Check out our latest OpEd in Aljazeera published here.
The new US foreign assistance strategy for nutrition makes little room for vulnerable smallholder farmers who have been the foundation of Africa’s food systems to date.
Instead of focusing “on households” by helping smallholders grow nutritious food, more resources will go to “large-scale fortification”- a technical term for the funneling of low-nutrition crops to factories that can blend them with vitamins and minerals.
US’s new nutrition plan continues the Green Revolution in Africa. While they announce their intent to help the most vulnerable like smallholder farmers, they build a highly mechanised, capital-intensive, agro-industrial economy, leaving little room for smallholders who are also the main providers of nutritious and diverse foods on the continent.
In the way the US’s agriculture plans have encouraged farmers to rely on factory-synthesized chemicals to add nutrients to African land, its new nutrition plan promotes a reliance on factory-synthesized vitamins to add nutrients to African food.
Activists and scholars need to continue to hold USAID and others accountable for their promises to support smallholder farmers, who should be at the centre of efforts to end malnutrition.
Smallholders are already well suited to produce the most biologically and environmentally diverse and culturally appropriate food, not processors looking to profit from manufacturing nutrition on their behalf.
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