In this interview:
African faith leaders are calling for reparations from the “colonialist” Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the “false prophets of food security”. “This is not about money, but the dignity of people.”
ffinlo Costain spoke to Bishop Takalani Mufamadi from the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute. He said, “People’s inheritance has been taken away. To restore the soil – this is going to take years.”
Of the Gates Foundation, Bishop Takalani said, “They might mean well, but like colonialism they speak OVER the people, they don’t speak WITH the people. Like colonialism you do it FOR them, you don’t do it WITH them. Like colonialisation they respect the master, they do not respect the subordinates. That is a problem. Because they’ve got the economic muscle – they think, ‘I can do whatever I want to do…’ And anyone who questions? They say, ‘I’m doing it for you.’ We are misled and colonialisation does not stop.
Bishop Takalani said that studies from Zambia, Mali, Kenya and Tanzania show the devastation from artificial genetically modified seeds and from artificial fertilisers.
The faith leaders’ call for reparations is to highlight to the Gates Foundation that the damage they have caused has taken away the sustainability of African communities.
Bishop Takalani said, “As faith leaders we live with farmers daily. If we do not give our communities a voice, then we sink with our communities. God himself said that the Heavens are His, but the Earth is given to the sons of man – if we do not take care of the Earth, who will?”
“The pesticides they use damage the water table and the soil. Playing God is a painful thing. It’s not Bill Gates per se. He’s got researchers and people who are advising him. He’s got people who have developed these seeds. They knew the pros and cons. But they did not expose the fact that that this messianic food product can also be devilish – it can be destructive. When they sell us a product, they don’t tell us the good AND the bad so that we can make a choice.
“In many African nations there are no structures to protect human rights. People have no recourse to the courts.”
Bishop Takalani said that the Gates Foundation’s own commercial evaluation shows that AGRA* is failing. Despite this, the Gates Foundation is still funding industrialised agriculture in Africa with hundreds of millions of dollars.
(* AGRA stands for Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa. It was established in 2006 with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.)