In their hunt for a bigger supply of cheap commodity food, feed, and biofuel crops, the agribusiness corporations that op-erate around the world and –– for all intents and purposes –– manage global agriculture trade have honed in on Africa.

But its geography, degraded soils, lack of irrigation, climate, and poor or non-existent infrastructure present problems. Through their Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations hope to begin the process of updating continent’s agricultural infrastructure.²⁰

Some, including Soren Ambrose of the Solidarity Africa Network, believe such notions are cover for opening the door to export-oriented industrial agriculture.²¹ This conforms with the decades long process of turning underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into credit-dependent countries with cheap labor supplying cheap raw materials and cheap consumer products.²²

Indeed, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization aim to turn Africa into an export economy. The structural adjustment policies that the IMF and World Bank impose on countries in return for loans to “encourage them to earn hard currency to service debts and to rely on foreign trade rather than aspirations to self-sufficiency.” What poorer countries, such as those in Africa, can provide are “agricultural commodities that grow best in tropical conditions (since most of these countries are in the tropics) and cheap labor from the impoverished, often displaced, and jobless population.” ²³

But the Gates-Rockefeller plans for Africa and all they entail in terms of following the export-oriented agriculture model are not going unchallenged. Ambrose’s Solidarity Africa Network is coordinating an Africa-wide response to this corporate backed project in particular and to industrial, export-oriented agriculture and GMOs in general.²⁴

“We are concerned about people getting grants to do the AGRA research on GMO seeds that ask the wrong questions about the wrong problems. There is no focus on hunger and on agriculture that makes sense for Africans,” Ambrose says.²⁵ Although the continent’s farmers produce plenty of food, the major cause of hunger is distribution and accessibility to the food.

He is concerned that genetically modified and sophisticated hybrid seeds are part of an industrial agriculture model that relies on petroleum- and chemical-based inputs to grow lots of a few types of commodity crops that agribusiness can buy cheaply from farmers to process and export. Once firmly established, the factory farm model will gradually force subsistence and small-scale farmers off their land and into already overcrowded cities. Those remaining will have no realistic choice but to assume debt to pay for high priced seeds and other industrial agriculture inputs.²⁶

“GMOs are an accelerant to plans already in place to grow commodity crops for export and for biofuels, all of which makes farmers dependent on debt. Ultimately, it leads to increased corporate control over Africans’ decisions about what food to grow and eat,” he says. “This exacerbates hunger because more markets are controlled by corporations interested in exporting commodity crops grown cheaply in Africa, not in feeding people in Africa.” ²⁷

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