Farmers’ Seed Systems in Southern Africa: Alternatives to Philanthrocapitalism

Abstract

Farmer seed systems survive by engaging changing conditions and by sharing seeds and indigenous knowledge. Although the systemic change attracting the most attention as a challenge to farmer seed systems is climate change, another systemic threat needs equally urgent analysis. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) of the Gates Foundation is trying to transform farmer seed systems through ‘business rule’ and ‘business practices’ of philanthrocapitalism. Outlining the trajectories of philanthrocapitalism, this analysis explores fundamental differences in how large foundations are interjecting their private goals into public spaces, while extracting public funds for private use. Although much has been written about philanthrocapitalism in the fields of education and health, this article focusses on its role in farmers’ seed systems. Grounded in Southern Africa, it explains how smallholder farmers are not just resisting the insertion of philanthrocapitalism into their seed systems, but are offering alternatives.

Keywords

Seeds smallholder farmers philanthrocapitalism food ecological economics

Introduction

Farmer seed systems survive because they engage changing conditions, sustaining their identity while transforming it, similar to their adaptive crop populations. Consistent is their sharing of seeds and indigenous knowledge, even as the propagation and uses of the crops may change. Over the last decade or two, the systemic change attracting the most attention as a challenge to farmer seed systems is, of course, climate change. In that context, another systemic threat to farmer seed systems needs equally urgent attention and analysis: policy hazards that may be more ominous than climate change (Mushita & Thompson, 2013). Since 2006, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which was created and is sustained by the Gates Foundation, is leading the way in trying to exploit farmer seed systems.¹

This article explores fundamental differences in how large foundations, such as the Gates Foundation, with more cash than many governments, are interjecting their private goals into public spaces and extracting capital. Although much has been written about philanthrocapitalism in the fields of health and education (see, e.g., Fendler, 2018; Reckhow, 2013), this article focusses on its role in African seed systems. The analysis begins with the theory of philanthrocapitalism by outlining its trajectories, under neoliberalism. The core of the analysis offers explanations of how African smallholder farmers (with less than five hectares) are not just resisting the insertion of philanthrocapitalism into their seed systems, but are offering alternatives to the AGRA agenda. The empirical data are grounded in Southern Africa, in evidence-based findings from farmers’ fields. It suggests that these smallholder farmers’ practices are well in advance of our theorizing about the future of food for the planet.

Trajectories from Neoliberal Roots

Although neoliberalism has a long history over four decades and many expressions,² one can summarize its core themes. The most predominant is the theoretical conclusion that the market is the most efficient allocator of both production and consumption of goods and services: it provides ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. Therefore, governments must encourage competition by deregulating trade, opening up all domestic markets to foreign firms, including finance, to allow the free flow of capital. The core theory calls for privatization of production, while strictly regulating labour organizing in order to encourage direct foreign investment. Governments are to allow capital and goods to cross borders freely, while regulating organized labour and the migrations of economic refugees.

The theories concluded that by reducing the amount of government expenditure, giving space to private initiative, government debt would decline and government revenue could increase with taxes on expanding businesses. Debt often did not decline, especially when governments engaged in more or less continuous wars (e.g., in Southern Africa, neighbours being subjected to apartheid commando raids for over two decades, or militias fighting over control of minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The private sector often did not pay taxes owed, and capital flight surpassed foreign direct investment (Ndikumana & Boyce, 2011, pp. 60–73). Across the continent, therefore, the savings to demonstrate ‘fiscal responsibility’ often came from reducing government financing of schools and health care.

By about 2008, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to agree with much of this criticism and is now advocating a ‘new Washington Consensus’ as necessary to overcome the distortions of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) (Chang, 2009, p. 481). The IMF offers working papers, for example, on the distortions caused by unregulated capital transfers (Ghosh & Qureshi, 2016). Currently, illicit financial flight (IFF) from the African continent is estimated at well over US$50 billion annually, indicating ‘that in reality Africa is [and has been] a net creditor to the world rather than a net debtor’ (Africa Union/Economic Commission for Africa [AU/ECA], 2014, p. 34).³

Philanthrocapitalism recognizes its roots in neoliberalism by upholding the importance of market efficiencies, achieved through reducing government interventions. The Economist (2006) coined the term ‘philanthrocapitalism’ to report that ‘leading new philanthropists see themselves as social investors’, engaging in ‘venture philanthropy’ or ‘strategic philanthropy’. This study employs the term ‘philanthrocapitalism’, because the concept invokes more than a single transaction or relationship, but a systemic change to employ huge sums of private capital to address social problems using business methods. Not every foundation engages in these practices; the term designates large foundations proudly advocating venture philanthropy, arguing that their investment in social programmes requiring efficiency and ‘evidence-based results’ will benefit the recipients, as well as provide a return on the investment back to their foundations.

