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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
“Public debate is essential”
Colonising Africa’s agriculture
GM cotton in a dead end street
“The farmers have the choice”
Not yet mature – it is too early to bet on GM crops
02/2006
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Dead end street
Nearly all cotton grown in South Africa today is genetically modified. Even most small farmers have switched to GM – voluntarily and with conviction. Their choice has caused GM critics headaches, whereas the seed industry is jubilant. However, the farmers hardly make any profit out of cotton because of falling world market prices. In this context, GM technology makes no difference.
[ By Tillmann Elliesen ]
“I am sick of cotton, you can bet on that. My father started as a cotton farmer in the sixties and he was able to make very good money. But today, prices are so low that it’s hardly worth the effort.” In South Africa in early September, the last cotton harvest has been brought in. The next planting season will start in a few weeks’ time. But farmers are grumbling: “The price was four Rand a kilo last year; this year, we got only half that price,” Jeremiah Mabika complains. He is one of the more affluent farmers in the area, with 60 hectares of land.
Jeremiah Mabika, a man in his mid-forties, lives with his wife and eight children in Mboza, a small community on the Makhathini Flats in KwaZulu Natal in the east of the country. The Makhathini Flats form a 60 by 120 kilometre plain at the foot of the Lebombo Mountains on the border to Swaziland. Around 5,000 smallholders live and work here – many of them make their living mainly from cotton. They have all been suffering from falling world market prices for years. Cotton growers in Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali share that plight. But one aspect sets the South African growers apart. They are the first farmers in Africa to plant genetically modified seed designed to resist pests.
In the past few years, nearly all Makhathini farmers have switched to the GM cotton variety of US seed giant Monsanto, thus turning the Makhathini Flats in to one of the most contested ideological battlegrounds in the row over genetic engineering in agriculture. The GM lobby feels confirmed in its claim that small farmers can profit from genetically manipulated plants. In the eyes of environmentalist and human rights groups, however, the Makhathini farmers have become the victims of the GM industry’s unscrupulous sales strategies.
This hot debate, however, hardly tackles the reality of farm life in KwaZulu Natal. GM cotton does not contribute much to solving the problems Jeremiah Mabika and farmers like him are struggling with on the Makhathini Flats; nor has it, so far, done them any harm.
South Africa is the continent’s first and only country so far to have permitted commercial cultivation of GM plants. Aside from cotton, farmers from Capetown to Durban and Johannesburg have been planting pest-resistant and herbicide-tolerant varieties of GM maize and soya since the late 1990s. This market, however, does not mean big business for seed companies like Monsanto or Syngenta. Only half a million hectares are under GM crops in South Africa – compared with nearly 50 million hectares in the United States and more than 17 million in Argentina.
Setting the example
Nonetheless, the South African market is very important in symbolical terms. In Africa, the industry would like to show that green genetic engineering can contribute to the fight against poverty and starvation. Doing so would boost its legitimacy enormously. “The future of green genetic engineering will be decided in Africa,” says Rudolf Buntzel, an agricultural expert with the Protestant Church Development Service (EED) in Germany. Accordingly, Monsanto is delighted to see its GM cotton now grown on 90% of the farmland on the Makhathini Flats. “We want to expand from South Africa to other African countries. And of course we advertise the fact that small farmers like our product, too,” says Andrew Bennett, Monsanto’s marketing manager in Johannesburg (see page 66).
“Bollgard” cotton contains a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which produces a protein toxic to insect pests. The advantages for farmers are that they save on insecticide, lose less of their crop to pests, and can count on higher yields. Five years after Bollgard’s introduction in 1998, British and South African scientists found that Makhathini Flats farmers profited significantly from using the GM cotton. In a good year, they might earn as much as 30 percent more than with conventional varieties. If Bollgard cotton were planted across the whole of Africa, the scientists crowed, the world’s poorest farmers could increase their aggregate income by up to 600 million dollars.
For a long time, critics of genetic engineering had a hard time disputing these figures. It was not until April 2005 that a study by the South African environmental organisation Biowatch claimed to show that the Makhathini Flats success story never was true. The GM seed, the document stated, was more or less forced on the farmers. After initial successes, harvests sharply declined due to unfavourable weather conditions, according to Biowatch, and farmers who had bought the expensive seed were left saddled with dramatically increased debts.
However, many farmers tell a different story. Even cotton growers rounded up by Biowatch to meet foreign journalists in September said they used the GM seed. And they all seemed happy with it. “The biggest advantage is that I need much less pesticide than with conventional varieties,” Jeremiah Mabika said. The farmers denied that anyone was forced to buy the seed and insisted that they had a choice of five different varieties, two genetically modified and three conventional ones. The GM seed cost nearly twice as much the others. “But Bt cotton produces a much bigger harvest: up to eleven bales a hectare. With the other varieties, you get only three to four bales,” was the comment of Petrus Mkanini, who has five hectares of land.
According to Jeremiah Mabika, the introduction of GM cotton has brought no disadvantages for farmers, in spite of the fact that many Makhathini smallholders are in debt. “That has nothing to do with Bt cotton. Those debts go back a lot further,” his brother Joshua Mabika added.
Rock bottom price
That is one side of the story. The other is that GM cotton is not helping farmers out of debt either – contrary to what the scientists’ optimistic forecasts and the industry’s promises might suggest. Cotton farmers in South Africa – whether they have used GM or conventional seed – have hardly made profit in the past few years because the world market price dropped by nearly 50% since the mid-1990s. The main reason for this trend is the subsidies the United States pays to its farmers, enabling them to sell their cotton at dumping prices internationally. Experts agree that the situation will not even change much once the US abolishes all direct export subsidies at the end of this year, as promised at the WTO summit in Hong Kong in December. After all, export subsidies only make up a small share of US cotton support.
