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Petition to President Obama
Dear President Obama,
Last year your administration helped launch the G-8’s New Alliance to encourage private sector investment in African agriculture. This initiative attempts to fill the gap created when governments failed to extend and renew their commitment to public sector investment.
However, the New Alliance actually represents a shift in policies to favor large agribusiness. This threatens to displace smallholder agriculture in favor of less sustainable practices, placing food security at risk.
We ask you to use your trip to Africa as an opportunity to renew your commitment to support smallholder farmers and public finance for agriculture and address significant problems with the New Alliance:
- The New Alliance guarantees the availability of large tracts of land for private investors. The land tenure guidelines of the UN Committee on Food Security have not yet been implemented and there are limited protections in place ensuring that community land rights are respected and that the needs of the rural poor are met.
- The New Alliance gives incentives to agricultural machinery, fertilizer, and chemical companies which are primarily interested in doing business with large, highly mechanized farms. This encourages land-grabbing, ignores the social and environmental impacts of industrial-scale farming, and disregards the high production potential of smallholder farmers.
- By admitting countries that have not met their public agricultural investment commitments and by excluding smallholders and civil society from decision-making processes, the New Alliance undermines the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP), an African Union initiative that represents the most powerful African-led and African-owned effort supporting agricultural development with significant civil society input and participation.
- The New Alliance gives tax breaks to agribusiness, eliminating potential revenue sources for investment in healthcare, education and other public goods.
- The New Alliance requires African countries to change their seed laws to favor large seed monopolies and genetically modified seeds, despite the risk that these crops will undermine food security by increasing costs and decreasing genetic diversity.
President Obama we ask you to listen to the concerns of African smallholder farmers and work for increased public investment in rural community infrastructure, agricultural research and extension. Smallholder associations should exercise leadership and make their own decisions about the involvement of corporate private sector actors. We ask you to use your influence in the G-8 to suspend implementation of New Alliance frameworks that pressure African governments to favor large-scale industrial agriculture. Instead African governments should be supported as they work to ensure that communities have secure access to and control over their land and that smallholder farmers have access to the services and resources they need to achieve sustainable and resilient production systems that contribute to local food security.
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