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The Friday March 20 edition of the Daily Graphic carried an article from Action Aid (in collaboration with Food SPAN) with the above title. According to the article, the information provided was from a study done as a prelude to a project to be undertaken by ActionAid and FoodSPAN. I was however, very concerned at some of the extremely misleading information in the article. If indeed a two year project is being planned, it is essential that baseline information gathered be a correct statement of facts on the ground. While is it acknowledged that there is currently a world wide debate on the pros and cons of biofuel production, misinformation will not serve the interests of anyone.
In December 2008, I undertook a detailed study of 4 communities around the Kpachaa BioFuel Africa plantation on the Yendi road. In its article, Action Aid insinuates that biofuel production has led to the displacement of food crop farmers. This is untrue as far as the jimle/Kpachaa site is concerned. Prior to the establishment of the biofuel Jatropha plantation in the area. only about 10% of the land was under cultivation. Families did not have to relocate their homes and according to farmers whose fields were taken up by the plantation, they had been reassigned other farm lands. Later information reaching my office sometime in 2009 indicates that at a workshop held in Jimle under the auspices of Action Aid, an attempt was made to persuade people from the surrounding villages that the plantation was against their interest! According to the community members they fiercely disputed this fact. I am therefore surprised that the Action Aid summary report provided does not take the view of the people it claims to be defending as important.
The article gives the impression that foreign companies have come in to do what they want, acquiring land through unacceptable practice and destroying the environment. However, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) was undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before work was allowed to commence at the BioFuel plantation. Is Action Aid aware of this document? Was it one of the documents reviewed in the desk study? Again, EPA trained an individual whose sole job was to go through the project area to mark all economic trees so that these would not be destroyed during land preparation for the plantation. The actual number of economic trees left standing on the plantation is documented. Is Action Aid aware of this?
One of the most interesting claims of the article is the fear expressed that the food security of the people has been endangered. The Jimle/Kpachaa area normally has a 3-5month ‘hunger gap’ in any given year. In my study I interviewed households to find out what effect the plantation had had on their food security. According to the community members because several households had at least one (and in some cases several) persons employed by the plantation, they had been able to purchase food such that they did not experience the usual hunger gap in the course of year 2008.
It is not only food production that causes a people to be food secure. Their ability to purchase food, accessibility to markets, mode of utilization and so forth are all elements of food security. Why is the impression being created that some people do not have the right to purchase their food – they must only grow it? Interestingly, the community members shared that because they had a source of income, they were able to afford labour and in some cases tractor services so that they farms gave them better produce last year. So they gained from an income and they also gained from their farms.
Where is the accusation that there is slave labour coming from? This is not Brazil! We have biofuel plantations in Ghana. Are the people working on them under paid or unpaid? My experience is that the workers on the Jimle/Kpachaa plantation were well paid. Not only did they receive salaries, they also had social security payments and taxes paid on their behalf.
It might also be of interest to note that reverse migration took place as a result of the plantation. The absence of paid employment, the chromic poverty and lack of viable options leads to an annual spate of migration of young people from the project area to the south in search of jobs. Many become head porters – popularly known as ‘kayayoo’. As a result of the Kpachaa plantation, I met young ladies who had migrated to the south to work as ‘kayayei’, who had returned home because they had heard from family members that there was now a source of employment close to home. I met them. I spoke to them. The plight of the ’kayayei’ has been well documented in articles and by the press. Most projects to ‘solve’ this problem are sited in the south, thereby exacerbating the problem because once again they must migrate to take advantage of these projects. The presence of a viable source of jobs in the Kpachaa area reversed this trend.
It appears to me that the Action Aid researchers, for some reason avoided speaking directly to the owners of the plantation. Rather than visit a cross section of communities to hear directly from community members, a couple of representatives were drawn aside and as one community member put it ‘to force us to agree to what we disagreed with’. None of the implementers were invited to any of the workshops held to ‘validate’ the findings. Also, there was little objectivity displayed and information was gathered to fit a prior hypothesis.
There are some in the development world who believe that small scale production is the only thing that is necessary in northern Ghana. Ghana has been fed for decades by small scale producers, often to the detriment of themselves and their families. While assistance for small scale producers is to be encouraged and should continue, we must guard against the kind of myopia that causes us to fight against anything new or different from what we are used to. Should our people never have the opportunity, more common in the south, of paid employment? Should the young women and men in the north have to continue to leave for the south to work as head porters because we set out to kill private investment that could guarantee them jobs? Can we not read the message they are sending? Who will employ them? What opportunities do they have up here? Development work is dependent on engaging the interest of the foreign donors. Let us also not be guilty of putting their interests before that of our own people.
Dr. Joy Bruce
Rural Consult Ltd.
Tamale
Phone: 0274 223344 inside Ghana and +233 274 223344 for callers outside Ghana.
Email: dr.joybruce@gmail.com
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