In South Africa, falling prices have reduced cotton-growing by 80% over the past ten years. In 1995, the country had 100,000 hectares under cotton. Six years later the figure was less than 57,000; and by 2004/2005, it had gone down to only 20,000 hectares. Commercial cotton growers with large areas under irrigation have switched to other crops such as maize, soya, wheat or sunflowers. Many farmers on the Makhathini Flats would also like to do so but they lack the necessary water. Jeremiah Mabika, his brother Joshua and Petrus Mkanini are all dry-land farmers, they depend on rain. And KwaZulu Natal has had far too little of that in recent years. Only a robust plant like cotton will grow on the bone-dry soil of the Makhathini Flats.
What is more, cotton is the only crop farmers on the Flats can be sure of selling. “With beans and maize I never know if I will find buyers,” is Joshua Mabika’s assessment. Sugar cane performs poorly in dry soil and would need to be hauled more than 50 kilometres to the nearest sugar mill – too far for a small farmer. But for cotton, there is a guaranteed customer on the doorstep: Makhathini Cotton Limited. Funded by South African and Danish investors, the company buys the farmers’ cotton, removes the seeds and packs the cleaned fibres for shipment to a spinning mill.
Maria Kumete has also been selling to the factory for a year. In spite of the low price, she put a hectare under cotton in the 2004/2005 season. “What else can I do? I know the risk, but what I get for the cotton is better than nothing,” the young mother says. “So far, I have been living on my grandparents’ welfare.”
Dependence on cotton has a history. In the early 1970s, the South African government built a dam in the south of the Makhathini Flats to harness the Pongola River and direct its waters into an irrigation scheme. Previously, farmers had lived mainly from subsistence farming and stock breeding, but also from fishing. The dam and irrigation system put an end to all that, disrupting the natural cycle of dry and flood seasons.
Originally, the irrigated land was supposed to go to white sugar cane farmers. But by the time the project was complete, they were no longer interested. The government changed its plans and settled black farmers in the area instead, they were to grow cotton and rice on a commercial scale. The official objective was to create an economically less dependent “black homeland” in Zululand. With the help of two South African companies, Clark Cotton and Tongaat Cotton, the government promoted cotton throughout the 1980s.
In the early nineties, Clark and Tongaat set up a cotton gin on the Flats – Vunisa Cotton. The farmers received loans, seed and pesticides. In return, Vunisa got to process the Flats’ entire cotton harvest. Gradually, farmers were lured by loans and drawn into cotton production even from outside the irrigation scheme. Financially, the venture was a disaster. Farmers built up debts and the government pumped more and more money into the area. Some farmers defaulted on payments because crop yields were too low to cover their commitments; others simply refused to pay.
GMOs offer no solution
The GM seed introduced on the Makhathini Flats by Monsanto-licensed seed producer Delta & Pine Land in 1998 has done nothing to change that situation. GM technology has neither alleviated nor aggravated the debt problem. The farmers on the Makhathini Flats suffer from the monoculture imposed by the Apartheid regime in the 1970s, as well as from the low price of cotton on the world market. Genetic engineering offers no way out of this dead end street.
Harald Witt even fears the opposite. “GM cotton makes commercial irrigation farming more lucrative, so it intensifies the one-sided fixation on cotton on the Makhathini Flats,” says the historian at Durban University, who has studied the Flats economy for years. Even Monsanto’s manager Andrew Bennett is ready to concede: “There is some truth to the argument that the success of our cotton and the debate about it casts possible alternatives into the shade.”
The government has repeatedly launched initiatives to promote the cultivation of other crops, but shied away from the investment needed, for example to expand irrigation facilities. “The state actually does not want to deal with the issue any more and is waiting for private investors,” Harald Witt says. Last year, for the first time in quite a while, the Makhathini Flats received another injection of cash: more than 17 million Rand from the KwaZulu Natal provincial government. More than a third of the sum, however, was earmarked for the promotion of cotton-growing.
That suits Makhathini Cotton’s Danish and South African investors nicely. The company is writing the latest chapter in the history of cotton-growing on the Flats. Four years ago, it put its ginning plant into operation and broke the monopoly of the area’s first cotton processor, Vunisa Cotton. Within a year, Vunisa’s production chain on the Flats collapsed – because Makhathini Cotton offered farmers higher prices and bought large parts of the 2002 harvest. Vunisa Cotton made substantial losses and had to withdraw from the Makhathini Flats. Moreover, the government also stopped granting loans to the farmers.
Makhathini Cotton now has the monopoly in the region. But unlike Vunisa it does not supply farmers with seed and credit. Rather, it offers to lease their land and pay them wages for working in the fields. The company currently grows cotton on around 1,000 hectares of irrigated government land, plus several hundred hectares, which belong to farmers who have accepted the offer. Makhathini Cotton has ambitious plans to expand irrigated cotton-growing on the Flats. In this context, it is also betting on good results from GM seed. “They can hardly wait for the government to approve our new variety, which is both insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant,” says Shadrack Mabuza, a Monsanto employee.
Makhathini Cotton sees its strategy as a kind of developmental project: taking over the land for a limited period, investing in irrigation and other facilities, earning good money from cotton for a few years and then returning the land to the farmers. As Marnus Gouse, an agricultural economist at Pretoria University, puts it: “They want to develop the area and that is a great initiative.”
But many farmers are sceptical. Moses Kumete, for one, would prefer to farm his 26 hectares himself. He fears that Makhathini Cotton’s intensive cotton-growing would exhaust the soil. “In the same way, I would not stand by and watch someone fatten my cow, slaughter and eat it – and then throw the leftovers to me.” The farmers on the Makhathini Flats are looking to an uncertain future – whether they embrace GM cotton or not.
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