MODERNISING AFRICAN AGRICULTURE: WHO BENEFITS?

African agriculture is in need of support and investment. Many initiatives are flowing from the North, including the G8’s “New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa” and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). These initiatives are framed in terms of the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). This gives them a cover of legitimacy.

We, organisations assembled here,bear witness to a global extractivist boom that is leading to great misery for many hundreds of millions of the Earth’s people and destroying the very basis for life and its reproduction in significant parts of the Global South, and also the Global North.It is corporations, financiers and the rich that benefit, and not the majority of peasant and working class peoples. This extractivist, growth fixated and profit oriented maldevelopment model is expanding capital’s reach and destroying our common goods of water, land, air, forests and oceans. In this phase of global capitalism, power relations are shifting, with emerging economies and corporations of the Global South joining the traditional actors of the Global North in plundering and colonising the natural resources of South and North. Extractivism is not just the activity of resource extraction but a development model, which organises the political, socio-economic, gender and cultural dynamics within society and the state and its institutions.

To President Zuma and the Ministers of Labour, Agriculture and Rural Development:

We are the Farm Worker Coalition. We are farm workers and NGOs, social movements and unions that support farm worker. We submit the following:

1. We are marching two days after Human Rights Day while the government and the farmers are working to turn our rights as farm workers into nothing. It looks like that to them we are not human.