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Privatized energy has failed us – so why is UK ‘aid’ exporting it? Updated for 2026

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This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

  • trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
  • a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

 

 

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

 




390482

Privatized energy has failed us – so why is UK ‘aid’ exporting it? Updated for 2026

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This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

  • trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
  • a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

 

 

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

 




390482

Privatized energy has failed us – so why is UK ‘aid’ exporting it? Updated for 2026

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This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

  • trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
  • a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

 

 

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

 




390482

Blinded by the lights? How power companies just stole £1 billion – from us Updated for 2026

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So, the presents have been opened and the over-eating survived. What now remains of your ‘spirit of Christmas’? For me, the answer is always the same – it’s the lights.

Since childhood, they have fascinated me. I would wander the streets, marvelling at efforts people made to light up their houses and neighbourhoods.

It didn’t have to be much; just a symbolic willingness to do something that illuminated far more than it lit up. This has always been my ‘spirit of Christmas’.

Societies need their lights to be guided by, never more so than today.

I have been trying to find some of the same altruism or mysticism in the government’s own leap into ‘keeping the lights on’ politics. This has taken the form of the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC’s) first round of ‘capacity market’ auctions.

Remember Enron? It’s a game …

An idiots guide to capacity markets would tell you they are essentially a game for idiots. You can’t auction the unknown. It becomes a game for gamblers not legislators.

So, predictably, in the first round of auctions Santa (ie the public) threw a £1bn (pre-Christmas) subsidy to big energy companies and they agreed to pocket it.

The nominal deal also included Big Energy agreeing to keep Britain’s lights on. DECC breathed a sigh of relief and went back to writing its own letters to Santa.

For most people, keeping the lights on remains a pretty important test of government competence … and energy companies know this. That is why, a couple of years ago, they started mothballing existing gas power stations (and permissions to build new ones).

On the surface, the explanation was that power prices were too low for the stations to remain viable. But behind the scenes, energy companies were already preparing to ‘game’ the system – and needless to say, keep the suckers (that’s us) in the dark.

Power companies ‘manufacturing insecurity’

If you can manufacture the prospects of a shortfall, you can manufacture the case for a new subsidy system to avoid it. Big Energy invented the idea of capacity markets and sold it to civil servants in DECC.

The embarrassment is that the government fell for such an obvious sucker punch. It wasn’t as though parliament lacked other / better choices.

In various sectors of a modern economy, maintaining reserve capacity is just a legal obligation. Major data centres – particularly those dealing in credit referencing and financial transactions – have to operate every second of every day. Heavy fines, market disqualification and / or imprisonment would follow a failure to ‘keep their own lights on’.

Similarly – until they were allowed to convert into casinos – all the major banks were obliged to maintain robust ‘reserve requirements’, sufficient to keep the banking ‘lights’ on too.

Moreover, I’m astonished at how quickly governments have forgotten the motivating effect that ‘the avoidance of going to prison’ can have in their discussions with corporate executives.

If this sounds too brutal, the government could just as easily have sequestrated the generating capacity that was being mothballed. If falling power prices (never passed on to the public) were making gas power stations uneconomic, the government could have bought them for a song.

Subsidies or safety nets?

The UK was never short of more coherent alternatives. The problems began with how we defined the problem.

In any economy, back up energy capacity is always difficult – if only because you never know how often, or how much, you will need it. The government’s most dubious assumption, however, was that this provision had to be marketised.

Once upon a time, such back-up generation power would have been referred to as Britain’s ‘strategic reserve’; a back-up, held and operated by the State, providing society with a safety net, not a market.

Today, a different version of the same thinking could have taken the form of building more interconnectors, particularly with Europe. These would have been much cheaper (and quicker) than an everlasting round of bribes and bungs.

Within a more imaginative mindset, the government could have financed measures promoting reduced energy consumption rather than increased energy production.

One of the minor / major tragedies of the UK’s first round of capacity market ‘auctions’ was that less than 1% of the contracts went into such ‘demand reduction’ measures.

Politicians could easily have changed the nature of the auction by specifying that 50% of the contracts would go into an energy politics designed to consume less … but they didn’t.

Instead, they actually made it harder for ‘demand reduction’ providers to compete by limiting their contracts to just one year, when new power generation contracts last up to 15 years (see ‘UK’s unlawful £35 billion support to fossil fuels in ECJ challenge‘).

No less boldly, they could have set a carbon ‘cap’ on where this energy came from, or a minimum proportion that had to come from renewable sources … but they didn’t do that either.

