In August 2008 I wrote about Wangari on our blogs. I recently decided to expand on that thought process and refocus on her efforts in Africa.
A couple of years ago I attended a stirring speech given by Wangari Mathaai, then little-known Kenyan winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. At the time I thought that the reason she had been awarded the prize was simply because she had founded a women's movement in East Africa which had planted more than six million trees. After her speech, I was little the wiser. It was only when I read her wonderful biography, Unbowed, recently that I discovered the real reason for the prize.
As East Africa's first woman with a Ph D she had taken on a very male chauvinist, highly corrupt political establishment. First she had prevented a major park in the centre of Nairobi being used to build a privately owned office block and later she was instrumental in overturning the sale of a state forest to a developer of upmarket housing. In between she planted trees, uplifted women and fought both the bureaucracy and bad farming practices. For her sins, she was physically attacked, arbitrarily arrested, faced privations in prison, ridiculed in the press and parliament and ostracized. But she persevered and today Kenya is a much greener country than it might otherwise have been.
Her book is really in two parts, with the second part given over to her fights with the powers that be. In the early chapters she paints a beautiful picture of growing up in rural Kenya - the family home and village life but most of all growing crops and vegetables. One thinks of traditional African peasants as ignorant, but they understood the soil and the climate, the plants and the animals, the insects and the old fig trees that protected the springs of gushing water. In a very sensitive way, she also describes her father's life as a worker on the farm of a white settler at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion.
Both parts of Dr Mathaai's book have resonated with me recently as I have contrasted UN forecasts of the world's undernourished growing by 40 million people to 963 million people this year and prices of staple foods up 15% or more in just the last eight weeks with news reports of new agricultural projects being started in Africa. Just a couple of months ago there was the story about how South Korea's Daewoo had been allocated 1.3 million hectares of Madagascar, a chunk the size of a small European country, to grow food for the home country; last week it was a Wall Street banker who had signed a deal with a Sudanese warlord for 400,000 hectares of land alongside the Nile; and this week it was Lonrho taking over a block of 25,000 hectares of sparsely populated land in Angola.
For a couple of years now we have been reading of biofuels projects springing up in Mozambique especially, but also Tanzania. In Sierra Leone, Addax Petroleum, with the support of the national government, is to set up a 20,000 hectares sugar cane plantation together with an ethanol distillery/factory would produce more than 1,200,000 litres of ethanol per year and a 30 MW power plant that would be able to supplement Bumbuna. The project will employ 4,000 people. All across Africa, commercial farmers are growing sugar and tobacco, two of the biggest contributors to health problems worldwide.
As I read about all these projects - and with Dr Mathaai's words ringing in my ears - I find myself asking questions. Why was the land not already being used for agricultural production when Africa is so chronically short of food? Who really owns the land being used for the projects - the national government, the tribe or the individual families living on it? What is going to happen to the people currently living on the land? Will those given jobs really earn enough to live a better life than they enjoyed before? Will the country and community really be better off or is it the offshore investors who are the only beneficiaries? More than anything, I wonder whose pockets and offshore bank accounts are going to bulge even further as a result of these projects?
If all this sounds like just another African bad news story, let me end with a ray of hope. After years of drought and famine, the government of Malawi, against the wishes and so-called better judgment of the donor community, set up a scheme to distribute seeds and fertilizer at subsidized prices to small farmers. The result is that today Malawi produces more food than it consumes and earns foreign currency from exporting to the countries round about. What we really need is for Africans to use African land to fill African stomachs first, then foreign stomachs in exchange for filling the bank accounts of the local farmers who did all the hard work.
Incidentally, if you go searching the Internet for information on the African agricultural sector, you will find there is plenty of information on agricultural aid to the continent, but precious little about who produces how much of what. So our researchers have started pulling together all the pieces of this tricky jig-saw puzzle, starting with paulownia elongata, which you canread more about at www.paulownianow.org. We'll keep you posted as they update more of our pages. Some other useful links to further stimulate your thinking about where the world is going.Tags: reforestation, Africa, Wangari, Wangari Mathaai, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, Africa, reforestation, fertilizer, biomass, paulownia
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