Burkina Faso :

Countryside dwellers grumble

This year, Burkinabé farmers gathered in Gaoua in the south west of the country. For the ninth consecutive year, they listed their grievances in the presence of the Head of State and the whole of his government. A year after Kaya, what has radically changed in the agricultural landscape of Burkina Faso? 

Hopes were raised by SOPROFA, (a society for advancing agricultural benefits), created to facilitate the commercialisation of national production, but are being dashed in discouraging discordance, putting off more than one producer. The drought threat may have been contained, but it is still the case that Burkinabé farmers seem to be forever victims of disaster. They are barely able to scrape an existence from their craft. The disengagement of the State and the hasty lead-in to liberalism are in the process of killing off any agricultural potential in the country. Apart from the cotton sector, highly restricted due to considerable foreign credit earnings to the State, other sectors are abandoned to wildcat competition and harmful speculation. 

As a result, farmers and their organisations, driven back to their fields, are finally coming out of their shells and turning up the heat.

A petition has just been sent to the offices of UEMOA to plead for the protection of rice from common land. It is not quite the Luddite revolution, but surely this ferment is a disturbing sign from stay-of-execution producers? There are three demands:

Firstly, regulation of rice imports and its production methods in terms of quality control.  Secondly, locally-produced rice should be taken into account for national stock reserves, and thirdly, a percentage should be taken into account in each rice import for the purchase of local rice. 

In fact, African producers are demanding a genuine agricultural policy, which takes them into account as social and economic agents.  In this sense, could UEMOA not deal with the review of the increase in the common external tariff (TEC) of 10% to 20% as the farmers’ organisations required? Everything is a matter of political will and of knowing for whom are agricultural and trade policies put in place. 

Is farmers’ common sense stealing a march on the political engineering of our political leaders who sign often-disastrous agreements in terms of outcomes for rural populations and their own economies? 

Globalisation as applied to Africa is killing off agriculture. Raising cattle will be next after rice to pay the price of the surrounding free market interchange. Poultry and imported meat are already on our borders. In the name of what WTO principle should the local market be given over to imported goods in basic commodities at the risk of overbalancing the economy? However, the proponents of liberalism from the North are the first to protect their farmers by injections of subsidies. If this tendency continues, they will push this cynicism to the point of seeking to guarantee our food supplies by flooding our markets with basic commodities from their old surpluses and at a totally uncompetitive price. That is the thinly-veiled aim of Western and Asiatic countries. It is a matter of reducing Africa to a market of consumers and a mere supplier of raw materials for the industries of the North. 

Can we still speak for guaranteed food supplies when the African farmer is asking if it is worth producing? There is a need to ask what was the point in the investing millions for decades into the agricultural sector. There is a huge risk in losing control of food production that has been the hallmark and pride of certain regions for the sake of food trade colonialism. To confront this, energetic and civic action has to be taken. Consumption of local products as required by the Faso Farmers’ Confederation is a first step that must not fail to be accompanied by strategies in commercialisation and marketing. 

It is the most-needed missing link in order to sustain agriculture. It is not reserved to producers. They know how to produce quality, and that is what they learned. The rest is the business of politics, commerce and consumers. There lies the bane of our agriculture. 

"Le Pays"