Britain’s capacity auctions were designed by and for energy producers; a point apparently lost on our political leaders – freshly returning from Lima discussions about cutting carbon emissions, rather than maintaining carbon subsidies.

Clean connections before dirty

Interconnectors could have offered Britain a much cleaner energy-balancing act than the capacity market auctions. Norway, Iceland and increasing parts of the EU can already offer renewable energy surpluses through the use of their interconnectors.

In the EU, what also matters is that retail electricity prices are 50% lower than in the UK. An increased use of interconnectors could keep Britain’s lights on and cut electricity costs at the same time. But none of this would have propped up the rewards to Britain’s Old Energy cartel.

To get out of the trap Britain is in, we have to start looking for a new source of ‘illumination’, and within a different mindset. The good news is that this is where many of today’s brightest ‘guiding lights’ are already working.

Seasonally, perhaps I should have gone looking for three Wise Men to offer you, but maybe two and two halves will suffice.

Following yonder stars

The two ‘halves’ are different organisational ‘stars’ Britain should be taking its bearings from.

The first is a collection of academics based around the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. Fraunhofer has just completed its latest scientific audit about Germany’s transition plans towards a clean/green energy economy. The Audit’s conclusion is as stark as it is inspirational –

“It is economically to our [Germany’s] advantage to move as quickly as possible to a system of 80% renewable energy”, said Eicke Weber, the institute’s director and a professor of physics at Freiburg University.

80% ?!… Britain’s current political leaders would have palpitations about Committing to half this amount … in their political lifetimes! Yet what the Germans seem to grasp is that this is as do-able as it is desirable. But it involves a fundamental shift in mindset about what ‘keeping our lights on’ actually means.

Aiding and abetting this collectivity of German scientists and engineers is the Twitter-site of their Energy Transition movement – @EnergiewendeGER. The site offers a constant stream of energy insights that are tragically missing from the UK energy debate.

But it is to the smaller ‘lights’ that we might want to direct the most heartfelt Seasonal blessings to. They are the equivalent of the individual houses whose Christmas lights I gazed at as a child, and whose lights seemed to capture the sense of vision and hope that politics often lacks.

An American abroad

The first of these ‘lights’ is Craig Morris (a refugee Americam living in Germany). Against all odds, Morris has maintained a broadsheet that many in the Environmental movement have come to rely on.

Operating beneath the banner of ‘Petite Planete‘ his Renewables International internet platform constantly analysed (and corrected) all the garbage, misinformation and ‘dark light’ put out by climate-denying lobby organisations.

His has been a David and Goliath endeavour – buttons versus billions – that defied the might of money and power. Yet even Renewables International has its limits.

Faced with a dwindling supply even of buttons, the continued existence of RI itself is now in question. If there was ever a case for crowd-funding something that consistently ‘keeps the lights on’ about brighter choices, this is it.

No less ‘illuminating’ is the work of my second wise man – Jeremy Leggett, the founder of Solar Century and now SolarAid. Leggett came back from Lima with a plan to replace every oil-burning lamp in Africa with a solar lamp, by 2020.

Into the darkness of continued global oil and coal subsidies, Leggett wants us to shine the light of renewable energy into the lives of those least able to do so for themselves. Re-writing Aladdin, he promises to swap new lamps for old, clean for dirty.

Whilst global leaders continue to throw money at an unsustainable past, Leggett (and others) want us to ‘light up’ a different future.

New lights for old

My guess (and hope) Is that society Is looking for new lights to follow. And these lights will be sustainable, accountable, open and equitable: with new voices leading where today’s Leaders fear to go.

These are ‘lights’ that would have us invest in a future we can survive in, dis-invests in the one that is destroying us, and which remembers that this ‘Petite Planete‘ of ours is the only one we’ve got.

I guess that, as a child, this was the ‘illumination’ I began looking for as I gazed in over garden gates.

As the year ends, yet another report, Renewable energy versus nuclear power – comparing financial support – details the way that consumers, across the EU, could see their electricity bills cut by 37% (and more) if government’s shifted support from nuclear to renewables.

It is unlikely even to register in a British debate that remains trapped in backward looking, ‘Dim vs Dimmer’, energy politics. For brighter choices, we need to get out more; taking greater notice of the ‘lights’ outside, and less of the lobbying inside.

Have a Brave New Year!

 


Alan Simpson is a recovering politician, Energiewende admirer, advisor on energy policy, climate change and fuel poverty.

Twitter: Alan tweets @AlanSimpson01.

This article was originally published at Evernote.

Video: ‘Lights’ by Ellie Goulding.

