Thomas Sankara, revolutionary from Burkina Faso, campaigning against the desertification of the Sahel. The 1980s were a time of great challenges on the African continent, especially for people living in the Sahel region, as they saw an accelerated desertification process driving people out of their villages in search of water and food. Burkina Faso, when it did not yet have that name, was facing this reality at the same time as it was trying to face a sequence of coup and corrupt governments at the service of the empires. It is in this scenario that we meet Thomas Sankara, a young communist captain who struggled, at the same time, against his people’s traditions of self-violence and against the imperialism that tormented them. With one eye on politics and the other politicizing the environmental crisis, the young captain watched the desertification of the Sahel region advance by 7km annually.
At the same time, but on the other side of the Atlantic, the young Bill Gates began a revolutionary trajectory in the world of information amidst corruption and innovation, creating Microsoft and betting on its operating system for microcomputers. In the year that Gates launched his Windows 2.0, Sankara was assassinated in a coup that put an end to that prosperous and rebellious humanist legacy. We know how Gates became one of the richest men in the world and today he brags about climate warming while investing more than 6 billion dollars in Africa in the last 17 years. What we know little about is how his investment seeks to impose the capitalist mode of production on African lands and should accelerate the process of desertification that Burkinabe people were fighting to stop.
“The fight against desertification is a fight against imperialism. Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannahs.” – Thomas Sankara
In 15 months, the popular government of Sankara built 7,000 popular nurseries and each village had to plant at least 100 trees, seeking to reach 10 million trees planted. That project aimed to stop the desertification that was advancing, making families abandon their villages and even their country in search of opportunities in other places. The revolutionary government had an integral look at the environmental problem. I saw the problem from imperialism in humanitarian aid that donated food, but did not donate better tools for food production in the region, to perfecting stoves to use less firewood and thus reduce illegal felling.
“Where is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat. Imported rice and maize; that is imperialism. To avoid that, let’s try to eat what we control.” – Thomas Sankara
A planter in the desert
It was in the context of Sankara’s revolutionary government that, in northern Burkina Faso, a young Muslim heard the call against desertification and abandoned his small business to climb forests. By criticizing the traditional planting method and organic innovations, Yacouba Sawadogo managed to stop desertification in his community and generate more food for his people. Yacouba was recognized worldwide for his feat and remembers the context in which he began his fight against the desert:
“Thomas Sankara launched an appeal to develop initiatives to stop the advance of the desert and when he came to see my work he asked me what technique I was using and I told him that it was Zai. That’s why I’m also known as Yacouba Zai.” – Yacouba Sawadogo
While his people did not allow planting outside of the traditional rainy season, Yacouba faced it and began to soften the earth, surround it with stones to retain more rainwater and increased the depth of the cradle where he put the seeds and fertilized it waiting for the rains. The zai technique revolutionized the deserting landscape of northern Burkina Faso and caused the forests to rise.
While his people did not allow planting outside of the traditional rainy season, Yacouba faced it and began to soften the earth, surround it with stones to retain more rainwater and increased the depth of the cradle where he put the seeds and fertilized it waiting for the rains. The zai technique revolutionized the deserting landscape of northern Burkina Faso and caused the forests to rise.
The Yacouba forest didn’t just stop the desert: it was biodiverse, with species unknown to farmers in that region. It was thanks to the reforestation of approximately 30 hectares that it was possible to build a seed house where peasants went from far away to get seeds and where the master himself lived. If the visitors did not have the resources to buy the seed, Yacouba would only ask that they bring back some seed during the harvest. Despite revolutionizing the traditional way of planting, the community way of life was at the foundation of that reforestation. Whether in soil preparation or harvesting, the family and local joint effort was formed and the school of practice was constituted with young and old learning the innovative techniques of that peasant inspired by Sankara.
Billions for agriculture in Africa
Many years passed and in 2007 the African Union launched a project to build a Great Green Wall to stop the desertification of a Sahara that was 10% larger than it was in 1920. In some ways Sankara’s revolutionary thinking and Yacouba’s traditional knowledge generated an awareness of the need to face the desert as a form of sovereignty for the peoples of Africa. Three years earlier, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began its donations to Africa in a speech that mixed global warming with the need to develop African agriculture.
What’s behind the billions of dollars in donations to Gates’ “Africa”? Let’s see what GRAIN explains to us:
“Over the last two decades, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has injected a huge portion of his fortune into trying to convince small and small farmers in the Global South to adopt what they say are “the most modern options in seeds, pesticides and fertilizers”, commercialized and developed by the largest agribusiness companies in the world.”
