Friday, May 9, 2008

A Vision of Eden

Nnimmo Bassey’s notes on yesterday’s Africa session:

Mr Tommy of UNIDO roared that his stance would be to be provocative. He declared that every African nation could be a net exporter of food but that they lacked capacity to add value to their products. He also declared quite provocatively that “development can only be based on industrialization.” He then went on to say that that Africa should move away from the Garden of Eden mentality. We responded that Eden was a sustainable garden until man’s consumption appetite went beyond bounds. In fact there was no problem in the garden until overconsumption was suggested by the serpent. In other words, consumption has been mankind’s problem from the beginning. The Garden is never the problem.

Dr Gessese, a chemical engineer, bemoaned the lack of value adding in African agriculture and recommended more regional integration as one of the means by which synergies would help production across borders. A sore point in his presentation was that one of the problems of African agriculture is its being characterised by a weak knowledge base. We contested this notion and reminded the conference that scientists and experts ought to recognise the strong community knowledge base that has sustained agriculture over the centuries and is still available. We also added that scientists should be humble and willing to learn.

The haunting question that one had to contend with on leaving the conference was whether the measure of development in Africa must be the level of her competitiveness. If competition is the measure of progress in the world, we may have to re-examine the concepts of sustainability. Competition is the base of reckless exploitation of resources on the continent and indeed the many attendant conflicts. Complaining that Africa only exports raw materials and does not add value before sending the products off, and then building a picture of progress based on competition and value adding does not quite sound like eliminating concepts that should be given prime place in discussions on Africa in the context of the CSD. The concept of a continent being concerned mostly with production for exports is precisely the same concept that has driven the continent into a blind alley.