 




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EU Trade Secrets Directive – a threat to health, environment, human rights Updated for 2026

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A new draft EU directive currently looked at by the European Parliament wants to protect companies’ ‘trade secrets’.

But it uses definitions so large and exceptions so weak that it could seriously endanger the work of journalists, whistle-blowers, unionists and researchers as well as severely limiting corporate accountability and the transparency of corporate data used for regulation.

We publish a joint statement, below, together with many other groups that calls for the directive to be radically amended.

And end to transparency on health, food, environment

We strongly oppose the hasty push by the European Commission and Council for a new European Union (EU) Directive on Trade Secrets because it contains:

  • An unreasonably broad definition of ‘trade secrets’ that enables almost anything within a company to be deemed as such;
  • Overly-broad protection for companies, which could sue anyone who “unlawfully acquires, uses or discloses” their so-called “trade secrets”; and
  • Inadequate safeguards that will not ensure that EU consumers,  journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and workers have reliable access to important data that is in the public interest.

Contrary to the Commission’s goals, this unbalanced piece of legislation would result in legal uncertainty.

Unless radically amended by the Council and European Parliament, the proposed directive could endanger freedom of expression and information, corporate accountability, information sharing – possibly even innovation – in the EU.

Specifically, we share great concern that under the draft directive companies in the health, environment and food safety fields could refuse compliance with transparency policies even when the public interest is at stake.

Health

Pharmaceutical companies argue that all aspects of clinical development should be considered a trade secret.

Access to biomedical research data by regulatory authorities, researchers, doctors and patients – particularly data on drug efficacy and adverse drug reactions – is critical, however, for protecting patient safety and conducting further research and independent analyses.

This information also prevents scarce public resources from being spent on therapies that are no better than existing treatments, do not work, or do more harm than good. Moreover, disclosure of pharmaceutical research is needed to avoid unethical repetition of clinical trials on people.

The proposed directive should not obstruct recent EU developments to increase sharing and transparency of this data.

Environment

Trade secret protection can be used to refuse the release of information on hazardous products within the chemical industry.

Trade secret protection may, for example, be invoked by companies to hide information on chemicals in plastics, clothing, cleaning products and other items that can cause severe damage to the environment and human health.

They could also use the directive to refuse disclosing information on the dumping of chemicals, including fracking fluids, or releasing toxins into the air.

Food safety

Under EU law, all food products, genetically modified organisms and pesticides are regulated by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

Toxicological studies that the EFSA relies on to assess the risks associated with these products are, however, performed by manufacturers themselves.

However one of the EFSA’s most interesting objectives is to make its scientific opinions ‘reproducible’ by others, a key validation criteria in scientific methodology. Scientific scrutiny of the EFSA’s assessments is only possible with complete access to these studies.

Companies argue, though, that this information contains confidential business information and strongly oppose its disclosure. The EFSA has recently launched a Transparency Initiative to improve its credibility, and is considering providing independent scientists with access to this data.

Unfortunately, this objective has been strongly criticised by the manufacturing industries (chemical, pesticide, seed, biotech, and additives), which argue that this toxicological data contain “confidential business information” that “should be protected from all disclosures and misuse at all times”.

These industries openly threatened the EFSA with legal action should the Authority decide to publish this data. The EFSA would probably have a solid legal defense for such action because ensuring food safety serves as a strong justification. But this situation may change if the current directive on trade secrets covers such essential data.

It is essential that the risk assessment work of public bodies is properly monitored by the scientific community. All data that these public bodies use must therefore be exempt from the scope of the directive.

The right to freedom of expression and information could be seriously harmed

Under the proposed directive, whistleblowers can use undisclosed information to reveal misconduct or wrongdoing, but only if “the alleged acquisition, use or disclosure of the trade secret was necessary for such revelation and that the respondent acted in the public interest.”

Unfortunately, though, determining whether disclosure was necessary can often only be evaluated afterwards. In addition, it remains unclear whether many types of information (e.g., plans to terminate numerous employees) qualify as ‘misconduct’ or ‘wrongdoing’.

This creates legal uncertainty for journalists, particularly those who specialise in economic investigations and whistleblowers.

The mobility of EU workers could be undermined

The proposed directive poses a danger of lock-in effects for workers. It could create situations where an employee will avoid jobs in the same field as his / her former employer, rather than risking not being able to use his / her own skills and competences, and being liable for damages.

This inhibits one’s career development, as well as professional and geographical mobility in the labour market.

