Mandela and Friends, Monsanto and Gates, and Other Interesting Links

A few interesting links to start the week, and then I should be back later this week with a write-up on my Ethiopian adventure (finally!)

First, today (Monday) was Nelson Mandela's 93rd birthday. There are a few ways to celebrate the occasion:
-Jam with some songs for Mandela
-Rent Invictus (Damon and Freeman in a movie about Mandela, rugby, race, and reconciliation? It is safe to say that it was my kind of film...)
-Check out Dear Mandela, the upcoming documentary of three young South Africans "putting the promises of democracy to the test."



Other links:

-Interactive map / history of Africa

-Ok, this is the most interesting article to me: the Gates Foundation is working with Monsanto to bring genetically engineered crops to Africa. You may recognize Monsanto as the villain in a number of food-related documentaries (like this one, or this one, or this one) and for suing people for growing their own crops. Now the article says that "biosafety activists in South Africa are calling a program funded by the Gates Foundation a "Trojan horse" to open the door for private agribusiness and genetically engineered (GE) seeds..." There are so many complicated issues involved in this, and I am not at all qualified to jump into the debate. But here's one question to get you riled up: If GE crops produce more food for drought-stricken regions, will the ends justify the means? (You should be able to find most of those documentaries online; on the flip side, here is Monsanto's response to claims made in Food, Inc.)

Most of the above is courtesy of the blog Africa is a Country. The below are via the aid blog From Poverty to Power...

-Good news out of Africa: Ghana and Zambia have officially been reclassified as middle-income countries

-"Big businesses are taking advantage of a scheme that was originally designed for small-scale producers and now compete with those producers..." That's one of the glaring lines in an interesting article on Fair Trade and who it benefits. But two parts that really resonated with me were:

Even from within the movement itself, there were calls to address standards. Merlin Preza, coordinator of Fairtrade Small Producers in Latin America and the Caribbean, said “the problem lies not in meeting standards — of course producers can meet them — the problem is verification”. She explained that poor farmers, who are often illiterate and live in isolated rural areas, often find it very difficult to navigate all the ‘red tape’ involved in registering products and proving where and how products are grown.

and

The room generally agreed that fair trade can’t just be about certification or about getting a fair price. It must include other elements that build capacity and empower small-scale farmers to take control of their lives. That means investing in local communities, supporting education, improving product quality and, above all else, enabling organisation so that poor farmers can gain a stronger position in the market, widen their choices and negotiate better deals.

In my experience, free trade certification (and organic certification) requires so much monitoring, reporting and minutiae that it is unlikely the small farmers it is supposed to help can ever legitimately obtain it. Furthermore, many farmers I knew thought they could just show up to a meeting with a certifying agent and/or pay a large sum, and they would be certified (part of the blame for this goes towards the government bureaucracy, and part toward aid handout programs). The required "investment" in communities was not something that resonated at all with the small farmers I worked with in Madagascar (who, I should note, were already among the wealthiest farmers in the area... which makes sense because in order to take the risk of exporting rice abroad, they had to be otherwise financially stable... ah the Catch-22's...)