The debates about philanthrocapitalism tend to focus on two aspects: its advocating ‘business practices’ in public agencies (Bishop & Green, 2009; Edwards, 2010) and questioning whether the cash transfer is really a ‘gift’, since it arrives with ‘conditionalities’ required by the private donor (Hay & Muller, 2014; McGoey, 2015). Edwards raises the question of whether evaluation of social services can be measured only by the bottom line; pandemics such as ebola or the opioid crisis require local social organizing (public health interventions) as much as any cash. In measuring efficiency, it is also important what will be counted, or ignored. In measuring hunger, for example, the world has too long only counted calories, ignoring nutrition. But now we have the malnourished obese. The items tabulated by philanthrocapitalist agriculture will be discussed below. Regarding the second focus of the debates, cash transfers, Linsey McGoey demonstrated in her study, No Such Thing as a Free Gift, how the Gates Foundation offers investment, not a gift (McGoey, 2015, p. 187):

I argue that what is most novel about the new philanthrocapitalism is the openness of personally profiting from charitable initiatives, an openness that deliberately collapses the distinction between public and private interests in order to justify increasingly concentrated levels of private gain.

Extending both of these perspectives, this study analyzes how philanthrocapitalists are not just promoting ‘business practices’, or demanding a ‘return on investment’ (ROI), but more so, are requiring ‘business rule’. They advertise more than a ‘reformulation of generosity’ (Rhodes & Bloom, 2018, no page number). As will be discussed, goals and their assessment come from the top, with command as important as efficiency. By maintaining control of local decisions, they direct in a top-down manner, operating similar to corporate hierarchical rule. Consulting the ‘rank and file’ is just that, consultation that relinquishes no power. As Rhodes and Bloom (ibid.) conclude, ‘this “giving” culture… has a troubling emerging political legacy, one in which democracy is sacrificed on that altar of executive-style empowerment’.

Philanthrocapitalism is grounded in the neoliberal reduction of the role of government, but extends that theory to the goal of leveraging public funds to follow private goals newly inserted into public agencies. In contrast to structural adjustment policies privatizing parastatals or state services (state farms, grain silos), the public agency is not fully privatized. It still mobilizes public funds for services, but which are commandeered by philanthrocapital interests and goals. To venture philanthropy, ‘leveraging’ the funds of others is smart business, giving competitive advantage. If an agency is fully privatized, such as a grain silo or a seed bank, the private owner takes on any risks, losses, and depreciation costs; with governments still engaged, the risk is socialized back to the public, while the philanthrocapital goals are realized for private profit. The neoliberal goal of removing government involvement for corporate investment becomes the philanthrocapital goal of marshalling public funds; this article analyzes how the ‘philanthropic’ arm of the corporation uses its ‘gift’ to legitimate its ruling regime over public resources.

Philanthrocapitalism Illustrated

An analogy can be made between books and seeds to illustrate the differences between twentieth century philanthropy and twenty-first century philanthrocapitalism; it brings to the fore the extensive amount of control that the Gates Foundation, exemplary of philanthrocapitalists, seeks. Both books and seeds contain knowledge, gained by sharing. A single author may be the creator of a book, but the knowledge comes from ideas shared by others. Farmers would never say they create seeds, but their cultivation does transform them, such as farmers experimenting over millennia to develop a slender grass (teosinte) into maize with cobs.

Facilitating this sharing is the essence of repositories for both books and seeds: libraries and seed banks. The repositories, valued as public sites, offer easy access for the general public. Farmers across the globe donate seeds to the CGIAR (the Consortium of International Agricultural Research, which retains the acronym of its predecessor, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) family of 15 international seed banks,⁴ because they know sharing seeds increases knowledge, expanding biodiversity. Similarly, books are often donated to libraries, either in-kind or through cash. Almost everyone knows the ubiquitous library card, and standard material transfer agreements (SMTAs) are analogous for seeds in a public seed bank. SMTAs do not require the seeds to be returned, because as living organisms, they can be replaced by outgrowing others, with the farmers continuing to be the key donors. The transfer agreement, however, disallows any intellectual property claims that may limit access to the genetic material provided.