In addition, despite the Commission’s desire for a ‘magic bullet’ that will keep Europe in the innovation game, closed-door trade secret protection may make it more difficult for the EU to engage in promising open and collaborative forms of research.

In fact, there is a risk that the measures and remedies provided in this directive will undermine legitimate competition – even facilitate anti-competitive behaviour.

Supporters – a litany of corporate power

Unsurprisingly, the text is strongly supported by multinational companies. In fact, industry coalitions in the EU and the US are lobbying, through a unified Trade Secrets Coalition, for the adoption of trade secret protection.

In the EU, a so-called Trade Secrets & Innovation Coalition is pushing for this directive. This coalition is even registered in the EU Transparency register under this name. This coalition includes Alstom, DuPont de Nemours, General Electric, Intel, Michelin, Air Liquide, Nestlé and Safran, who work together with the pharmaceutical and the chemical industries.

In the US, two new bills are pending before Congress: the Trade Secrets Protection Act of 2014 (H.R. 5233) – and Senate Bill: Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2014 (S. 2267).

If passed, these texts would allow trade secret protection to be included in the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – something that will be incredibly difficult to repeal in the future through democratic processes.

The US has made no secret of its explicit wish for strong language on trade secret protection in this agreement. Given that TTIP is expected to set a new global standard, its potential inclusion of trade secret protection is particularly worrisome.

We urge the Council and the European Parliament to radically amend the directive. This includes limiting the definition of what constitutes a trade secret and strengthening safeguards and exceptions to ensure that data in the public interest cannot be protected as trade secrets.

The right to freely use and disseminate information should be the rule, and trade secret protection the exception.

 

 

This statement was originally published by Corporate Observatory Europe. Please check the original joint statement for signatories, contact details, etc. In this version, footnotes have been incorporated into the main text, and additional subheads have been inserted.

 

 




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Victory! Outspent 87-1, Maui voters back GMO moratorium Updated for 2026

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Hawaii voters in Maui County made history this week by backing a ballot initiative to prohibit the growth, testing or cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops in Maui until an environmental and public health study can show that they are safe.

Voters backed the measure by 23,082 to 22,005 – in the face of massive spending by agrochemical companies.

The opposition ‘Citizens Against the Maui County Farming Ban’ – almost exclusively backed by Monsanto and Dow Chemical to defeat the initiative – raised $7,970,686.12 million for its campaign.

Thar’s an amazing $362.22 per vote earned, or $174.43 per total vote cast – 87 times more than ban supporters – leading the Center for Public Integrity to dub it “the most expensive local initiative in the country”.

“Our victory today sends a strong message to the agrochemical industry in Hawai’i“, said Ashley Lukens, program director at Hawaii Center for Food Safety. “Community members will not sit idly by and watch these companies threaten the health and safety of our people and our planet.

“Voters saw past the misleading claims of pesticide companies like Monsanto and Dow Chemical and demanded accountability to the community.”

Monsanto uses Hawaii as ‘outdoor lab’ for GMOs and pesticides

Hawaii is used as an outdoor laboratory for companies like Monsanto to test genetically engineered crops and their related pesticides. In 2013 alone there were 1,124 field test sites; California only hosted 184 sites.

Most of these crops are engineered to resist herbicides and pesticides. Testing these crops means repeated spraying of dangerous chemicals near neighborhoods, schools, and waterways.

The initiative passed today suspends all GE operations in the county pending a safety impact review, requiring agrochemical companies to provide funding and data to the county who would complete a health and environmental impact assessment before allowing operations to continue. Violators can be fined $50,000 per offense.

Rather than growing food for local consumption, these operations are researching and developing corn and soy varieties that have been genetically engineered to resist greater applications of their signature pesticides, posing numerous potential health threats to the neighboring communities.

Opponents played on claimed detrimental effects on the economy. According to one TV ad, “This initiative truly has zero aloha. It’s not just GMO. It’s the mom-and-pop store. It’s the coffee shop down the road.

“I don’t know how people will pay their mortgages. I don’t know how people will pay their bills. I don’t know how people will get their medical or send their kids to school or provide clothing for them. This will affect our economy. This will affect our future. “

‘We have a right to know’

But a clear majority of voters saw through the ‘no’ campaign tactics, said Lukens. “The moratorium will impact only 1 percent of the county’s agricultural operations, but Monsanto and Dow Chemical spent millions trying to keep residents from understanding the impacts their activities have on the community.

“This is not a farming ban. This is a demand for assurance of safety in our daily lives. Maui is not the private laboratory of Monsanto. We will not sacrifice our health and safety to protect the profits of mainland corporations.

