Conspiracies against agriculture

Officials in most government offices are  either absent (or ‘’not-on-seat’’); haggling over textiles or beverages hawked by itinerant traders; sleeping across tables; sharing gossip; waiting for files that never seem to arrive or being rude to visitors. While these government workers are entitled to monthly salaries for non-production, peasant farmers are NOT paid during planting […]

Officials in most government offices are  either absent (or ‘’not-on-seat’’); haggling over textiles or beverages hawked by itinerant traders; sleeping across tables; sharing gossip; waiting for files that never seem to arrive or being rude to visitors. While these government workers are entitled to monthly salaries for non-production, peasant farmers are NOT paid during planting and weeding crops or herding livestock. President Lula’s government in Brazil taught Africa a most innovative lesson in ‘’paying’’ mothers for mothering children. A long standing conspiracy has denied such to benefits to peasant farmers in Africa.
On 9th May, 2014 CNN’s Richard Quest derided the ‘’World Economic Forum Africa’’ held in Abuja with a television documentary on “Coco-nomics’’ – the story behind cocoa production in Cote d’Ivoir; its global marketing and consumption. Cote d’Ivoire produces 40 per cent of the world’s cocoa; uses child labour and crude hand tools including cutlasses for cutting trees and breaking up cocoa pods.  Shacks with rusted corrugated iron roofs are shelter for communities with emaciated bodies due to malnutrition. Quest, typically, ignored the food sector.
 The chief executive of NESTLE told Quest that his company made a profit of 11 billion Swiss francs in 2013. Quest showed thrills by village males getting their first taste ever of cocoa chocolate from bars he gave them during an assembly of village farmers. The men looked prematurely old from planting and selling cocoa seeds but being paid very low prices. NESTLE refuses to fund good quality schools, health clinics, roads and local processing plants to create work and higher earnings by producers. It is a cynical conspiracy with economic-genocidal impunity.
 This tradition of conspiracy has roots in colonial forced labour economies. Peasant producers of cotton in Nigeria and Uganda; coffee in Uganda, Cameroun, Congo; groundnuts in Senegal, Nigeria, Gambia; palm oil in Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon, produced  raw commodities highly priced in the international market; which funds were given to British, French, Belgian banks to loan to their industries, local governments, and builders of infrastructures.  African governments and intellectuals have not prosecuted colonial governments for decades of forced labour; and not demanded reparations for funds robbed from peasant producers for decades.
 Peasants still lack political voices to demand for insurance; and against land robbery. In Botswana big farmers have fenced huge ranches, blocking grazing routes for livestock for local communities; and migration routes for wild animals. It is deepening the poverty of local communities; and undermining the tourist industry.
In Kebbi State in Nigeria land deals have been signed with a Mexican company without the consent of village communities. A triumvirate of Brazil, Japan and the Government of Mozambique have unilaterally grabbed 7 million hectares of land for an agricultural scheme. Brazilian and Chinese companies have leased land in Ghana, Sudan and Namibia without consent by local communities. In Acholi areas of northern Uganda, villagers are fighting local government officials seeking to sell their land to various companies. In Madagascar over 3 million hectares of land was leased to Korean companies for producing maize for Korean consumers. A conspiracy to entrench inequality is on a rampage.  South Africa has a ticking bomb of past land robbery.
The demographic scandal that over 70 per cent of Africa’s 1.1 billion people live in investment-denied rural communities has meant that low-capital ‘’agriculture as a business’’ is the fate of villagers who sell food products in rotating rural markets because public officials conspire to consume imported foods. In Nigeria the oil wealth was never massively transferred to peasants for creative use in exploring industrial potentialities of food crops; pharmaceutical frontiers of herbal plants, wild fruits and flowers. A Trust Fund for vegetables, fruits, local beverages, mushrooms remains long overdue.
Seed colonialism is a frontier of conspiracy.  Multinationals sell seeds whose harvests are engineered to give low yields and, thereby, enslave farmers to buying more parent seeds from them. European Union groups fear that ‘’genetically modified seeds’’ do kill local seeds; and give yields only if treated with insecticides and herbicides often marketed by the same agro-companies. It is a likely commercio-biological road to famine. Seed self-sufficiency is a vital national security matter.
Industrial frontiers of crops and fruits remain uncelebrated. Seizing from Japan, the initiative of manufacturing cosmetics and pharmaceuticals from Shea Butter seeds in Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Nigeria, South Sudan and Uganda, awaits funding.  Agriculture-focused primary and technical secondary school education must open up local small and medium scale invention of suitable agro-technology supported with capital for their graduates.
 The food sector was primary as a vital subsidy to colonial peasant economies but doomed to be a politically safe ‘’subsistence’’ or starvation domain. From Addis Ababa to Dakar urban markets are starved of local fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, spices peculiar to varied ecologies while choking with metallic vehicles for transportation. The malicious indifference of colonial governments to nutritional conditions of African peasants and mine workers has persisted.