Controversial G7 agriculture initiative accused of ‘land grabs’ to face parliamentary hearing in Brussels

Controversial G7 agriculture initiative accused of ‘land grabs’ to face parliamentary hearing in Brussels

Date: 1 December 2015

Today, a European parliament hearing will scrutinise the controversial aid initiative, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The New Alliance has been widely criticised by civil society organisations across Europe for facilitating the grabbing of land and other natural resources, accelerating seed privatisation and undermining small-scale famers and their right to adequate food and nutrition.

Launched in 2012, the New Alliance provides aid money from the G7 countries and pledges of corporate investment in the agricultural sector of 10 countries in Africa. But in return, those countries are required to change their land, seed and trade rules which benefit multinational companies, at the expense of small scale farmers who produce most of the food on the continent.

Campaigners from across Europe welcome this move in the European parliament to scrutinise and call to account this controversial initiative which has attracted mass opposition. In June 2015, over 100 farmers’ organisations, social movements, and civil society groups from Africa and around the world released a statement calling on the G7 and African governments to stop supporting the New Alliance.  Earlier in 2015 an independent audit of the UK’s aid projects with corporate partners singled out the New Alliance as being particularly ineffective. The report suggested that the £600 million that the UK had poured into the scheme was effectively subsidising the PR campaigns of the big agribusiness companies involved.

Former UN Special Rapporteur to the Right to Food, Professor Olivier de Schutter was commissioned to produce a report to present to today’s hearing. He concludes that the New Alliance ‘is seriously deficient in a number of areas.’ For example, the New Alliance is ‘silent on the need to favour a shift to low input, sustainable agriculture.’ The report also criticises risks around land grabbing and seed privatisation.  

Heidi Chow, food sovereignty campaigner at Global Justice Now says:

“The New Alliance is supposed to address issues of food security and nutrition but it isn’t doing anything to improve the conditions for small-scale farmers in African countries. Instead it represents a corporate agenda that is increasingly gaining traction with aid donors, which sees the control of food, land and seeds being transferred away from small-scale farmers and into the hands of big business. The EU needs to listen to small-scale farmers who are losing land, seeds and livelihoods because of the New Alliance and withdraw financial and political support for this initiative.”

Notes

For more information about the New Alliance see our report Growing Evidence Against the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition:

  • In Ghana a proposed bill – dubbed the ‘Monsanto Law’ – would bolster the power of multinational seed companies whilst restricting the rights of small farmers to keep and swap seeds. This bill, which is being brought in as part of the Ghanaian government’s commitment to the New Alliance, will see the control of seeds being transferred away from small farmers and into the hands of large seed companies.
  • Farmers in Nigeria’s Taraba State are being forced off lands that they have farmed for generations to make way for US company Dominion Farms to establish a 30,000 ha rice plantation. The project is backed by the Nigerian government and the New Alliance.
  • In Tanzania about 1,300 people are at risk of losing their land or homes to make way for a sugarcane plantation, which is a New Alliance project. An area of land the size of Washington D.C. will be used by a plantation to produce sugar for biofuels.