“We don’t know the long term effects of these experiments on our people or environment. Data from similar operations on Kauai reveals record-breaking use of chemicals with known impacts on the development of young children. We have a right to know if we are being hurt by these experimental operations.”

Monsanto: ‘legally flawed and cannot be enforced’

John Purcell, vice president of Monsanto Hawaii, said the company would challenge the ban in the courts. “To protect our employees and farms, and in support of thousands of local residents who opposed this initiative, Monsanto plans to file a lawsuit challenging the legality of this harmful ban.”

He added that the initiative is “legally flawed and cannot be enforced”, and “invalid and contrary to long established state and federal laws that support both the safety and lawful testing and planting of GMO plants” – raising the question of why Monsanto spent so much money opposing it.

Monsanto is “confident in the safety of our products and our practices that have been reviewed and approved by federal and state agencies”, Purcell insisted, while “the referendum will have significant negative consequences for the local economy, Hawaii agriculture and our business on the island.”

Similar legislation on Kauaʻi Island was ruled invalid by a federal judge earlier this year, blocking the county from regulating the use of pesticides and commercial GMO crops. However the federal judge’s decision is now under appeal.

 

 

Website: voteyesforhealth.org 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Coalition4Maui
Facebook: www.facebook.com/voteyesformaui

 




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To hit fossil fuel firms where it hurts, support divestment! Updated for 2026

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Glasgow recently became the first European university to join the rapidly-expanding fossil free divestment movement.

Following hot on the heels of the Australian National University, Glasgow promised to move £18m of investment over the next ten years.

The international, grass-roots, student-led fossil-free movement now has the support of religious, medical and charitable bodies across the world (181 and counting).

These organisations have divested because they can no longer endorse the activities of the fossil fuel sector.

The movement is inspired by the success of the anti-apartheid divestment campaign, where financial and moral pressure on companies doing business with South Africa contributed to the fall of the apartheid regime.

How can we leave this carbon in the ground?

The campaign is beginning to rattle fossil fuel companies. A fight-back has begun. Pro-coal Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has called divestment “stupid“. Academics, too, have criticised the campaigners as hypocritical.

Such criticisms are wrongheaded. Anyone who cares about climate change should support the divestment campaign.

Viewed at a global level, existing solutions aren’t working. The ability of market-based instruments to reduce carbon emissions is more a matter of faith than empirical evidence. Carbon reductions from renewables, while growing fast, are offset by increases elsewhere.

Greater efficiency stimulates growth and consumption, not parsimony. Existing measures are like ‘squeezing a balloon‘: reductions in one place lead to increases elsewhere.

The Fifth IPCC assessment warned that we have five times more fossil fuel reserves than we can safely extract if we are to stand a decent chance of staying under 2°C warming. This puts the question starkly: how can we leave this carbon in the ground?

Hit where it hurts

The divestment movement confronts the core logic – licence, extract, profit – of fossil fuel companies. One key tactic to make it harder for them to extract carbon is to erode their political legitimacy.

Fossil fuel companies use their economic clout to sow doubt about climate science. They lobby for generous subsidies and flout indigenous rights.

They commission toys and sponsor art at the Tate, the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company and other cultural institutions to normalise the presence of big oil in our everyday lives.

By divesting, organisations such as the World Council of Churches send a strong message: we find your activities immoral.

The moral case for divestment is based on the clear environmental damage and the undemocratic power of these corporate behemoths. By stigmatising fossil fuel companies, the divestment movement aims to reduce their political room for manoeuvre.

When mainstream figures such as the governor of the Bank of England says fossil fuel reserves can’t be burnt, or the Rockefellers start divesting from fossil fuels for financial reasons, people take notice.

2.8  trillion tonnes of ‘unburnable’ fossil fuel reserves

The financial case for divestment is based on the carbon bubble. The financial health of fossil fuel companies relies on 2,795 gigatonnes of ‘unburnable’ carbon – reserves that have to stay in the ground if we are to have a decent chance of staying under 2C warming.

This creates enormous financial risk, as a change in policy (or indeed in climate) could leave these reserves and their associated infrastructure stranded. Long-term financial sustainability is at odds with carbon investment.

So far, £30 billion has been divested – small beer compared to the £441 billion spent on exploration by the top 200 companies in 2012.

For deeper success, divestment will need to break out beyond churches and charities to affect wider market norms. If this happens, debt will likely become less accessible and capital-intensive projects at the margins less feasible. This can only be a good thing for the climate.