Making his fortune over a century ago, Andrew Carnegie is well remembered for his philanthropic giving to construct library buildings. Local public funds purchased the books and provided salaries for staff, with the one Carnegie conditionality being to loan books to anyone for free. Carnegie did not expect his foundation employees or ex-employees to sit on the board of public libraries to command what books to favour or staff to hire.⁵ Yet, this approach is what the Gates Foundation is using in relation to the CGIAR family of public seed banks. From 2007, the Gates Foundation increased its funding to these seed banks, and now much of the accounting and governance falls under the ‘business practices’ and ‘business rule’ of philanthrocapitalism.

The first ‘reorganizing’, officially completed by 2010, changed policies to reflect the new business modalities. The board of directors, no longer a ‘consultant’ to the scientists and seed breeders, became the central, top-down policy-maker: ‘[t]he initial Center boards saw themselves more as advisors to the director than as policy- and decision-making bodies overseeing Center operations and the director’ (Özgediz, 2012, p. 118). The reorganizing separated those who implement research from those who fund it, with board members as ‘overseers’ directing policy.

This separation advanced a second transformation relating to voting power (Consortium of International Agricultural Research [CGIAR], 2016, Article 3). Of the 20 possible voting members, Europe alone has seven, while all of Pacific Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Sahara Africa are allowed one vote each (for a total of five of the 20).⁶ The only private entity with a full vote—equal to any of the vast regions where diverse genetic wealth is cultivated—is the Gates Foundation. Where is the principle that donors of the genetic wealth—the source and life of the public seed banks—exercise as much (or more?) power than those who use the seeds (to conduct further research or to commercialize)?

Changing personnel on the CGIAR System Management Board (board of directors) also signifies increasing philanthrocapital influence. After 2010, a Gates Foundation employee, Frank Rijsberman, became a non-voting member of the board. By 2018, Kanayo Nwanza, serving on the board of the Gates Foundation’s AGRA, became a full voting member of the System Management Board. The current Chair is Marco Ferroni, chief executive officer of the Syngenta Foundation. In contrast to Carnegie’s funding of lending library buildings, the Gates Foundation has its own personnel and selected colleagues on the CGIAR board of directors, with increased influence to set policies and goals. They ‘oversee’ decisions for seed conservation, choosing what seeds to value, to pull out of cold storage and use to experiment. Carnegie did not command the boards of public libraries, nor have his allies choose what books to value, to put on the shelves. Philanthrocapitalists are forging top-down ‘business rule’ into public seed repositories to fulfil a primary commercial goal of private profit, that may or may not serve the interests of the public.

Further reflecting policy influence, the international seed banks are now subjected to financial cost/benefit analysis, not to social cost/benefits that would take into account benefit-sharing or farmers’ rights. The bottom line is based purely on financial transactions. Yet, public international seed banks’ genetic treasures (natural capital) or indigenous knowledge embedded in the seed (intellectual capital) are highly valuable.

In the vast amount of CGIAR reporting—from annual reports to special reports and to financial statements—one cannot find an inventory of the seed accessions; there is no accounting of their presence or value. By 2017, a performance report announced the figure of 768,576 accessions, with little detail (Consortium of Internatioinal Agricultural Research, 2017). The gene banks are composed of seeds, but farmers’ valuable gifts are not enumerated, often not even acknowledged. To gain power over policies about this treasure, the philanthro-capitalist approach is to erase natural capital, with its shared knowledge, from all accounts, making finance capital (cash revenue) appear as the sole resource. It is as if the ‘library’ has no ‘books’.

As an illustration, the Genebank Platform leaflet (Crop Trust, 2017, p. 2), reported a new variety of cassava, derived from the gift of Venezuelan farmers:

KU 50’s pedigree traces back to a key parent called CMC 76, a Venezuelan landrace that was collected in 1967 and conserved in the CIAT [International Center for Tropical Agriculture, part of CGIAR] gene bank. No other institute would have been able to provide such a range of cassava diversity…. The aggregate economic benefits from the adoption of KU 50 are estimated to exceed US$ 97 million.

What is the value of the ‘key parent called CMC 76’ versus the ‘economic benefits…of KU 50…estimated to exceed US$97 million’? Is the Crop Trust of CGIAR really saying the value went from zero to US$97 million? The value of seed seems to be recognized only as it is privatized.

