Experts in the agricultural space have embarked on developing a comprehensive roadmap to disrupt financial flows to industrial agriculture but instead champion funding for agroecology.
Building on the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa’s (AFSA) Healthy Soil Healthy Food initiative, participants will explore strategies to address the financial imbalances, focusing on shifting investments towards sustainable farming practices that ensure food sovereignty.
Speaking when opening the three-day meeting at Maanzoni, National Coordinator of BIBA Kenya Anne Maina said industrial agriculture is an extractive, monoculture-driven model that undermines food sovereignty, depletes our soils, and erodes the resilience of our farmers.
“Despite the overwhelming evidence of agroecology’s benefits for climate resilience, biodiversity, and nutrition, financial flows continue to prop up industrial agriculture at the expense of people and the planet,” she added.
“There is a need to come up with a campaign strategy to disrupt the financial systems that sustain industrial agriculture and redirect resources to agroecological practices that nurture our soils, sustain our livelihoods, and secure our food systems,” Maina said.
She added that farmers and communities deserve investment and therefore need to mobilise resources for agroecology, develop concrete advocacy action that will drive change at local, national and continental levels, and also strengthen collaboration between civil society, researchers, and policymakers to unify our voices and efforts in reclaiming Africa’s food systems.
AFSA General Coordinator Million Belay said that over the past years, they have made significant strides and produced 12 insightful case studies across eight countries on agroecology.
“We launched the Healthy Soil, Healthy Food Initiative, forging new paths in sustainable land use and food sovereignty as well as the integration of agroecological principles into the African Union’s Land Governance Strategy and nurturing vital platforms like Our Land is Our Life,” he explained.
On climate advocacy, Belay added that they have also managed to engage with the Africa Group of Negotiators, launching national agroecology platforms across countries such as Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, and Togo, who have solidified agroecology’s role in climate resilience.
He noted that their “Seed is Life” campaign and the burgeoning continental seed sovereignty movement have empowered farmers’ seed rights and hence they would be launching the AFSA AfCFTA book, which details the merits and demerits to Africans.
Last year in October, Balay noted that AFSA and other CSOs launched the EU-AU Civil Society Engagement Mechanism as a platform to engage the EU-AU partnership engagement, whose focus is finance that comes to Africa.
“The Civil Society Engagement Mechanism (CSEM) seeks to include the voices of the people and meaningfully engage them in the AU-EU Partnership in order to yield effective and legitimate decisions,” he said.
Together, Belay reiterated the need to forge a future where agroecology and food sovereignty are not only recognised but are the cornerstones of agricultural and climate policies.
A study by the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University found that only 2.7 per cent of the EU disbursements to FAO, IFAD and WFP between 2016 and 2018 flowed to projects supporting agro ecology and this is a clear indication of the need to increase transparency around these financial flows.
By Wangari Ndirangu
