Opinion: Nutrition grows in farmers’ fields

By
18 April 2017

Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje explains that to build food sovereignty in Africa, we need to speak with farmers and look in their fields.

We are faced with incredible challenges that are being intensified by the false solutions of seed and biotech companies. With their ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’, in connivance with government agencies, they all claim to be ‘saving’ farmers and improving the quality of their seeds and livelihoods.

Why are these companies creating imaginary problems and providing false solutions to make profits from our food and agricultural systems? There are countless examples of false solutions that undermine food sovereignty in Africa: from biosynthesising the active ingredients in our medicinal plants, to biofortification. Most of us were outraged earlier this year when we learned about Tanzania’s new law that criminalises peasant seed exchange.

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. The food and farming system practiced by the majority of small scale farmers is not broken. They have the knowledge, skill and experience to grow food for nourishment, taste, quality and resilience. Big corporations look down on them and call their seeds inferior and archaic. But time and again, grounded evidence shows that small scale producers are feeding the people and meeting the basic needs of their communities.

As I have done, you only need to learn from farmers themselves. Our farmers are working with nature, the soil, plants and animals. They have the knowledge and the right to choose what they want to grow, how they want to grow it and what is culturally appropriate and healthy. That is what food sovereignty is all about.

Food sovereignty is built on the inalienable rights of peoples to maintain their cultural as well as seed diversities. Cultural diversity permits peoples to maintain and enlarge their stock of local knowledge; produce, save, exchange, use, and reuse their seeds and have control over farming practices developed over centuries of experimentation and experience. Food sovereignty ensures that farmers stay in business and that people are not forced to alter their diets.

Our governments and (future) researchers must take the indigenous and local knowledge of small scale farmers and producers into account. Lost knowledge must be recovered and research must be identified by the people and not defined by corporations who are only interested in making profits, or by laboratory experts.

Africa can no longer afford to be a testing ground for all kinds of unwholesome food and toxic technologies, in which her people are being used as guinea pigs in the so called fight against hunger, malnutrition or disease. Our nutrition is not found in the laboratory, it is found in farmers’ fields and knowledge.

Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje (mariann@eraction.org) is the Chair of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and is programme manager for Environmental Rights Action / Friends of the Earth Nigeria.