Ghana protests Monsanto Law
If you are a farmer, you save your seeds, even more so if you are a subsistence farmer. It is part of what you do, it is what farmers have done for generations. Save the seeds from the harvest, selecting out the best seeds from the best crops, sowing the seeds, looking after the crop, harvesting the crop, saving the seeds, and so the cycle repeats itself season after season.
By this process of selection, farmers select what is best suited to their land, their environment, their climate.
It results in many thousands of varieties, not a handful of varieties that make agriculture prone to disasters.
With the rapid change occurring under climate change, we need this wide genetic variety.
Sometimes disaster strikes, the crop fails. In parts of the world when this happens, farmers bring in seeds from another farm, another village, they still plant their own saved seed, but they will also plant the new seed.
In Ghana, this upsets the profits of Monsatan aka evil Monsanto. How can they sell seeds if farmers insist on sowing their own seeds? How can they sell their nasty chemicals, if farmers have crops that are performing well, when generations of farmers have selected seeds that suit their farm, their locality.
Monsanto has the answer. Outlaw the saving of seeds, then farmers have no choice than to buy from Monsatan, Monsanto Law as it is known. Under the Monsanto Law, farmers that use seed varieties claimed under new intellectual property rights by individuals and companies anywhere in the world risk hefty fines or even imprisonment.
Corrupt politicians in Ghana, like corrupt politicians everywhere, are for sale to the highest bidder. they will happily enslave their own country, so long as their own pockets get lined.
What is happening in Ghana, is part of a trend across Africa, industrialisation of agriculture, food produced not for local mouths to be shipped to Western markets.
Please sign the petition calling for the scrapping of Monsanto Law.
The UK as a member of G8, is one of those countries under the guise of Third World aid, is pushing Monsanto Law via New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, which in essence is a global corporate land grab for Africa, colonisation Mk II.
Please ask your Member of Parliament to sign an Early Day Motion (EDM 466) on Food Sovereignty.
In Guatemala, large-scale protests forced its government to cancel a similar law restricting the use of indigenous seed. We can do the same in Ghana.
Monsanto is the epitome of evil.
- Food sovereignty Ghana
- Ghana’s battle for seed sovereignty
- Battling the ‘Monsanto law’ in Ghana
- The fight for seed sovereignty in Ghana
- Why my grandfather would hate the Monsanto law
- Ghana’s farmers battle ‘Monsanto law’ to retain seed freedom
UK ‘aid’ is financing a corporate scramble for Africa
Tags: EDM 466, Monsanto, Monsanto claims ownership of seeds in Ghana, Monsanto Law, Monsatan, seeds
Keithpp's Blog 
November 27, 2014 at 3:47 pm |
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