If you are interested in learning more about the action research partnerships we are building in Ghana for food sovereignty, here is a recording of a recent talk I gave.
The unprecedented state of global hunger is exposing the fragility of food systems, which are the political economic processes and infrastructures that feed people. This fragility is caused by systems that privilege the commodification of food and profit over ecological sustainability and equity. For decades, scholarship has demonstrated how the agricultural development approaches of the Green Revolution focused on intensifying yields across the Global South, generally degrade soil, decrease biodiversity and increase debt burdens, trapping smallholders in poverty. This trapping inhibits smallholders’ household food security and adaptive capacity to climate change. A donor evaluation recently demonstrated that food insecurity has intensified across the African countries currently targeted for the Green Revolution like Ghana, which is inciting resistance across the continent.
Major alternatives to the African Green Revolution generally advocate for food sovereignty, which is the right of people to define their own food systems instead of corporations, so that healthy, diverse, delicious and culturally appropriate food is more accessible. In this presentation, I will illustrate how we as scholars are supporting Ghanaian partner organizations’ efforts towards food sovereignty using grounded, participatory action and interdisciplinary research into agroecology and disappearing indigenous culinary ingredients as alternatives to the African Green Revolution. Learning from food sovereignty movements such as these partners’ efforts has the power to transform notions of who holds expertise and how change can happen.
Preserving and promoting local food production and culinary knowledge and practices for climate change adaptation and resistance to unjust political economic power dynamics can provide more sustainable incomes than those that privilege productivity.
Showing appreciation to the Ghanaian journalists Mahmud Mohammed-Nurudeen also @thenurudeenreport and others for covering our workshop that we hosted in July 2023 with stakeholders across Ghana’s agriculture and food system.
We translated research and knowledge for policy change and practice. With this coverage, we are trying to tell a more complex story than what big corporate food marketing and advertising will have you believe about what people want to eat and grow.
Thank you to all of the academics and organizations involved particularly Prof Jasper Ayelazuno and others the Faculty of Communications and Media Studies at the University for Development Studies, @ghanafoodmovement, @ibrahimmahama3, Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Organizational Development, Food Sovereignty Ghana, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture northern regional unit and all of the farmers, market vendors, chefs, artists and others involved.
Watch & read about our kitchen session here that was hosted for the Association for the Study of Food and Society with Chef Abiro from the Ghana Food Movement where we prepared and tasted dawadawa jollof as a way to discuss wider scholar-activist food sovereignty movement building in Ghana & beyond.
Excited to share our latest published study in The European Journal of Development Research. Access here: https://lnkd.in/g9YrYB6E
We investigate how agri-food & nutrition policy & practice address gender inequality with examples from Haiti, Benin, Ghana & Tanzania.
We find that the widespread emphasis on gender equality in policy and practice generally ascribes to a gender narrative that includes stereotypes of static, homogenized conceptualizations of food provisioning and marketing.
These narratives tend to translate to interventions that use and objectify women’s labor by funding their income generating activities and care responsibilities for other benefits like household food and nutrition security without addressing underlying causes of their vulnerability, making them worse not better.
We argue that policy and interventions must prioritize locally contextualized social norms and environmental conditions, and consider further the way wider policies and development assistance shape social dynamics to address the structural causes of intersecting inequalities.
Our latest open-access paper is out. Check it out here.
It points to potential gaps in policies & interventions targeting young people in African agriculture by investigating their diverse mobilities, aspirations & engagements in northern Ghana.
Our study challenges the prevalent assumption of African farmers’ movements from rural to rural areas, from rural to urban areas, and out of farming altogether, as we found evidence of young people migrating from urban to rural areas.
We also show that the intersection of generation, place and gender unevenly shaped young people’s movements to and away from rural areas, along with the broad patterns of their involvement with farming.
Thanks to the Hungry Cities Partnership for the open-access outlet. Particularly, thanks to Sujata Ramachandran for her editorial excellence & my co-author Prof Bruce Frayne for his expertise. And as always, the biggest thank you goes to the young farmers and others who participated and steered the research.
Here is a photo essay that I wrote for the Feeding Cities lab on how people’s diets are changing in Tamale – the major urban area of northern Ghana.
I write about my latest research project where I find two contradictory food trends. On the one hand, people are adapting to global food practices, like producing, selling, and consuming highly-processed ingredients and foods grown with heavy doses of inorganic fertilizer and agrochemicals. On the other hand, many people still maintain local practices, such as cultivating and selling staple ingredients grown nearby with minimal external technologies.
This essay explores some of these diverging practices through narratives and photographs from Tamale.
Our OpEd in Aljazeera linked here about how food disruptions from the pandemic and war show the need for strong local supply chains. Yet the US and others won’t learn.
Here I speak with Alex Park – Journalist and Researcher for the Global Get Down podcast on existing international agricultural development models and trends and what the implications of this mean for smallholders and our food systems.
Since the 2008 global food crisis, African governments, with the help of foreign donors, have financed the agriculture sector. Initially, this was a programme centred on the efforts of smallholder farmers as they recognized that these farmers were pivotal to the economy. However, these programmes failed to bring much progress because their models have failed to assist smallholders, ultimately forcing them to leave their farmlands and causing mass displacement. As a result, this so-called “Green Revolution” has brought more harm than good.
Thanks to Joao and Thalin for the interesting conversation.
Here is a link to the podcast click here or find it on the Spotify app and follow the Global Get Down Podcast link here.
As many of you may not know, I sit on the Board of Advisors for a small but fierce NGO called Initiative for Equality whose work I believe in because it is actually community-driven, diverse, inclusive and focused on bringing justice to the most marginalized.
One of their main focus areas has been in defence of the Batwa people – an indigenous group located in the Congo Basin region of Central Africa who are facing genocidal attacks and atrocities.
While I do not know anything about this topic, I know that this group is discriminated against for many reasons. One is because they are pygmies, and have been in Central Africa for at least 88,000 years.
This means that they are among the longest-surviving human cultures on earth, having developed sustainable ways of living that didn’t destroy one another through inequality and conflict, and didn’t destroy nature.
For tens of thousands of years they survived, developing their nature-based economy and culture, and protecting the forests of the Congo Basin with all of its diverse plant and animal life. But over the past 100 years – the space of just one lifetime – the Batwa people are being destroyed so that others can take their lands, forests, wildlife and minerals.
They could teach us how to survive; how to coexist peacefully with one another and with nature. We should be learning from them, not destroying them.
Who is taking their lands and life?
* Neighboring agricultural tribes are desperate for land as their corrupt governments keep the agricultural population in poverty by supporting corporate land grabs, cash crops and mining operations.
* Corrupt ruling elites cut lucrative deals to extract timber, wildlife and especially minerals from the Batwa’s traditional lands, enriching themselves and hiding the money in offshore accounts. This has been extensively covered by one of the famous journalistic collaborations based on leaked data, called “Congo Holdup”.
* International companies and their governments enable this corruption by continuing to do dirty but profitable business deals in this region in order to get minerals and “carbon offsets” – justifying it as necessary to address climate change and build a “green economy”.
* Violent conflict is rampant in the forests of the eastern Congo as armed militias, often supported by foreign governments, fight over control of the minerals for international export.
* Huge conservation corporations like WWF and WCS, along with their donors and collaborating governments, expel the Batwa from their lands under the guise of “preserving biodiversity” – despite the fact that the Batwa were vastly better at conserving the forests and biodiversity for countless millennia. Now wealthy Westerners engage in tourism and trophy hunting, and mineral deposits are illegally exploited in the so-called Protected Areas, while the Batwa are killed for returning to their traditional lands.
Thus this vicious cycle of local corruption and violent conflict, incentivized by the profits that flow from international business interests, is destroying one of the longest-surviving human cultures on earth, along with the second largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon.
By destroying the Batwa, we are destroying our own humanity.
Why does IfE – a global network of organizations dedicated to overcoming inequalities around the world – devote so much time and energy to this one particular situation?
* Because this is our largest, most active regional network, and IfE makes its decisions through its partners on the ground.
* Because the situation of the Batwa is a microcosm of everything that is wrong in the world: from the exploitation by corrupt governments, wealthy elites and international corporations to the destruction of nature, sustainable ways of life and peaceful human societies. If we can help the Batwa people change their situation, we can apply those learnings and tactics to help change other situations around the globe, too.
