Dr Tewolde Gebre Egziabher, heading the Environmental Protection Agency of Ethiopia, will shortly be announcing the results of a study showing that Ethiopia is producing a surplus of food for the seventh year in succession. Journalists and other visitors are welcome to witness for themselves: * All this food is produced by small farmers using traditional farming practices. (The only commercial farming is in cotton). * There is no "improved seed" produced by commercial breeders - all seed is enhanced, selected and exchanged by small farmers. * There is a minimal use of chemical fertilisers and no use of genetically engineered crops. * The country has built up good stocks of food from the small farmers, to ensure it can supply its people with food if there is a drought or shortage of food. * Visits can be organised to the site where the notorious photos of starving people were taken in 1985, which have remained as the image of Africa in a helpless, endless cycle of starvation. Large areas of this dry region have been recuperated through regenerating the ecosystems (water harvesting, water source protection, prevention of erosion, control of grazing etc.) * Other sites demonstrate the work of the award winning Ethiopian Gene Bank (Biodiversity Institute) which enhances productivity by increasing the diversity and density of farmer varieties growing together - again a simple ecological principle. The Ethiopian example is particularly significant post the Food Summit (Rome, June 2002), and pre the Earth Summit (Johannesburg, August 2002) where: * At the Food Summit the US government announced that it was investing $100 million in promoting biotechnology in developing countries, having bullied the governments at the Food and Agriculture Organisation to say that biotech would help reduce hunger. * NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development), and the pro-globalisation institutions (World Bank, World Trade Organisation, IMF etc.) all promote industrial agriculture, which means the use of hybrid and genetically engineered seed, chemicals, pesticides, monocultures, export oriented agriculture etc, as the way to increase productivity and feed the growing populations. Biotech agriculture will be strongly promoted at the Earth Summit (as it was at the Food Summit). * Also at the Earth Summit there will be up to 300 small farmers from different African countries insisting that they will continue to feed Africa 's growing population; and that they will continue to defend their livelihood systems and food sovereignty. * The drought and starvation that will be surrounding South Africa at the time of the Earth Summit will intensify the polarisation between the biotech claims that genetic engineering is the answer and the growing resistance of small farmers, consumers, civil society groups and increasingly governments and other institutions, to the dangers of the biotech industry's drive to control seed production and supply and hence the food chain - its hidden agenda. Ethiopia shows that diverse, ecologically and culturally adapted food production systems, generated and controlled by millions of small farmer households, provide food security and protect the people and the country from foreign and commercial control of food. Self-reliance in food at the household and country level, is the foundation on which democracies can be built.:
