the Chyulus and Tsavo to the north and east.
The project’s Environmental Impact Assessment raises concerns over the impact of setting up water-intensive commercial agriculture here, as well as the risk of chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides leaching into surrounding areas.
Kenneth Nashuu is a retired warden whose 40 year career with Kenyan Wildlife Service brought him all across Kenya. He predicts serious repercussions for both wildlife and the economic situation of local communities should KiliAvo’s vision succeed. “An insertion like KiliAvo in a critical route point should have never been allowed to happen. There needs to be a stronger management plan in place that trains people so they understand the consequences.”
Once open rangeland is transformed into cultivated farms, reductions in grazing land would impact livestock herding, likely causing people to lose money and affecting cultural norms tied closely with herding.
Kimana is one of several sites across the country where strategies to reduce conflict between growing human populations and their livestock and farms have enjoyed recent success.
Daniel Ole Sambu, head of the Predator Protection Programme at Big Life, helped develop a compensation scheme to attenuate retaliatory predator killings in 2003. Funds from both Big Life-facilitated donations and a local community kitty offer partial compensation for attacks on livestock by lions, hyenas, leopards, and other predators. By offering compensation credit on a sliding scale, the program encourages herders to adopt good husbandry practices, such as fencing and keeping constant watch over livestock. For instance, should the attack occur in a fenced area, the compensation will be greater than if the attack took place in an open pasture.
Since the introduction of the program, fewer predators have been killed in retaliation for livestock casualties. Big Life’s Rangers’ phones used to ring off the hook with people reporting intruding wildlife. Now, there is an average of four or five calls a day across the 647,497 hectare (1.6 million acres) that they oversee.
Speaking to KiliAvo shareholder and manager Jeremiah Saalash on the path leading to the farm’s newly-drilled borehole, an opposing vision quickly becomes clear: “Soon, this area will be covered with farms just like this one. My ancestors farmed in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, and I have made it here.”
The establishment of an enterprise such as KiliAvo may undo years of hard work and catalyze conflicts beyond Amboseli, reintroducing conflicts where people are living and grazing due to the disruption of a critical migration corridor.
Further constraints on grazing from encroachments like KiliAvo could even force locals to return to subsistence poaching.
It is worth noting that there are smallholder farmers growing maize, beans, onions, and other vegetables near natural water sources in ALOCA’s seven conservancies. It’s the location and scale of KiliAvo that raises concerns.
Changes to ecosystems in tandem with conventional human development are inevitable, but this is not to say stewardship should be abandoned. The KiliAvo ruling by the National Environmental Tribunal clarifies which forms of development make ecological sense here in sight of Amboseli.
By obstructing wildlife migration corridors, eliminating critical pastures for local herders, and monopolizing scant resources, a farm such as KiliAvo is fundamentally incompatible with the drylands of Kimana.
“Everything is connected here,” Parmuya Ole Timoye, a manager at nearby Amboseli Bush Camp commented.“One person’s actions can affect everyone else.”
Featured image: Arctic polar bear with cubs. (Credit: USFWS)
Contact: Kristen Monsell, (510) 844-7137, kmonsell@biologicaldiversity.org
ANCHORAGE, Alaska— The Biden administration issued a proposed rule today allowing oil companies operating in the Beaufort Sea and Western Arctic to harass polar bears and Pacific walruses when drilling or searching for oil for the next five years.
“It’s maddening to see the Biden administration allowing oil companies to continue their noisy, harmful onslaught on polar bears. Oil in this sensitive habitat should stay in the ground,” said Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “President Biden promised bold action to address the climate crisis, yet his administration is proposing to allow business-as-usual oil drilling in the Arctic. Polar bears and walruses could pay a terrible price.”
The Southern Beaufort Sea population is the most imperiled polar bear population in the world. With only about 900 bears remaining, scientists have determined that the survival of every individual bear is vital to the survival and recovery of the population.
