Kenya: Farmers fight against GMOs

Kenyan Urban Farmer, Nov 2024 Photo:@NPI_Kenya

November 14, 2024 Hour: 12:10 pm

In communities across Kenya, peasant organizations are mobilizing to defend the right to healthy food and rejected GM crops that advance the country’s food security.

In Karura, a region on the northern outskirts of Nairobi, community leaders meet with local peasant communities to explain the implications of GMOs to small farmers, seeds introduced into the country following a government authorization to seed patenting by food multinationals.

In a room with sheet and canvas walls, with the floor of dirt; twenty Kenyans discuss strategies to resist a threat they perceive as imminent. For many, the entry of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) means the loss of traditional seed, the cultivation methods learned from their grandparents and the threat of an agriculture dependent on big corporations and harmful chemicals.

One of the keys to GMOs is resistance to agrochemicals that other herbs do not have, so spraying products like glyphosate on crops kills all competition and allows intensive production of the plantation of interest.

“Well water is here, the bath is there, everything shares the same soil,” says Denis Wangila, one of the representatives who debate the sustainability of the places where they live.

In this sense, the villagers are moving forward with the organization of committees at different locations to gain organizational advantage against the advance of the multinationals.

One of the most popular grassroots organisations in the area is the Kenyan Peasant League (KPL), which has managed to win temporary victories in court by maintaining a ban on GMOs until a final verdict is reached. However, the threat persists and farmers continue to mobilize.

Recently, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision to temporarily ban GMOs on the grounds that the government did not guarantee adequate public participation, which the KPL considers fundamental. ” The Constitution backs us, we have a right to be heard,” adds Susan Otawi of the Kenyan Peasant League Women’s Collective.

In parallel, the campaign to collect signatures against the introduction of GMOs is advancing strongly. In the community of City Park, another point of resistance in Nairobi, activists and farmers gather to collect signatures and continue challenging the government decision. ” We have not been given any guarantees of safety on GMOs, and the government made this decision without consulting us. That is unacceptable,” says one of the spokesmen.

The KPL maintains an active strategy based on legal and environmental principles. The organization supports its arguments in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other Workers in Rural Areas, and in Article 10 of the Kenyan Constitution, which establishes the right to public consultation.

This legal framework has been the basis for their struggle against the decisions of a government that, according to its leaders, is more aligned with the interests of multinationals than with the needs of its own citizens.

For many of these farmers, the fight against GMOs is a battle for food sovereignty and the right to decide what kind of food and farming methods they prefer for their land. With a history of agroecological practices and indigenous seed cultivation, the fear of farmers is that the income of GMOs will destroy the delicate ecological balance and make communities dependent on patented chemicals and seeds, that only enrich the great corporations of the global North.

“Hunger is not solved with GMOs, but with policies that eliminate poverty,” insist the KPL, reiterating that the seeds of the multinationals will not improve their crops in the soils of Kenya, contrary to what the government tries to make believe.