Eventually, campaigners hope fossil fuels will face a regulatory and legislative environment that forces the whole company – not just the green-tinged outliers – to move beyond petroleum, or to make way for those who will.

Too much hot air?

All this fossil fuel bashing will be too much for some. “We all use fossil fuels, you included!” says the critic when she leaps to the defence of big oil.

This is true, as far as it goes, but naïve. Energy use is not a matter of individual choice – whether we like it or not we are locked into world systems whose very life-blood is oil.

We can’t choose a decentralised grid, renewable supply, or decent cycling infrastructure, thanks to historic legacies and the continued power of big oil. We need divestment to work because fossil fuel companies distort politics and stand in the way of a sustainable future.

“We should engage fossil fuel companies, not demonise them”, runs another counter-argument.

Investor engagement can work, but only if clear goals and timelines are set. Research that helps companies extract more efficiently just gets carbon out of the ground faster; working with companies on renewables, carbon capture and storage, or low-carbon technology can work, but does nothing to transform the core business of big carbon.

And when the laws of coercive competition squeeze, big carbon will always retreat to its core business.

We are well past the point where the good delivered by fossil fuel companies outweighs the environmental, social, and economic negatives. We need any and all tactics to achieve a post-carbon world.

Divestment puts fossil fuel companies in the spotlight, names them responsible for climate change, and confronts their power. Divestment should be supported by everyone who cares about climate change.

 

 

Franklin Ginn is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




385639

Big Biotech’s African seed takeover Updated for 2026

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French seed giant Groupe Limagrain, the largest seed and plant breeding company in the European Union, has invested up to US$60 million for a 28% stake in SeedCo, one of Africa’s largest home-grown seed companies.

In another transaction, SeedCo has agreed to sell 49% of its shares in Africa’s only cottonseed company, Quton, to Mahyco of India – which is 26% owned by Monsanto.

Mahyco specialises in hybrid cotton varieties, and has a 50:50 joint venture with Monsanto to license its genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton throughout India.

By contrast Quton produces unpatented , non-GMO ‘open-pollinated varieties’ (OPVs) of cottonseed.

‘Deep concerns’

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is “deeply concerned” about the Seedco acquisition and released a statement denouncing the industrialisation of the continent’s farming sector:

“Attracting foreign investment from the world’s largest seed companies, most of who got to their current dominant positions by devouring national seed companies and their competitors through mergers and acquisitions, is an inevitable consequence of the fierce drive to commercialise agriculture in Africa.”

SeedCo, like so many other seed companies around the world, began life as a farmer-led and owned organisation to improve the availability of quality maize seed in 1940.

Today it describes itself as Africa’s largest seed company, operating in 15 countries across the continent and has significant market shares in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

SeedCo also has access to government and donor-funded input subsidy programmes in Zambia and Malawi and has set its sights on potentially lucrative markets in Nigeria and Ghana.

In July 2014, SeedCo and Limagrain began discussions with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) for a collaborative research project on maize lethal necrosis in Africa.

“From the outside this appears to be another case of scarce African agricultural budgets being used to subsidise the multinational seed industry”, commented AFSA.

Big biotech taking key stakes in African seed market

These acquisitions follow close on the heels of Swiss biotech giant Syngenta’s take-over in 2013 of Zambian seed company MRI Seed, whose maize germplasm collection was said at the time to be amongst Africa’s most comprehensive and diverse.

Taken together, this means that three of the world’s largest biotechnology companies, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, all now have a significant foothold on the continent in markets for two of the three major global GM crop varieties: maize and cotton.

According to AFSA, the creation of a corporate seed industry in Africa is “a vital component of the Green Revolution push, which equates agrarian transformation in Africa with the adoption of commercial certified seed and other expensive inputs such as fertilizer.”

AFSA names the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) as a key player in the process. It says AGRA “claims to collaborate with 80 small and medium sized seed companies across Africa and has also organised public-private-partnerships between seed companies and public research institutions.”

But it adds: “How many of these newly established entities will remain independent of global seed industry players remains to be seen.”

South Africa – corporate seed dominance is near complete

Multinational capture of local seed companies is a process that has long been under way in South Africa, a country much further down the Green Revolution path than any other in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1999 and 2000 Monsanto purchased two of the country’s largest seed companies, Carnia and Sensako, and the Missouri based company now enjoys a dominant position in South Africa’s commercial seed market.

In 2012 the largest domestic seed company, Pannar Seed, was taken-over by US firm Pioneer Hi-Bred, itself a subsidiary of the DuPont chemical company. The purchase not only gave Pioneer access to Pannar’s vast maize germplasm collection and agro-dealer network in South Africa, but also the company’s long established presence in 23 other countries across the continent.