It is, therefore, about changing the way African women and men produce their food, an attempt – in opposition to Sankara – to control seeds and impose capitalist techniques. We are not, therefore, just talking about the production of food, wood, whatever. We are talking about controlling the productive forces, transforming the way of working to one that fits the demands of the so-called Big Tech systems. It is important to understand this aspect: Gates values land and has become one of the biggest land grabbers in his country, showing that unlike the left, he knows that land is central to power. However, what their social engineering is operating is changing the conditions and ways of working so that millions of African peasants become new farmers with their smartphones in hand, receiving satellite information on rainfall, commodity prices, tips on pesticides and innovations genetics available at a click and a few dollars. We know that mechanized agriculture, agriculture 4.0, the agriculture of the future, that of spraying drones and 5G, does not fit that many peasants. We know this story by looking at the Brazilian cerrado.
So it is to be expected a social scourge caused by an expulsion of peasants in an Africa for sale as the new agricultural frontier for world agribusiness – a scourge far superior to the rural exodus caused by enclosures in the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe. It is estimated that of the 1.2 billion African men and women, 70% live from agriculture. We are therefore talking about hundreds of millions of people who are already experiencing innovations in the field of agriculture, but who are now suffering harassment from megacorporations so that these innovations represent the deepening of changes in the work relationship. These are new technologies and ventures that inspire capitalism and push for outputs that change organic agriculture in Africa: 4Afrika by Microsoft, Apple Watch by Agworld (Apple) and WeFarm by Amazon, to name just three well-known technology giants. Whether in the Cerrado or in what is now deepening in Africa, native, racialized populations began to see their territories invaded not only by white entrepreneurs, but by white techniques, technologies and ideas.
The important thing is to change African modes of production
The zai technique from Yacouba, baniwa, ashaninka or xukuru agriculture (in the case of Brazil), although full of innovations in relation to conventional agriculture, are not seen as a solution to the challenges of facing hunger, deforestation, desertification, etc. . When Yacouba climbed its forest, scholars from African and European universities, international multilateral organizations and companies had already tried to develop experiences with millions of dollars invested, but without an effective return. So the zai, using a hoe, manure, ashes, stones and collective work, managed to contain desertification. One thing, then, is the people’s challenge in the face of the environmental crisis, another thing is the incessant pursuit of valuing the value of capital. Stopping desertification is important for life and for the economy, even the capitalist one. It is estimated that “the damage to the global economy is estimated at US$ 1.3 billion per day due to the loss of agricultural land, for livestock grazing, the loss of land that could be used for tourism and human habitation”. However, the priority of these capitalists’ investments in Africa is not there, but in the transformation of work and land use.
We learn from Marx and Engels that “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without permanently revolutionizing the instruments of production, therefore the relations of production, therefore all social relations”. That is, what we are seeing with the advance of startups and information and production engineering in African agriculture and in the Brazilian cerrado, is the transformation of forms of production and, therefore, of social relations for the survival of destructive capitalism as we know it. . As García Linera explains:
“Capitalism, therefore, does not indiscriminately develop the productive forces, but rather mutilates them, represses them so that they only follow the route that enhances the valuation of value. It is a unilateralization that annuls the multilateral possibilities of material work capacities, promoting only those capable of serving, of being compelled by the logic of value.” (The Plebeian Power, p. 40)
The zai also proposed a community way of life, emerging in the defense of villages that were emptying with the flight of entire families in search of water and food. With the forest, the water came back and with it people established their lives and work in those territories. But the purpose of the new agriculture that has eyes for Africa is none other than the deterritorialization of black peoples on your continent once more. Mutirões, work with songs, native food, food sovereignty of the territories, all this is being replaced by the expression “precision agriculture”. Again García Linera explains that
“There are no naive or neutral productive forces. Each tool, each means of work, the result of contemporary society, incorporates in its material quality and in the forms of its use a set of social intentions, a set of devices of order that compress skills, prescribe behaviors, prioritize this and that knowledge, discard others, they spread this or that group attitude and crush others according to the general historical demands of the time that accompany the value enhancement strategies.” (Ibid., p. 41)
Agroecology X capitalist agriculture
And for this, it may be relevant to talk about the differences between a model of conventional agriculture and the agroecology of peoples with regard to the ideological contents implicit in the work. Monoculture capitalist agriculture creates a distance between the plants and the soil of the other species of that biome, claiming that the plants would compete with each other. This competition would be for sunlight, nutrients available in the soil or fertilizer. The agroecology of the peoples, on the other hand, chooses different plants to intercrop, to cooperate with each other in an arrangement where one helps the other to strengthen, to grow. Plants are chosen for their ability to produce biomass, fix nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and others in the soil, that is, instead of competing, they serve as nutrition for the soil through handling and pruning. Only in this opposition between competition and cooperation is it possible to perceive that the capitalist system promotes a scientific agricultural thesis that contradicts the functioning of forests, where the soil is alive and healthy.