Yet the wealth of the repository (e.g., the key parent CMC 76) has been donated, and not by the Gates Foundation. By erasing the vast natural capital donated for decades by smallholder farmers around the world to the international seed banks, the few millions of finance capital ‘ventured’ by the Gates Foundation and others become dominant. Such a business practice allows those who developed KU 50 from the ‘key parent’ to ignore two international laws (Convention on Biological Diversity, International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture) requiring benefit-sharing back to farmers who originally bred, and then donated, the key parent. No benefit sharing, or any part of the US$97 million, went back to the Venezuelan farmers.

In addition to cassava, two other policy examples (rice and barley) are notable. In 2013, the rice international seed bank (International Rice Research Institute, part of CGIAR) announced a yield-boosting (by as much as 36%) rice gene, without giving any details of its origin in its publications. Others identified the gene as being from an Indonesian farmer variety (Daringan) donated to the public seed bank. This seed bank and Japan’s international agricultural research agency (JIRCAS) filed an international patent application on the gene (Hammond, 2017). Although the patent application violates CGIAR’s own intellectual property protocol, as well as the two international laws, the application proceeds because the board of directors offered exception to their own business practices, claiming that justifications for a patent are ‘acceptable’. No justifications have so far been disclosed.

In 2011, the wheat/maize/barley seed bank (ICARDA-International Center for Agricultural Research, in Dry Areas, part of CGIAR) signed a 3-year research agreement with Impulsora Agrícola, a Mexican firm that acts as an agent for three breweries, Heineken and two others owned by Mexico’s Grupo Modelo (50% of which is owned by Anheuser-Busch) (ETC Group, 2012, p. 25). Along with the barley, the brewers obtained intellectual property, as the international seed bank allowed exclusive private control over the barley lines. It tried to justify the facilitation of private profit from donated seeds deposited in a public bank by promising that any improved progeny would eventually be shared back to the farmers. An ‘international public goods spillover’ effect would perhaps some time in the future assist some farmers.

To conclude the analogy, it would be as if the Carnegie Foundation required a library it constructed to give a corporation ‘exceptions’ to following laws, such as copyrights. If a copyright over a book is violated, it can be prosecuted as a felony, and the author can receive payments for damages incurred. But this crime does not prevent others from benefitting from the book, from the knowledge; we can still read the book. However, exclusive use of a seed prevents all others from using the genetic sequence, or parts of it, to experiment for seed breeding. Public scientific investigation is shut down; genetic material is sealed off; the ‘book’ and the knowledge it imparts are removed from the public domain. The philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie for public libraries increased sharing of knowledge; the philanthrocapitalism of the Gates Foundation turns the sharing by others into exclusive private gain.

Farmers’ Alternatives

The rise of philanthrocapitalism is occurring in the time of rising global inequality (Plank, 2017). Tracking the unprecedented upsurge for several years now, the 2018 Oxfam report reminds us: ‘[b]illionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 per cent since 2010—six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of just 2 per cent’ (Oxfam, 2018, p. 1). A new billionaire was created every day in 2017–2018 (Oxfam, 2019, p. 10). For the United States, just the top three—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the American population (160 million people) (Collins & Hoxie, 2017, p. 1).

Reporting this inequality is almost old news, but another type of ‘inequality’ is as striking, and often not at all recognized. It is much more positive (Douwe van der Ploeg, 2018, pp. 502–504; Leblond & Trottier, 2016, pp. 27, 38). A short list suggests its propitious directions:

Smallholder farmers on the African continent account for 90 per cent of all farms, while having access to only 15 per cent of the continent’s agricultural lands (GRAIN, 2017, p. 4).

Eighty per cent of all African farmers are smallholder farms (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa [AGRA], 2016, p. 254).

Family farming produces 98 per cent of the food crops in sub-Sahara Africa (ibid.).

Smallholder farmers supply 80–90 per cent of the seed used on the African continent (Stakeholders’ Consultation on farmers’ rights, 2016, p. 3).

Rural Africa is expected to have about 60 per cent more people in 2050 than today (AGRA, 2016, p. 4).

These few statistics suggest that large-scale commercial agriculture is not the food provider on the African continent. This section explains what smallholders and their allies are doing to provide, not just resistance, but alternatives to philanthrocapital control over seeds.⁷ The ‘results-based evidence’ comes from our working with smallholder farmers in Southern Africa over three decades; however, many such practices are found throughout the continent. Their lessons highlight the importance of other forms of capital (e.g., natural capital), much beyond simple cash accounting; the final section of this article offers that analysis.