Even the smaller South African companies are now seen as fair game, with Link Seed being taken over in 2013 – also by Limagrain.

AFSA argues that solutions to Africa’s agricultural challenges can be found in the collaboration between its small-scale farmers and public researchers, with the former taking the lead in setting the research agendas and objectives:

“A key part of public investments in R&D and extension should include identifying, prioritising and supporting work around participatory plant breeding, participatory variety selection, farmer-managed seed certification and quality assurance systems, identifying and supporting the development of locally important crops on the basis of decentralised participatory R&D, and farmer to farmer exchanges.

“The encroachment of the international seed industry, which focuses almost exclusively on genetically uniform varieties, subject to UPOV 1991 style intellectual property protection, takes us further away from this agricultural vision and closer to neo-colonialism of Africa’s food systems.”

 

 

Source: Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.

 




385359

Big Biotech’s African seed takeover Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




French seed giant Groupe Limagrain, the largest seed and plant breeding company in the European Union, has invested up to US$60 million for a 28% stake in SeedCo, one of Africa’s largest home-grown seed companies.

In another transaction, SeedCo has agreed to sell 49% of its shares in Africa’s only cottonseed company, Quton, to Mahyco of India – which is 26% owned by Monsanto.

Mahyco specialises in hybrid cotton varieties, and has a 50:50 joint venture with Monsanto to license its genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton throughout India.

By contrast Quton produces unpatented , non-GMO ‘open-pollinated varieties’ (OPVs) of cottonseed.

‘Deep concerns’

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is “deeply concerned” about the Seedco acquisition and released a statement denouncing the industrialisation of the continent’s farming sector:

“Attracting foreign investment from the world’s largest seed companies, most of who got to their current dominant positions by devouring national seed companies and their competitors through mergers and acquisitions, is an inevitable consequence of the fierce drive to commercialise agriculture in Africa.”

SeedCo, like so many other seed companies around the world, began life as a farmer-led and owned organisation to improve the availability of quality maize seed in 1940.

Today it describes itself as Africa’s largest seed company, operating in 15 countries across the continent and has significant market shares in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

SeedCo also has access to government and donor-funded input subsidy programmes in Zambia and Malawi and has set its sights on potentially lucrative markets in Nigeria and Ghana.

In July 2014, SeedCo and Limagrain began discussions with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) for a collaborative research project on maize lethal necrosis in Africa.

“From the outside this appears to be another case of scarce African agricultural budgets being used to subsidise the multinational seed industry”, commented AFSA.

Big biotech taking key stakes in African seed market

These acquisitions follow close on the heels of Swiss biotech giant Syngenta’s take-over in 2013 of Zambian seed company MRI Seed, whose maize germplasm collection was said at the time to be amongst Africa’s most comprehensive and diverse.

Taken together, this means that three of the world’s largest biotechnology companies, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, all now have a significant foothold on the continent in markets for two of the three major global GM crop varieties: maize and cotton.

According to AFSA, the creation of a corporate seed industry in Africa is “a vital component of the Green Revolution push, which equates agrarian transformation in Africa with the adoption of commercial certified seed and other expensive inputs such as fertilizer.”

AFSA names the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) as a key player in the process. It says AGRA “claims to collaborate with 80 small and medium sized seed companies across Africa and has also organised public-private-partnerships between seed companies and public research institutions.”

But it adds: “How many of these newly established entities will remain independent of global seed industry players remains to be seen.”

South Africa – corporate seed dominance is near complete

Multinational capture of local seed companies is a process that has long been under way in South Africa, a country much further down the Green Revolution path than any other in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1999 and 2000 Monsanto purchased two of the country’s largest seed companies, Carnia and Sensako, and the Missouri based company now enjoys a dominant position in South Africa’s commercial seed market.

In 2012 the largest domestic seed company, Pannar Seed, was taken-over by US firm Pioneer Hi-Bred, itself a subsidiary of the DuPont chemical company. The purchase not only gave Pioneer access to Pannar’s vast maize germplasm collection and agro-dealer network in South Africa, but also the company’s long established presence in 23 other countries across the continent.

Even the smaller South African companies are now seen as fair game, with Link Seed being taken over in 2013 – also by Limagrain.

AFSA argues that solutions to Africa’s agricultural challenges can be found in the collaboration between its small-scale farmers and public researchers, with the former taking the lead in setting the research agendas and objectives:

“A key part of public investments in R&D and extension should include identifying, prioritising and supporting work around participatory plant breeding, participatory variety selection, farmer-managed seed certification and quality assurance systems, identifying and supporting the development of locally important crops on the basis of decentralised participatory R&D, and farmer to farmer exchanges.