The heavy equipment used in seismic exploration and drilling activities can crush polar bears in their dens or scare polar bears out of their dens too early, leaving cubs to die of exposure or abandonment by their mothers. The noise generated by routine operations can disturb essential polar bear behavior and increase their energy output.
Walruses are also incredibly sensitive to human disturbance. Without summer sea ice for resting, walrus mothers and calves have been forced to come ashore, where they are vulnerable to being trampled to death in stampedes when startled by noise.
In addition to seismic exploration, the rule covers construction and operation of roads, pipelines, runways, and other support facilities. It also covers well drilling, drill rig transport, truck and helicopter traffic, and other activities.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act generally prohibits killing, harming or harassing a marine mammal. The statute allows the federal government to authorize certain industrial activities to harm and harass marine mammals, provided such activities will take only a “small number” of animals and have no more than a “negligible impact” on the population.
The proposed rule covers existing and planned activities across a wide swath of Alaska’s Arctic, including 7.9 million acres in the Beaufort Sea, and onshore activities from Point Barrow to the western boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It includes the Willow development project that the Center and allies have challenged in court, and which the Biden administration this week submitted a brief defending.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be accepting public comment on the proposed rule for 30 days.
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Heavily armed goldminers have launched a series of attacks on the Yanomami community of Palimiú in the northern Amazon.
Hutukara Yanomami Association reports that on May 16, 15 boats full of miners opened fire on the community and hurled tear gas canisters at them. The Yanomami report suffering from burning eyes and choking on the gas.
The attack follows an earlier assault on the same community on May 10, when one Yanomami was wounded, and several miners were injured. Footage filmed by a Yanomami captures the miners opening fire from their boat at a group of Yanomami on the riverbank. Several boats full of miners continued to fire at the Yanomami for the next 30 minutes.
In the chaos of the attack many Yanomami children fled into the forest to hide. Two days later the bodies of two children, aged one and five, were discovered floating in the river where they had drowned.
Eight Yanomami representatives from Palimiú travelled to Boa Vista, the state capital, to denounce the attack and to demand the authorities investigate it. In a press conference held on May 15, they expressed their anger at being abandoned by the state.
Timóteo Palimithëri said: “We are exhausted and barely able to hold out. Please, it’s urgent, don’t you see? The police and FUNAI have to be strong… If the army and police don’t act now many indigenous people will certainly die.”
In a letter to the police, community leaders denounced the terrible impacts of the mining activities: “The goldminers have been here since 2012 and to date, 578 Yanomami have died from poisoning, yet not a single measure has been taken to stop this. They are destroying our rivers, polluting the water, fish and all the animals. We have serious health problems. We can no longer bathe in the river and both adults and children are losing their hair because of the toxic chemicals they pour into the river.”
Since February the community of Palimiú has repeatedly asked the authorities to remove the miners. The miners’ attacks this week were reportedly in response to the refusal by the Yanomami to let them collect fuel, quadbikes and equipment they had left there to supply their illegal mine upstream.
Intercepted audio messages by the miners refer to an armed gang operating in the region
Unless the authorities take decisive action now, criminal gangs and drug traffickers are likely to carry out more violent attacks. Last year miners murdered two Yanomami.
There are an estimated 20,000 goldminers working illegally in the Yanomami territory.
Concerns are growing for the safety of uncontacted Yanomami communities, one of which is in a region where miners are operating: the miners reportedly attacked their community in 2018.
A humanitarian crisis is engulfing the Yanomami, who are already reeling from high rates of malaria (in 2020 the indigenous health department registered 20,000 cases of malaria) and Covid-19, a lethal combination which is devastating their health and ability to feed themselves.
This is graphically illustrated in a photo, taken on April 17, of a severely malnourished Yanomami child suffering from malaria, pneumonia and dehydration.
The government’s genocidal policies and criminal neglect are killing the Yanomami and other indigenous peoples in Brazil. Please support the Yanomami in their protest.
