Managing the Food Weapon
Okello Oculi

At a press conference on 28th April, 2008, the UN Secretary General officially announced that food is a new war weapon against the poor of the post-Cold War global economy. His solution of US$ 750 million for purchasing fertiliser and seeds was clearly meant to butter hearts of multinationals that control seeds and manufacture fertilisers.
Seeds that are genetically programmed to give high yields only if fed with chemical fertilisers are roads to disaster for poor farmers that cannot afford adequate levels of fertilisers. Such seeds also require constant supply of water that rain may not guarantee; but need to be hooked to irrigation. Such irrigation demand appropriate equipment that are manufactured and supplied by these corporations and are therefore another set of financial burdens on poor farmers.

Food as a prerequisite

“Food” is commonly associated with what one takes into the body to end a feeling of “being hungry”. Nutrition scientists, biochemists, biological scientists and physiologists would insist that it is the chemical compounds and elements taken into the body that constitutes "food", which include carbohydrates, lipids(or fats), proteins, vitamins, minerals and water. The latter is usually so much taken for granted.
The roles that these intakes play in building muscles, bones of the skeleton, release of energies as the body digests food, and the use of that energy for activities as well as for keeping the body warm, link food to our being alive, giving birth and creating culture through mental activities. This linkage has immediate policy implications as nations worry about "Dietary Standards" or what citizens must eat if they are to live and act.

Inadequate food and nutrition

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have been very active in recommending what scientists regard as adequate levels of nutrition to be ingested by individuals. In Nigeria, the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration Control (NAFDAC) has come close to dealing with this issue, but has tended to stop at dangers of foods likely to contain poisons from bad processing.
Nutrition scientists show deep concern about dangers resulting from inadequate levels of nutrients in foods taken or not taken. They have established a number of alarms, such as the following: low or lack of vitamin A causes blindness; and, bones get deformed when vitamin D is lacking, which may result in rickety legs or pelvic defects that would prevent normal births in women. It was shocking to see a recent exposure of a pandemic of rickets in a community in Kaduna State that had only gotten attention because a team of German scientists had taken interest in it.
Food that is low in protein, vitamins and enzymes may hinder mental development in children as well as lower their ability to learn. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa drew a brutal battle with those advocating sale of HIV/AIDS drugs when he insisted that poor diet is the primary destroyer of immunity to infections. What is of prime interest here is the need for a national map of food intakes and of health problems resulting from areas of food poverty.
Human beings also have to compete for their food with other organisms, which include bacteria, moulds, insects, rodents, birds and yeasts. Traditional defences against the competition that the communities and laboratory way birds have invented include the following: denying insects entry; trapping or harassing or smoking; excluding oxygen; and reducing activity by enzymes inside the food items. These measures combine well to keep the foods wholesome and to keep toxins (such as aflatoxins found in poorly dried millet and groundnuts) and other micro-organisms away hence preventing illness to humans.
While the above problem of preservation receives sporadic attention, some areas like fighting quelea birds enjoy dramatic visibility when financial interest are involved (in hiring light planes to spray chemicals) as swarms come into focus. Consider the deaths that arise from eating beans sprayed with chemicals to keep away weevils, or  oranges and tomatoes that rot away before reaching consumers; interest in such matters fade away quickly as media attention wanes.
The high occurrence of liver cancer as a result of eating grains invaded by aflatoxins continues to be ignored as a policy challenge by officials of the relevant Ministries of Agriculture and Health. There is also no vigorous promotion of investment in food production within a larger industrial agenda that sees African producers as key players in local, African and global markets.

Threats to food security

More formidable threats to food security have been in the areas of policy propaganda. Three of the policies stand out. One is the loud advocacy of ‘green revolution’ seeds that ignore, and even destroy, local seeds that have centuries of ecological adaptability. These seeds are genetically engineered by scientists working for big multinational companies. Imposing them on African farmers creates a dangerous dependency, as they are programmed to become sterile when harvested. In effect, farmers get significantly lower yields if they use these seeds in a subsequent season.
Farmers must buy new seeds from the multinational companies, which hold intellectual copyright and production capacity. Continued purchase of these seeds each planting season requires income that may not be achieved from sales of previous harvests. The need to sell harvests at high prices would mean that most low-income farmers cannot afford to buy the food items. Moreover, critics in the European Union countries continue to express fears about new diseases (including new forms of cancer and nervous disorders) that may emerge from eating genetically invented seeds and livestock products.
The second policy propaganda is that of ignoring the peasant farmer and giving financial support mainly to ‘commercial farmers’. This approach ignores the fact that, in the last five decades, there have been no jobs in urban areas for farmers to run to (they seek to escape from poverty in rural areas). It ignores the simple notion that millions of small rural producers are also a vast potential market for the limited industrial sector of most African economies. In the situation in which scarcities in grains, milk products, beef, vegetable and fruits are emerging (as a result of grains being converted to produce biofuels and ‘climate change’ through droughts and floods), it seems blatantly unwise to ignore this ancient source of strength for feeding rural and urban populations in Africa. China did not lose sight of anchoring her agriculture on the hundreds of millions of small producers.
Another of the policy propaganda has been that of food imports. As an example, Gambia has been an open door for rice imports from Thailand to enter the ECOWAS market. Key victims have included rice grown in the delta on the river Niger inside Mali, rice grown in Niger State, and in Abakaliki in Ebony State ( both in Nigeria). Farmers in these production zones are denied the advantage of a protected regional ECOWAS market. The benefit for ECOWAS from this case of subversion of food security is not easy to see. The import duty that Gambia currently earns from taxing rice from Thailand could be recovered by a tax paid by the governments of Mali and Nigeria. The latter has wrestled with an American invasion that uses her porous borders to smuggle vast quantities of cheaper and better-processed rice from American farmers. America’s success increases Nigeria’s vulnerability as Nigeria’s own rice farmers are unable to compete for an effective share of the richer local urban market; hence they abandon the crop.