“The encroachment of the international seed industry, which focuses almost exclusively on genetically uniform varieties, subject to UPOV 1991 style intellectual property protection, takes us further away from this agricultural vision and closer to neo-colonialism of Africa’s food systems.”

 

 

Source: Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.

 




385359

Big Biotech’s African seed takeover Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




French seed giant Groupe Limagrain, the largest seed and plant breeding company in the European Union, has invested up to US$60 million for a 28% stake in SeedCo, one of Africa’s largest home-grown seed companies.

In another transaction, SeedCo has agreed to sell 49% of its shares in Africa’s only cottonseed company, Quton, to Mahyco of India – which is 26% owned by Monsanto.

Mahyco specialises in hybrid cotton varieties, and has a 50:50 joint venture with Monsanto to license its genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton throughout India.

By contrast Quton produces unpatented , non-GMO ‘open-pollinated varieties’ (OPVs) of cottonseed.

‘Deep concerns’

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is “deeply concerned” about the Seedco acquisition and released a statement denouncing the industrialisation of the continent’s farming sector:

“Attracting foreign investment from the world’s largest seed companies, most of who got to their current dominant positions by devouring national seed companies and their competitors through mergers and acquisitions, is an inevitable consequence of the fierce drive to commercialise agriculture in Africa.”

SeedCo, like so many other seed companies around the world, began life as a farmer-led and owned organisation to improve the availability of quality maize seed in 1940.

Today it describes itself as Africa’s largest seed company, operating in 15 countries across the continent and has significant market shares in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

SeedCo also has access to government and donor-funded input subsidy programmes in Zambia and Malawi and has set its sights on potentially lucrative markets in Nigeria and Ghana.

In July 2014, SeedCo and Limagrain began discussions with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) for a collaborative research project on maize lethal necrosis in Africa.

“From the outside this appears to be another case of scarce African agricultural budgets being used to subsidise the multinational seed industry”, commented AFSA.

Big biotech taking key stakes in African seed market

These acquisitions follow close on the heels of Swiss biotech giant Syngenta’s take-over in 2013 of Zambian seed company MRI Seed, whose maize germplasm collection was said at the time to be amongst Africa’s most comprehensive and diverse.

Taken together, this means that three of the world’s largest biotechnology companies, Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta, all now have a significant foothold on the continent in markets for two of the three major global GM crop varieties: maize and cotton.

According to AFSA, the creation of a corporate seed industry in Africa is “a vital component of the Green Revolution push, which equates agrarian transformation in Africa with the adoption of commercial certified seed and other expensive inputs such as fertilizer.”

AFSA names the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) as a key player in the process. It says AGRA “claims to collaborate with 80 small and medium sized seed companies across Africa and has also organised public-private-partnerships between seed companies and public research institutions.”

But it adds: “How many of these newly established entities will remain independent of global seed industry players remains to be seen.”

South Africa – corporate seed dominance is near complete

Multinational capture of local seed companies is a process that has long been under way in South Africa, a country much further down the Green Revolution path than any other in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1999 and 2000 Monsanto purchased two of the country’s largest seed companies, Carnia and Sensako, and the Missouri based company now enjoys a dominant position in South Africa’s commercial seed market.

In 2012 the largest domestic seed company, Pannar Seed, was taken-over by US firm Pioneer Hi-Bred, itself a subsidiary of the DuPont chemical company. The purchase not only gave Pioneer access to Pannar’s vast maize germplasm collection and agro-dealer network in South Africa, but also the company’s long established presence in 23 other countries across the continent.

Even the smaller South African companies are now seen as fair game, with Link Seed being taken over in 2013 – also by Limagrain.

AFSA argues that solutions to Africa’s agricultural challenges can be found in the collaboration between its small-scale farmers and public researchers, with the former taking the lead in setting the research agendas and objectives:

“A key part of public investments in R&D and extension should include identifying, prioritising and supporting work around participatory plant breeding, participatory variety selection, farmer-managed seed certification and quality assurance systems, identifying and supporting the development of locally important crops on the basis of decentralised participatory R&D, and farmer to farmer exchanges.

“The encroachment of the international seed industry, which focuses almost exclusively on genetically uniform varieties, subject to UPOV 1991 style intellectual property protection, takes us further away from this agricultural vision and closer to neo-colonialism of Africa’s food systems.”

 

 

Source: Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.

 




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