The American West is having a drought. So, what else is new? And, that’s just the point. The American West has been in an extended drought since 2000, so far the second worst in the last 1200 years. Here is the key quote from the National Geographic article cited above:
In the face of continued climate change, some scientists and others have suggested that using the word “drought” for what’s happening now might no longer be appropriate, because it implies that the water shortages may end. Instead, we might be seeing a fundamental, long-term shift in water availability all over the West.
That is what climate scientists have been warning about all along. The problems we are now experiencing are not just cycles or fluctuations—although those continue to be important—but rather, permanent changes in the climate (that is, on any timeline that matters to humans).
I wrote about this drought when it was only 10 years old. (For a sense of how bad it is now, see the U.S. Drought Monitor.) Back then it did not seem that residents and businesses were taking it seriously, even if some water officials were. There have been ups and downs in the intervening years, but mostly downs.
There is a reason that most major cities are located near water and not in arid regions. Water is heavy, fluid and not easily transported—though vast and expensive water projects do just that. Water cannot be easily created from its constituents elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen is abundant everywhere on Earth. But hydrogen in its elemental state is not readily available and must be extracted from other sources such as natural gas. The cost of manufacturing water is prohibative or we’d likely be doing it already.
That leaves society with two paths: Bring ever greater amounts of water to arid regions which continue to grow in population and water-intensive activities such as farming OR conserve dramatically in order to live within the available water supply.
The second choice appears imminent as water authorities across several states are preparing to activate a drought response plan this summer when Lake Mead (the lake behind Hoover Dam) is expected to reach a level that triggers the plan. All those receiving water from the Colorado River and its tributaries are likely to be affected. Again, a look at the U.S. Drought Monitor demonstrates that the drought extends far beyond the Colorado River basin, west to much of California, east into New Mexico and West Texas and north into parts of Oregon.
There is a third path which I haven’t mentioned because in polite company and official circles it is unmentionable: People could leave. And, they may do so as the costs and consequences of living with less water mount—especially for those in water-intensive pursuits such as agriculture. Those in the cities may leave, too, as the cost of provisioning water for urban areas rises and supplies are curtailed. That would, of course, hit water-intensive businesses and their employees the hardest.
All of this was prophesied long ago by Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, the acknowledged classic treatment of water in the American West. The subtitle of the book is “The American West and Its Disappearing Water.”
Of course, the boosters of growth in the West will tell us that these things are cyclical and that soon the rains will return. But, the West has been waiting for over 20 years. Unfortunately, a positive mental attitude does not trump the physics of climate change—which, in this case, has been combined with a return to what the historical and geological record show is far closer to the norm in the West.
That does not bode well for a people and a culture used to getting its way with nature—something, it turns out, that was really just luck, the luck of having populated and reconfigured the West in a period that was particularly wet in relation to the millennium that preceded it.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights.
Editor’s note: Large scale agriculture, especially the industrial form with its dependence on heavy machinery, highly toxic chemicals and genetically modified crops is incredibly destructive. It’s also remarkably undemocratic since it is pushed by large multinational cooperations and their exclusive institutions like the World Economic Forum and the UN. If we as humans want to have a future on this planet (it looks like we don’t), we need to shift radically to more community based, small scale, democratic food systems and locally applicable techniques for ecological restoration, since large scale agriculture will inevitably fail and leave toxic, deserted landscapes behind.
A battle for the future of food is already underway. There’s still time to change the outcome.
Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.
A Crisis of Participation
But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”
The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”
The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains. “The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”
Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”
Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains how “The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”
The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.
It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”
Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”
Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values: “Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values,” said Kenyangi. “While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”
The Presence of AGRA
The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.
AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).
Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.
Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains, “During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”
“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organisation that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”
Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.
While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.
Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change
This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.
The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?
This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work.
A Growing Culture would like to ask all readers to help raise the dialogue about this upcoming summit. Re-share this article, re-post, tweet and amplify this issue. You can learn more about A Growing Culture here: https://www.agrowingculture.org, on Twitter: @agcconnect or Instagram: @agrowingculture.