Indigenous food alternatives

In Nigeria, a policy threat has been that of putting emphasis on exporting cassava pellets instead of finding effective markets for gari, the powdered form of ground and fried cassava, among urban populations in Africa, Europe, North America, the Caribbean and South America. Gari is a brilliant invention as a most versatile food that fits into the fast lifestyles of urban working populations. That powdered form can either be consumed while mixed with fried groundnuts and soaked in drinkable cold water or turned into an edible paste when poured into boiling water.
It is perplexing that Nigeria’s food technologists have not risen to the challenges of integrating flavour, texture and beauty to challenges of packaging, transportation, storage, preparation and propaganda for it so that it could follow the trail that the country’s home-made videos by “Nollyhood” continue to open all across Africa. It is also perplexing that this food invention has not been broadcast around Africa (such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania), where cassava is grown. The same goes for beverages from powders of roasted millet and sorghum, which are currently marketed on a limited scale in Nigeria’s urban markers.
Promoters and marketers of wigs on female actors in Nollyhood productions seem to have been more successful than Nigeria’s food technologists and food exporters in targeting the movie lovers in West and Eastern Africa. In Uganda and Kenya, urban consumers of millet (or kal) and matoke with vegetable stew – with or without simsim and groundnut pastes – appear to have asserted their demands into an effective market in markets outside of the so-called “five-star” hotels.
Multinational companies rule and protect the international food market. These companies behave like ancient sharks and gladiators. They will continue to block local production of wheat by farmers in Kano State in Nigeria, just as they have fought Ethiopia over control of sales of processed coffee in the world's supermarkets. This must not, however, be an obstacle.
The food market is too rich a frontier to allow Africa to continue to be barred from. Peasant producers of cotton, cocoa, groundnuts, sisal, tea and other so-called “export crops” were shut out during the colonial era from direct participation in international commodity trading by traders or institutions in the form of produce marketing boards. This situation cannot be justified under an ideological umbrella of “globalisation”. In this regard, new African food diplomacy is clearly and urgently called for.

African food diplomacy

Food produced by farmers in northern Mozambique was sold across borders into Malawi where there was a rich market for it, while people in southern Mozambique starved because they were poorer. The World Food Programme bought food from northern Mozambique to feed people in Darfur, while victims of malnutrition were ignored in southern Mozambique. Food diplomacy must not, therefore, follow the pattern that emerged between Malawi and Mozambique.
The lesson from Mozambique is that of a failure to see the high cost of having a population that is nutritionally endangered. British colonial authorities learnt this the hard way when, in 1938 across all their vast empire, colonised peoples were so desperately impoverished and malnourished that they were suffering from numerous diseases. As a result, they were medically unfit for conscription into the army to help Britain fight World War II. It is not clear whether the nutritional health of citizens was considered in the 2007 election campaign rhetoric in either Nigeria’s 30 political parties or Kenya’s 144 political parties.
The above mistake also seems to inform a backward policy retreat recently stated by the leadership of the Universal Basic Education Board in Nigeria. That leadership appears determined to terminate a pro-poor people programme of giving one meal a day to school children. The reason given is that from past experience, state governments in Nigeria failed to pay counter-part funds demanded from them.
At least there should be serious appreciation of the vital linkage between nutrition and mental development and ability to learn, which has been scientifically demonstrated. This linkage should be the determinant of policy at the federal level rather than the difficulty in getting state governments to honour their obligations to their children. Failure would be an inhuman abandonment of helpless children and abdication of the responsibility to provide enlightened guidance through courageous governance. It would also be unconstitutional and a gross undermining of national security by denying food security to a country’s citizens, let alone its children. Remember Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s nickname – snatcher of milk from Britain’s babies.

Conclusion

The danger of the post-Cold War era, assuming the Malthusian notions of the “survival of the fittest”, is very real. Its dawn was marked by the emergence of HIV and AIDS as a weapon with origins in biotechnological experiments. Its commercial value is now expressed in the provision of steady markets for pharmaceutical companies that produce anti retroviral drugs. The use of genetically modified seeds as a possible war weapon (through the destruction of internal food security of mass peasant communities), needs open discourse and diplomatic work and thought. Africa cannot afford to remain silent now that food war has burst into the open.
African governments need to protect seeds that have adapted to local climates. They also need to support national research scientists to modify these seeds as part of national capacity. Oil producing African countries (Angola, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Libya and Sudan) should be pressurised by the African Union to combine capacities for producing chemical fertilisers as spin-offs from oil and gas production. Such a pooled capacity would supply fertiliser to other African countries at rates that ward off pressures from multinational companies and their Euro-American governments.
The African Union should also come up with a Common Food Bank. Similarly, it should come up with a seed bank, a food-industrial pool and a food marketing agency.
At the level of ‘food-pot diplomacy’, Africa must insist that companies and governments that take measures for the purposes of causing hunger and starvation either within or other countries, must be regarded as committing a crime against humanity, a fundamental violation of the right to life and human dignity.

Okello Oculi is a Professor at Ahmadou Bello University, Nigeria & Executive Director, Africa Vision 525