* Because the level of violence the Batwa are up against is so bad that they cannot defend themselves without help. Their need for global solidarity is urgent, and that’s what IfE does best.
* Because most international NGOs that have gotten involved have failed to improve the situation of the Batwa. But we still have a large, regional, multi-partner collaboration working directly with the Batwa on the ground, and we believe we can support the Batwa to achieve their goals. We won’t walk away.
In 2018, Gabriel1, a Batwa rights activist, was kidnapped into an unmarked government vehicle as he walked down a city street. He was thrown in prison without charges, to be tortured off and on for 4 years. When we finally succeeded in making enough noise to obtain his release, we were overjoyed – until we learned that a death squad working with a political party planned to kill him. We moved heaven and earth to help him to relocate and apply for asylum elsewhere. He lives in poverty now, but at least he is alive – for the moment.
1 name changed to protect his identity
What does IfE intend to do about the destruction of the Batwa and their lands?
This multidimensional problem needs to be addressed from many directions. We are looking for a way to record the voices of Batwa elders talking about their history and traditional culture, before they leave us. We are holding discussions with Batwa community members to help them to think through how to reverse the cultural breakdown. We are experimenting with conflict resolution mechanisms that could help resolve inter-ethnic and inter-community disputes. We are advocating for new approaches to conservation that work with the indigenous people instead of expelling them from their lands. And we are intervening however possible to stop the arbitrary arrests, torture and killings that are happening to Batwa people across the Congo Basin and African Great Lakes region.
But we are not only fighting for the Batwa: by preventing this amazingly sucessful human culture from being destroyed, we are also fighting for our own survival – trying to retain some of the key indigenous knowledge, wisdom and life ways that could help all of us survive the existential threats we face today.
We urgently need your help and support! Join with us to stop the killings, reverse the land grabs, elevate the Batwa’s human and indigenous rights, and retain a model for human survival. Please support our work with the Batwa people by making a generous donation today or by sharing this post.
I am writing this today to raise awareness of these issues and of what can be done. You can help.
It was a such a privilege and joy to work with the talented Dr. Melisew Dejene and the wider team at IPDR, Hawassa University in Ethiopia.
They are the brains behind understanding one of Africa’s largest social protection programmes and are doing incredible work to translate research for policy – strengthening the much needed interventions aimed at reducing social inequality and justice.
This article is about how social protection programmes do not generally account for gendered power dynamics.
Oftentimes, they target women only as beneficiaries, which can intensify gendered disparities.
This case study uses a mixed methods research approach to conduct a gender analysis of the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia.
We find the programme has progressive gender equity goals, but these are not well implemented. Since special provisions for women are neglected in the case study sites, they do not challenge unequal social norms nor recognize unequal roles and responsibilities.
For example, there is a recognition that women in this context have unique time constraints and reproductive work burdens. The programme aims to make special consultations and allowances for them (e.g. workload reductions, flexibility in work timing, special grievance communication). Maternity leave, awareness raising and reproductive health initiatives are also major parts of the programme. Some of these special provisions made for women are critical for gender equity.
These special provisions need to also be balanced by making them requirements to men’s participation as a way to challenge gender norms and work burdens and as a way to encourage men to participate in stereotypically feminine roles, such as childcare.
There is a need for social protection to redress inequitable social norms and structural factors that perpetuate women’s vulnerability to poverty, as opposed to simply including women or targeting them to meet their practical needs.
Alongside implementing the gendered provisions, we recommend further research into the ways that the programme can challenge discriminatory social norms.
Overall we found upon implementation that in the case study sites:
The workload requirements for women, which should be half compared to that of men, as well as flexibility in work timing, were enforced unevenly across the communities.
Women and men were also not consulted separately and implementing such provisions for women involves awareness by supervisors, none of whom were women.
Most participants felt the distance needed to travel for Public Works, specifically for women, and the scheduling of activities were inconvenient.
No networks or associations were established to represent different community needs and a large majority of women and men thought that they had little choice in the types of work they could pursue and that current activities compromised their health.
Finally, the representation and consultation of women were politicized and sufficient childcare was unavailable.
In some instances, gender sensitivity was not necessarily facilitating the transformation of norms, roles and responsibilities. Instead, negative gender norms tend to be reinforced by the program design and implementation.
My Development Diary 