Participatory Plant Breeding

The concept and process of participatory plant breeding (PPB) are as ancient as farming, but are gaining more international recognition. They emerge from problems that commercial plant breeders and their corporate sponsors have not been able to resolve; their approach to farmers treats them only as ‘end users’, or passive ‘consumers’ just waiting for the next seed sales. This view results in slow adoption rates of newly marketed commercial seeds, especially for sorghum, which hovers around 10 per cent on the African continent. Continuing farmer resistance to commercial seeds reflects their decisions that those seeds do not serve their needs, rendering them unaffordable at any price. However, commercial seed corporations call the farmers seed systems ‘uninformed’ (Mabaya, Omanga, & DeVries, 2013), or worse. Their latest claim declares that selection of germplasm, undertaken by smallholder farmers in their fields, is not capable of producing seed but grain. Farmers, however, have been selecting next year’s seed from this year’s grain for millennia. To contend that farmers have no knowledge or capacity to produce good quality seed ignores the history of agriculture. Perhaps the commercial industry and farmers could both agree that farmers are ‘risk adverse’—to seeds that do not offer characteristics they are seeking and require high-cost inputs (e.g., fertilizers) to survive highly variable micro-climates.

In contrast, the PPB agenda follows farmer-prioritized traits that set breeding objectives (fieldwork, 2015–2019).⁸ PPB offers a knowledge pathway for transforming and developing the agriculture sector into farmer-led research, participatory education, and into pluralistic extension services. For example, planting a one-hectare field with more than 25 varieties (nutrition density) shows the way for greater nutrition. Such initiatives prioritize participatory action-research involving communities (Brown, Nuberg, & Llewellyn, 2018). These practices offer varieties with preferred traits, increasing adoption rates. Because, on average, adoption rates of modern commercial varieties hover around 30 per cent across sub-Sahara Africa over the past 15 years, PPB has the potential to contribute to sustainable growth of the smallholder farming sector and to improve livelihoods with predictable food and nutrition security and employment creation opportunities.

While PPB can cultivate a selection of locally adapted and heterogeneous varieties, it also releases them without any ‘value chains’ of centralized control. The farmers make local selections, with field experience of multi-location trials and with on-farm characterization of germplasm, addressing the needs of a broad range of seed cultivators (Community Technology Development Organization [CTDO], 2016). Farmers become co-researchers, selecting germplasm, making crosses, and setting up trials to direct the process of seed multiplication (Mbozi, 2015). Their scientific work does not separate the laboratory from field testing, the site where commercially bred seeds often fail. An analysis of PPB versus conventional plant breeding of barley gave results that the benefit/cost ratio of PPB is 2.6 times higher than that of conventional plant breeding (Halewood, Deupmann, Sthapit, Vernooy, & Ceccarelli, 2007, p. 3, quoting Mustafa, Grando, & Ceccarelli, 2006).

PPB entails intensive farmer participation in agenda setting, decision-making, understanding the key components and desired benefits of the crops. They undergo multi-location variety testing in the farmers’ fields in order to determine suitability, measure the adaptive complex, potential uses, storage quality, nutrition, agronomic characteristics, and pest and disease resistance. In this context, the farmers will validate the suitability, adaptability, economic viability, and social and cultural acceptability of that new variety.

Enhancing PPB processes is both a form of political action and a practical technological solution to genetic erosion. In the context of commercial seed failures through two green revolutions coming from outside the African continent, PPB demonstrates that African smallholder farmers’ shared knowledge and cultivation of new varieties assist in adaptation to climate change through new, field-tested varieties. PPB encourages wider dissemination and adoption of technologies suited for the very limited financial levels of most smallholder farmers.

Farmer Field Schools

Farmer Field Schools (FFS) are a group-based learning process introduced by a number of governments and international agencies to promote Integrated Pest Management. First designed and managed by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Indonesia in 1989, FFS emerged after it was realized that most technologies developed by researchers alone were inappropriate for smallholder farmers (Jürgen, Murwira, & Connoly, 2000). Extension services were initially structured and operated on the assumption that farmers are largely passive and illiterate and, therefore, ignorant and unable to innovate or to integrate new cropping and livestock practices into their established agricultural systems. However, farmers, as field researchers, test various technological options available, adapting alternatives to their particular circumstances. In this way, farmers are involved in technology development and transfer (Asiabaka, 2009). In participatory extension approaches, farmers take part in the design, management, implementation, and evaluation of their experiments.

