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| The image of Fulani boys at Wurin Alheri |
Global industrial agricultural chemical products infiltrated until they have taken over African small-holder agriculture, decimating African environments, impoverishing farmers, and breaking down relationships between ethnic groups, contributing to widespread violence and the destruction of local economy and life.
While promising rich crop harvests, the chemicals kill off life in the soil and contribute to massive surges in diseases like diabetes, cancer, and hypertension in those who eat the farming produce. Large numbers of people are dying from these diseases, leaving behind helpless families, in a scourge far higher than the death rate and suffering caused by headline-grabbing terrorism.
Like drug pushers, these giant international chemical companies tell farmers they can farm without the traditional methods of soil fertilisation, such as crop rotation and integration of farm animals like cows and sheep, and the manure from native chickens that once roamed the fields. (Bill Gates “gave” us “better chickens” kept in sheds, off the soil, which die from viruses, for which Gates sells “superfood” and vaccines.) Relationships between cattle herders and crop farmers, essential to farming from time immemorial, have been discarded. Once the soils began to deteriorate, competition came into these relationships, both sides needing what was left of the landscape for crops or for cattle. Massive distrust and violence, killings and refugee camps have become the norm, as the environment continues to breakdown.
A few years back CFM decided to study this situation, in our pursuit of peace. We were already actively building relationships with local cattle herders, but we also learnt the importance of this for farming. On a large plot of land, with soil ruined by years of chemical farming, we planted maize, used expensive chemical additives, and reaped absolutely nothing. Then we invited local cattle herders onto our land with their cows. The cows slept on the land each night for two months. The next year we had a bumper harvest of maize on the same field, without any chemical fertilizers. All free.
Our relationships continue to build. We now farm in cooperation, not in competition. Yesterday, local cattle herders, in what used to be one of the most violent and deadly regions for herder/farmer conflict in the nation, donated a cow to our bible college students, their traditional enemies. Peace has returned, and our farming is blossoming. And the gospel is spreading. Children are going to school. The environment is being restored.
To the Fulani, the security of their cows is top priority. Most of the cows are owned by the wealthy in cities and they hire local Fulani for a pittance to "follow their cattle." The herd that sleeps at Wurin Alheri is managed by a local Fulani adult, but he often leaves the cows at Wurin Alheri with his two boys. He leaves his cows and boys to sleep together each night in the midst of 600 Christians, knowing they are completely secure. During the day, if the boys get into any trouble with the cows, they call the bible college students to come and help. Each night the boys are taught by Christians who live at Wurin Alheri. This is a witness to the wider community around us. This, not artificial chemical farming that divides the community, is what we need for local prosperity and peace.
The answer is clear. The World Economic Forum doesn’t want this answer because it doesn’t yield them exploitive profiteering opportunities. Its time to stop the economic colonialism and corruption of the WEF in our local regions and rebuild local agriculture and economies naturally, not with the deadly, controlling and poverty-producing technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (New World Order, Great Reset.) We owe it to human and environmental rights and justice.
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