AFSA celebrates International Year of the Family Farming

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), an alliance of African farmer and civil society networks and allies met in Lome, Togo July 17- July 19, to celebrate the International Year of the Family Farming.

The meeting also reaffirmed the opposition of the Alliance to corporate-driven industrial agriculture in Africa and commitment to food sovereignty.

The statement issued by AFSA said the Alliance is committed to small farmer-led solutions to Africa’s food crisis and are vehemently opposed to measures imposed by for instance, the G8 New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN), spearheaded by the world’s industrial powers.

The explicit emphasis of NAFSN is to industrialise African agriculture and promote corporate control over Africa’s food systems.

The NAFSN is pressuring African countries to rewrite their seed and land laws to allow for fully fledged entry and profit making by multinational corporations on the continent.

“We are equally concerned about other similar initiatives, including the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme, the US government’s Feed the Future Initiative, the Grow Africa Partnership, and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa,” the statement said.

AFSA is outraged by the unprecedented land grabbing of African farmland in the past decade by foreign countries, companies driven by a desire to ensure their own future food security or simply to make money out of Africa’s farmland through the establishment of huge corporate commodity farms.

The statement said these processes are often carried out with the tacit support of local elites. Additional drivers include the growing market demand for biofuel crops and the projected exponential growth of the African urban food market – estimated to exceed $400 billion by 2030.

Land in Africa is a social and cultural resource and access to land is the foundation of all farming. Large-scale land grabbing, estimated to be in the region of around 50 million ha has already resulted in the massive displacement of small farmers, food insecurity, conflict, water loss and environmental damage.

“Millions of African farming families are at the risk of being displaced and losing their livelihoods if this trend is allowed to continue-with catastrophic consequences for the continent, its people and our food sovereignty.”

It said African countries are being severely pressurized into abandoning their farmer-based seed systems and hand these systems over to the corporate sector, based on the imperative that food production needs to be increased by the adoption of industrial large-scale monocropping farming systems.

Donors and potential investors have identified weak governance and regulatory systems and institutions in Africa as immediate obstacles to the expansion of corporate seed systems that are based on quality controls and intellectual property.

A key priority in the industrial agriculture agenda is to facilitate regional harmonisation of policies and laws to regulate and support investment in seed and agrochemicals.

The statement said these laws are designed to facilitate the corporate control over Africa’s seed systems, and criminalise the age-old farmer practices of replanting, exchanging and selling farm-saved seeds and propagating material.

“Small farmers are the creators and custodians of Africa’s seed diversity. They produce the bulk of the food in Africa and their crop varieties are the cornerstone for food production on the continent.

“The recent policy shifts by ARIPO and others totally undermine this central role of small farmers and hands over the control of Africa’s seeds and farming to foreign corporates.

“AFSA also takes notice of the push by Monsanto to commercialise its GM (bt) cotton in Africa. Already there is resistance to this in Malawi, and AFSA is committed to strongly resisting the commercial growing of GM crops in Africa.

“Experiences from Burkina Faso and South Africa have already shown that cultivating Monsanto’s GM cotton carries a high risk of trapping smallholder farmers in a cycle of debt and dependence. AFSA will resist this GM push strongly as it is also designed to open the flood- gates to GM technology in Africa, which is mostly closed,” the statement said.

AFSA is determined to fight against these destructive policies and practices and advance small-holder farmer-led agroecology within a food sovereignty paradigm as an African solution to an African problem.

“We are committed to building on farmers’ age-old knowledge and practices to improve soils and water systems, to nurture our seeds, and improve the productivity of our farms in harmony with nature.

“Numerous studies and policy documents have already shown that this approach is ecologically sustainable and socially just and one that can indeed feed Africa.

“They are diverse and more resilient in the face of climate change. Diversity of diet, founded on diverse farming systems, delivers better nutrition and greater health, with additional benefits for human productivity and livelihoods,” the statement said.