This approach to adult education evolved from the concept that farmers learn optimally from field observation and experimentation. The basic elements of a FFS include a group of 25–35 farmers, field-based, and lasting for at least one cropping season from seeding to harvest, with weekly meetings during the season. The topic can easily change from planned discussions to issues concerning, for example, a pest that has arrived in the fields, or a receding storm that was far more adverse than predicted. This approach emphasizes participatory action research, premised on collective, deliberative solving of problems (Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Program, 2009; Hughes & Venema, 2005). As one researcher observed, ‘[m]anure cannot be controlled from a distance. The same is true of the soil and its biology, intercropping, green manures, the female line in animal breeding, subterranean flows of water and many other aspects of living nature’ (Douwe van der Ploeg, 2013, p. 118).

Simple experimentation helps farmers further improve their understanding of functional relationships (e.g., pests-natural enemy population dynamics and crop damage-yield relationships). As important, FFS provide the opportunity to share indigenous knowledge, often ignored or denigrated in other fora. Yet the debates are lively, often heated, sometimes only resolved at the end of the season when practices are tested in ‘results-based’ evidence. FFS provide the time and space for community empowerment through sharing of information and farmer innovation. In this cyclical learning process, farmers develop the expertise that enables them to make their own crop management decisions, based in new understandings of the ecology of their fields (Venema & Masendeke, 2006). Practical, FFS provide political resistance to the philanthrocapital goal of rendering farmers as simply consumers of seeds bred to profit a few corporations.

Community Seed Banks

These facilities are the key nerve centres of local germplasm conservation and sustainable use, on-farm characterization, local knowledge management, and technology dissemination (Andersen, Shrestha, Otieno, Nishikawa, & Kasasa, 2018). As practised in Zimbabwe, local communities own and manage their own seed banks, electing the seed bank leaders for a designated term.⁹ The community may also select one or two farmers as seed breeders, designating land for propagation of larger quantities of selected seeds. For a particular season, members decide the varieties to outgrow (in situ conservation) and the ones to conserve in plastic containers (ex situ) in a small seed bank building. Communities donate only farmers’ varieties, with members setting storage conditions and lending protocols, how much of which seed to lend out and designation of the terms for returning newly harvested seed (CTDO, 2017; Fusire, 2009).

Community seed banks (CSB) are key in coordinating aspects of restoration and enhancement of lost plant genetic resources which are preferred by smallholder farmers and are adaptive to specific ecological regions especially under the changing climate. The facilities promote the conservation and sustainable use of neglected and underutilized crop species (NUS), from sorghums and millets to amaranth.¹⁰

The institutional framework of managing CSB can be broadened to include local authorities, chiefs, and spirit mediums (to address the spirituality of seeds), farmers’ organizations, local agricultural extension services, national gene-bank, and development partners alike. In Zimbabwe, for example, farmers are organizing the National Alliance of Community Seed Banks (CSB) for purposes of lobbying for the formulation of a national policy for CSB. Through their seed banks, local Zimbabwean farmers link with national crop improvement institutions, seeking to facilitate farmer-led crop improvement research.

This National Alliance of CSB consists of CSB farmers, those responsible for sustainably managing these facilities in each locality where they exist. Extending their local participatory organizing, they elect a national body from among themselves that is responsible for the national coordination, management, and networking, such as linking with the National Gene Bank of Zimbabwe. The alliance supports coordination of local germplasm collection in collaboration with the national gene bank, including on-farm characterization, restoration, and enhancement of lost diversity by location. Depending on the demand for specific crop varieties, adaptive to local ecological environments, it will coordinate seed distribution and supply. In the near future, the alliance plans to address supportive policies to facilitate smooth operation and function of CSBs nationally and beyond.

CSB networks participate in action research for the socio-economic development of neglected, underutilized species as a source of food and nutrition security. They are instrumental for distributing climate adaptive crop cultivars to the wider farming community of smallholder farmers. Both the research and distribution ensure increased utilization, value-addition, and market linkages of such crops. Through these linkages, conservation ensures seed supply, improvement of farmers’ varieties, with the development of NUS for greater nutrition.

This networking is possible because farmer integrated seed systems provide ‘evidence-based performance’ of scaling up positive benefits for a good range of crops. They have attributes such as working at various scales of farming systems, responding to local markets, moving a wide range of crops, working across agro-ecological regions, and rarely breaking down entirely. These activities make it possible for farmer seed systems to provide the bulk of seeds that smallholder farmers plant for food production, at upwards of 80 per cent, as referenced earlier.

Community-based seed systems, designed to enhance reliability of seed supply at village levels, where seeds are produced, managed and controlled by the community, contribute to local food security. Crop improvement initiatives, based on a farmer-centric trait prioritization, also lead to improved technology adoption. Smallholder farmers’ integrated seed systems can enhance ecological adaptability, bio-cultural local knowledge systems, food and nutrition security, as well as tried and tested agronomic and use traits.

Grounding Farmer Alternatives

To understand the ability of farmers to engage in the organizing and sharing for greater seed diversity, one needs to engage the relatively new field of ecological economics (EE) (Daly & Farley, 2011; Eriksson & Andersson, 2010) that analyzes five forms of capital: finance (cash/credit), human (labour), intellectual, social, and natural. Smallholder farmers, indeed most all farmers, are always edging along debt, bereft of finance. But smallholder farmers do mobilize successfully the four other forms of capital, especially in their integrated seed systems. According to a FAO study including sub-Saharan Africa, ‘on-farm agricultural capital stock represents 84 per cent of total average annual investment’ (Lowder, Carisma, & Skoet, 2012, p. 19). According to West African farmers’ groups, 90 per cent of investments in West African family farming come from the producers themselves (West African Committee for Farmer Seeds [COASP] & Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage [COPAGEN], 2018, p. 2). Farmers provide most all the annual investment for the next season. Farmer seeds embody both intellectual capital (indigenous knowledge) and natural capital (germplasm as a material for breeding new genetic combinations), while the community organizing, discussed above, mobilizes social capital (sharing of knowledge, seeds) and human capital (sharing labour, time).

EE explains these concepts very differently from neoclassical environmental economics. The latter requires nature or natural capital to either be commodified or to offer environmental services, whereas EE recognizes value within natural capital, whether it is directly and immediately servicing humans or not. For example, a seed has sacred value, often more precious than its nutrition, but as important is that NUS, discussed above, may in the future offer great wealth (cure for disease) or resilience to unforeseen weather changes. The EE conceptualization of natural capital rejects the reductionism of environmental economics: the value of seed is not limited to its commodification, to what it can sell for today (Thompson, 2014).

Furthermore, the labour of smallholder farmers is not necessarily subordinated to capital as wage labour. Smallholder farmers, of course, work to benefit from their efficient use of labour, but that goal is much broader than simple wages (Chambati, 2017). They work to enrich their factors of production, such as soil fertility, the genetic plasticity of favourite seed varieties, and the food-bearing diversity of their trees. A healthy mango or avocado sapling can put ‘more [natural] capital in the bank [ground]’ than return on cash crops sold during market prices depressed by outside economic forces (such as by dumping of surplus crops from abroad, or a speculative run on the national currency).

However, how to analyze labour is perhaps the most controversial of the different forms of capital. Farm labour has long been labelled dirty drudgery, as gleaming new machines come on to the fields to manufacture nature—soil, plants and animals. Smallholders hiring seasonal labour may be viewed as offering itinerant employment, or as highly exploitative work (Chinsinga & Chasukwa, 2018). Drudgery and exploitation certainly occur on smallholder farms. This accurate picture, however, ignores the costs of manufacturing nature and of displacing labour into the urban morass. To be efficient, machines require uniformity, which is one reason for the monoculture of industrial agriculture. As the data show over decades and across many economies, those escaping the drudgery rarely go to jobs in gleaming office buildings (Scherrer, 2018); even the ones who do make it, often find they are stuck in minuscule cubicles, subservient to software algorithms.

In Southern Africa, many families respond to the problems of labour on the land and in the cities by diversifying their investments: some family members stay on the land to cultivate and organize; others seek urban employment, with more formal education. This diversification allows cash from urban employment to flow back to the homesteads, and food can flow to the urban family members in times of underemployment. Sociologists are beginning to notice that migration in this century is less one-way and more circular (Tilzey, 2017, p. 330). Young people do leave the farm, with some returning in mid-career, creating both urban and rural bases. With the internet, the farm is no longer as remote, receiving news, data, popular music and stories, and also transmitting the same. Solving problems, seeing new challenges every day by growing food begins to look more creative than desultory work at a computer, and one can still relax at the end of a long day with a good movie, at home or in a community centre.

We do not need to ‘romanticize’ growing food—it is a highly demanding endeavour. Equally, the youth are finding that there are limits to the urban allure; the jobs can be boring and underpaid, with days and days of work as long and tedious as any farm day. What EE offers is a different way to recognize the value of smallholder farming, while we continue the debates about labour.