For capitalist agriculture, production necessarily depends on inputs, chemical fertilizers, transgenic seeds accessible only by purchase, pesticides, so that the plants can produce. The soil, then, is a kind of factory that receives raw materials (inputs coming from polluting factories) and produces plants for sale. But in the agroecology of the peoples, the seeds are native, they are creole, reproduced in the territories and count on the solidarity of the peoples in their exchanges to generate life. Instead of chemical inputs and pesticides, pruning, bark, leaves and dead organic matter are used to enrich the soil. The logic is not a soil that needs to transform inputs into plants, but work to build a living, healthy soil and it, together with management (work), will manage to produce healthy plants, as Ana Primavesi would say. That is, for capitalism the soil is just a means, but for the people it is a living system, full of bacteria, fungi and insects that are part of life that generates new lives.
Defending the agroecology of peoples in Africa
Thus, what is at stake in Africa is imposing a capitalist vision for the meaning of land and agriculture. It is the struggle to modify the forms of socialization, interaction at work, community cultures. Here is one of the basic tactics for the new project of whiteness and international capitalism for blacks, but community agriculture in Africa continues to resist:
“Despite the millions—perhaps billions—invested in international research centers that promote these technologies and programs such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra), these efforts have had little impact, and the adoption rate of these technologies remains low.”
A possible clue for this low adoption lies in the fact that although the Gates Foundation finances agricultural enterprises in “Africa”, the truth is that its donations focus on agents outside the continent. Yes: “nearly 90% of this funding went to groups in North America and Europe; only 5% is channeled directly through African NGOs”. In other words, they do not trust African peoples to be agents of their own development. Together with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation created AGRA (Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), to whom they donate most of their donations and although they claim that they are for African peasants, most of the resources go to research centers and of these most are in North America and Europe. In other words, it is the construction of a “Green Revolution”, of precision agriculture, thought from outside Africa, but to impose on African men and women a white, capitalist form of work and land use.
In a certain sense, it seems that resistance to capitalist forms of production suggests conservatism in relation to technological innovations or capitalism, as we can read in Customs in common by E.P. Thompson. That is, it is possible that there is a rebellion from below against a set of changes that follow the course of the development of productive forces that deepen the domination over them. This does not mean that we are defending here any fear of the development of technology, but as long as this is developed and dominated by the imperialist elites of the world, it is necessary to remain vigilant, because the revolutionary struggle has not been widened and deepened within our societies in this world. permeated with technologies that fit in the palm of the hand. Just as the reduction in the time taken to perform tasks by the machine did not help workers to organize themselves politically, social networks and the development of means of transport did not make rebel eruptions any easier. Thus, a rebellious network that seeks a revolutionary horizon must not forge the development of capitalist productive forces within its commune, under the risk of the alienation of labor weakening the foundations of its irruptive path. That is, while we are aiming at the rebel struggle, it is still necessary to build forms of work – from now on – that will free minds and hearts from capitalist domination.
Although it is an objective reality that African nations need credit for investment, it is also true that they also need objective conditions to sow their sovereignty, especially nations that are experiencing an accelerated process of desertification of their soils. So, from Brazil, it is urgent that we show what the soil of our cerrado has become after the rapid and violent implementation of agribusiness, it is urgent that we show African brothers and sisters what has happened to the native populations where these mega-projects arrive. Above all, it is fundamental to point to the drought in the southeast and south of the country to say that a resource so scarce in a large part of Africa will be at risk: water. In this context, defending the forest of Yacouba and the agriculture of the peoples is to retain two desertifications: one caused by the advance of the Sahara and the other caused by the powerful wave of capitalist transformation of the form of production and, consequently, of social relations in Africa. By defending the community spirit that surrounds the fight to stop desertification, we are saying that the peoples’ priority is to maintain life, water and conditions of existence in a sovereign way for the peoples, as Sankara thought 37 years ago.
From: https://www.nuceciwan121.xyz/en/2023/04/sankara-and-sawadogo-agroecology-and-revolution/