Lack of knowledge curtails indigenous farmers’ benefits

Zimbabwe ratified the ITPGRFA in October 2002, two years before it came into force in 2004. The ITPGRFA seeks to recognise the right of the farmer to protect indigenous knowledge on plant genetic resources and share benefits from those resources.
Article 9 of the treaty also seeks to make farmers realise their right to produce, save, exchange, re-use, participate in decision making and protect their local knowledge systems.
While Zimbabwe was among the early countries to ratify the treaty, the country has been slow in embracing it.
Analysts say the country is lagging behind because of red tape and lack of urgency on the part of the government.
The fact that there is no legislation in Zimbabwe compelling anyone to enforce the treaty or protect traditional knowledge in plant genetic resources does not help matters.
After Zimbabwe ratified the ITPGRFA in 2002, efforts to domesticate the treaty hit a brick wall some years back when the Environm-ental Management Authority was stripped of the agricultural aspect of the treaty, which meant that the proposal to include farmers’ rights in the country’s laws had to be sent back to the drawing board via the Ministry of Agriculture.
“This process has excluded the legislators yet they are the ones who make the laws…One way of dealing with the farmers’ rights issue is to include it in the constitution,” said Moses Jiri, Member of Parliament for Chikomba.
And because the country does not have a legislated policy on plant genetic resources, talking of farmers’ rights is a sheer worst of time at the moment.
In essence, Zimbabwe farmers may own the land they live on, but they neither have the right to the benefits it produces nor the right to conserve anything that survives on that land.
Under the present highly westernised food regime, where indigenous foods are frowned upon, there is no economic incentive for farmers to conserve and grow local genetic varieties.
MP for Mutoko North, Mabel Chinomona questioned the wisdom of encouraging farmers to save, conserve and plant local food varieties, which the nation is not interested in consuming.
“It would appear the nutritional value of our indigenous foods is now being recognised because we have the problem of HIV and AIDS. These foods need to be promoted for consumption in our hospitals, but this is not the case. We cannot start exporting food which we are not eating ourselves,” she said.
With about 70 percent of Zimbabwe’s hospital beds occupied by people with HIV and AIDS related ailments, a serious local effort to promote the highly nutritious indigenous food stuffs not only in hospitals, but in all major institutions such as schools could be the starting point for farmers towards realising meaningful economic benefits from conserving the nation’s biological diversity.
Some of the local highly nutritious food varieties that can withstand harsh climatic conditions include wild spinach (mowa), spider’s web or cat’s whiskers (nyevhe), cow peas, okra, mustard rape or Indian rape.
Wild spinach, for example, is said to contain 13 times more iron and protein than the English cabbage, which is awash in the country’s shops and vegetable markets. The vegetable also has twice more energy than cabbage and contains 5 716 beta-carotene per every 100g compared to 100 per every 100g in a cabbage.
Beta-carotene is the source of vitamin A, which is critical in the human body in helping vision, gene transcription, immune function, embryonic development and reproduction, bone metabolism, haema-topoiesis, skin health, reducing the risk of heart disease and acts as an antioxidant.
The executive director of the Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT), Andrew Mushita, believes a lot still needs to be done if Zimbabwe is to domesticate the ITPGRFA.
“There is still a lot of work to be done. It’s a long process,” he said.
Through the ITPGRFA, the UN hopes to fight hunger and poverty and achieve Millennium Develo-pment Goals 1 and 7, which aim to eradicate poverty and hunger and halt the spread of HIV and AIDS while reversing its spread by 2015.
And because no country is self-sufficient in plant genetic resources, international cooperation and open exchange of genetic resources are essential for food security says the UN.
“We are the first to sign, but the last to implement,” said Joseph Mushonga, plant breeder and deputy director of CTDT, in his closing remarks at a recent workshop on farmers’ rights and economic development held in Harare.
CTDT has been active in nine rural districts in which, the non-governmental organisation is promoting traditional knowledge on plant genetic resources.
But the rest of Zimbabwe’s communal farmers living in 50 districts, which make up more than 70 percent of the country’s population are virtually ignorant of their right to access and share the benefits of indigenous genetic resources.
While the Zimbabwe government dithers over empowering its rural communities by simply domesticating ITPGRFA, the country’s rich biological diversity resource base is being systematically looted daily while the custodians of the unique resources continue to wallow in abject poverty and survive yearly on imported food handouts.
CTDT reports that the country’s genetic resources have been leaked out of the country for many years now with one of the first classical examples of biopiracy having been recorded as far back as 1987.
A 1987 joint venture between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, an Australian government agency and a consortium of Australian producers, resulted in the collection of Tuli cattle embryos from Zimbabwe and Zambia. The Tuli cattle were developed in 1945 by the Zimbabwe government to help improve the stock of African farmers in the country’s outlying areas.
The Australian consortium then sold the embryos on the Australian and world markets at a price of $9,500 Australian dollars retaining profits of US$2,4 billion per year while Zimbabwe and Zambia benefited nothing from the whole trading arrangement.
Despite the critical nature of plant genetic resources, nations — Zimbabwe included — have been dragging their feet unnecessarily in fully implementing the ITPGRFA.