‘Peasant agriculture goes where capitalist farms cannot go. It is “anaerobic” because it can survive without the oxygen of profit’ (Douwe van der Ploeg, 2013, p. 16). Many have called for viewing the ‘multifunctionality’ of smallholder farming, instead of measuring it only by the profit motive, because the other motives are compelling, such as increasing the wealth of natural capital. The farmers are experimenting with their seeds, a scientific endeavour that energizes creativity and may bring results in new varieties. They value biodiversity (natural capital) as their food security, their insurance against any calamities; that insurance remains under farmer control, not relegated to some distant banker. As discussed earlier, they experiment with appropriate technology, a direct technology (intellectual capital) that stands the test of harsh field conditions.

What seed banks, PPB, and FFS reveal are the importance of social capital among smallholder farmers in providing biodiverse nutrition. It is their organizing, very locally, that mobilizes the other forms of capital. Shared ideas, shared seeds expand knowledge more efficiently than keeping them private. If the goal includes biodiversity, along with cash, the ‘results-based evidence’ demonstrates that sharing knowledge and germplasm is a highly efficient way to proceed. Accumulating cash often becomes a zero-sum game, but increasing biodiversity is the opposite. Sharing knowledge increases knowledge; one gains by giving it away. Perhaps we can take the goal of philanthrocapitalist ‘efficiency’ and apply it not to the financial ROI but to the natural capital ROI. If that becomes our criterion, then the smallholder farmers are much more efficient than ‘business practices’, and gain ROI without autocratic, exclusionary ‘business rule’. Farmers give freely to the international public seed banks of the CGIAR system, the opposite of privatizing the seeds for corporate gain. They expand public wealth, not leverage it for private gain, by increasing biodiversity within their integrated seed systems.

EE also signals the variety of ‘markets’, from the global to the local. It raises questions about the global ‘market’, for that operates more like a cartel, an oligopoly. Smallholder farmers linked to the ‘food value chain’ turn themselves into consumers of the ‘shrink-wrapped’ package of seed, fertilizer, and pesticide they must buy from non-competitive, price-setting corporations: ‘…an agricultural entrepreneur is bound to a script defined by others, notably the food industry, trading companies, retail chains, input delivery industries, banks and state bodies’ (Douwe van der Ploeg, 2013, p. 82).

A micro-market down the road offers other challenges, but the farmer or her local marketing liaison stays in control. The diversity of the system allows for varied logistical channels that differ by crop to facilitate access to seeds of choice and differentiated seed quantities to be traded by smallholder famers. In Southern Africa, local markets are the major venue for much of the small grains and legumes seed exchange, including indigenous vegetables. In contrast, social networks (neighbours, kin, or friends) are the standard conduits for moving planting material of vegetatively propagated crops, such as sweet-potatoes, cassava, and banana. In short, in addition to mobilizing several forms of capital, smallholder farmers offer alternatives by building alternative ‘markets’. Their diversity of products directs their diversity of exchange, another way to diversify risk. Local, alternative economies may not register in World Bank statistics, just as the vast diversity of farmers’ crops often do not register as food for the World Food Program. But both offer alternative material bases from which to deter philanthrocapital agendas (Patnaik, 2018).

Conclusion

Smallholder farmers’ integrated seed systems in Southern Africa not only challenge, but also offer alternatives, to centralized control of global seed systems. Philanthrocapitalism, exemplified by the Gates Foundation’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), tries to extend privatization of resources, too familiar under colonialism in Africa, into today’s markets. Inserting its financial resources into the network of international public seed banks (CGIAR), AGRA policies discount the gifts of farmers’ seeds that created the gene banks in the first place. Accounting only finance capital, not natural capital, as ‘revenue’ or ‘resource’, AGRA places its personnel on the board of directors, who promote exemptions to CGIAR’s own protocol of not privatizing the germplasm (seeds). As this analysis explains, these ‘business practices’ and ‘business rule’ under philanthrocapitalism do not recognize benefit-sharing back to the farmers, nor farmers’ rights, and, therefore, violate two international laws.

In spite of this context, smallholder farmers in Southern Africa, offer alternatives that signal the future of food. Their seed systems engage PPB, FFS, and CSB in order to breed and freely exchange new cultivars to increase biodiversity of food crops, an important way to adapt to climate change. Concepts from EE help us to understand how farmers can sustain these activities: they are mobilizing social, human, and intellectual capitals in order to increase the wealth of natural capital. Smallholder farmers are often cash poor, but their integrated seed systems increase the genetic wealth of biodiversity, which they mobilize through action research and participatory sharing. This material base of their wealth offers a means for them to avoid philanthrocapitalist control of seed systems. Farmer seed systems that increase the biodiversity of crops indicate the future of food.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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