{"id":136408,"date":"2025-12-30T13:47:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T13:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/?p=136408"},"modified":"2025-12-30T13:47:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T13:47:30","slug":"an-innovative-way-to-innovate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/an-innovative-way-to-innovate\/","title":{"rendered":"An innovative way to innovate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ethiopian activist, Million Belay<\/strong>, talks to The Mint<\/em> about the fight to take back control of Africa\u2019s food.<\/p>\n

In a world where food is increasingly treated like a financial product\u2014priced, packaged, shipped, and speculated on \u2014 long-time organiser of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Million Belay Ali, wants to return it to something more basic: culture, health, land, and justice.<\/p>\n

AFSA\u2019s roots go back to the late 2000s, when a new contest for Africa\u2019s agriculture was gathering pace. By 2006, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations and other actors were initiating what would later become widely known as a renewed \u201cGreen Revolution\u201d push on the continent. In 2007, movements including La Via Campesina met in Ny\u00e9l\u00e9ni, Mali and sharpened the global concept of food sovereignty\u2014framing it around core principles rather than just an attractive slogan. A year later, African networks began to coalesce around building something continental. AFSA was formally named in 2009.<\/p>\n

But Belay is careful not to present AFSA as a simple \u201canti-Gates\u201d reaction story. The spark, he says, was also internal: a sense that scattered African civil society networks were not achieving enough alone. \u201cIndividually, we felt that we were not achieving what we wanted to achieve,\u201d he explains\u2014so it made sense \u201cto come together and fill a gap in African food sovereignty policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The risk, as he sees it, is that African farming is pushed into a system where survival depends on outsiders.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That \u201cgap\u201d matters because Africa is not a marginal player in its own economy. Belay points out that more than 80% of Africans are farmers, and that agriculture accounts for a large share of economic activity. Yet the direction of travel has been towards dependence: inputs, seeds, land deals, distribution, and \u201cthe economy around foods\u201d increasingly shaped by \u201ca few actors\u201d with global reach. The risk, as he sees it, is that African farming is pushed into a system where survival depends on outsiders.<\/p>\n

This is where the movement draws a hard line between two phrases that often get blurred in international forums: food security<\/em> and food sovereignty<\/em>. Food security, Belay argues, can be satisfied by one crude measure\u2014food on the table\u2014without asking who controls that food system or how that food was produced. It can ignore whether food is treated as a commodity, whether production respects ecosystems, or whether farmers and communities have power over land, seeds, and markets. Food sovereignty, by contrast, forces those questions to the centre: control, ecology, and political agency.<\/p>\n

If food sovereignty is the \u201cwhy,\u201d agroecology is the \u201chow.\u201d For Belay, the movement\u2019s most important strategic move was to \u201ctie it with agroecology\u201d: farming that respects nature and the people who produce food, while improving soil, health, nutrition, and resilience in the face of climate shocks. He rejects the caricature that agroecology is nostalgic or anti-science. \u201cIt\u2019s a cutting-edge science,\u201d he says\u2014full of innovations that can raise productivity and strengthen local economies without locking farmers into chemical dependence.<\/p>\n

AFSA\u2019s approach has included building communities of practice, supporting agroecological entrepreneurship, and developing \u201cterritorial markets\u201d and cross-border trade that keep value closer to producers. Belay also notes that international crises have unintentionally helped the agenda by exposing the fragility of import-dependent systems.<\/p>\n

The biggest barriers, however, are not technical. They\u2019re ideological\u2014and heavily funded.<\/p>\n

Belay describes a set of narratives that have been drilled into politicians, scientists, and public institutions: that African seeds are \u201ctired,\u201d that African land in African hands is \u201cnot producing,\u201d that Africa can only feed itself by reorienting agriculture into \u201cmarket business,\u201d and that progress means adopting high-yield varieties, agrochemicals, and GMO-led pipelines. These stories serve clear commercial interests: the \u201cGreen Revolution agenda will allow them to sell their agrochemicals [and] their high-yielding varieties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of AFSA\u2019s answer is to work through pride, taste, and everyday life \u2014 not just policy papers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The deeper problem, he argues, is the emotional power of \u201cmodernisation theory\u201d\u2014a worldview imported from Europe that treats development as a single linear path from \u201cbackwardness to modernity.\u201d In that frame, traditional practices are automatically dismissed: \u201cyour land is backward, your seed is backward\u2026 your technology is backward.\u201d It isn\u2019t just persuasion; it\u2019s a status system.<\/p>\n

So how do you counter a belief that operates at the level of identity?<\/p>\n

Part of AFSA\u2019s answer is to work through pride, taste, and everyday life\u2014not just policy papers. Belay points to a campaign called \u201cMy Food is African\u201d, built on research into the value of African foods and a simple premise: people want food that reflects who they are. He also describes organising African chefs to champion African ingredients and cuisines\u2014creating a \u201cpowerful statement\u201d that African food is good, and that innovation can come from mixing traditions across countries to speak to a younger generation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also, plainly, a fight over attention and access. \u201cBill Gates can come today\u2026 [and] easily get an appointment with the president,\u201d Belay says. \u201cThe doors are open to them and not to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the structural shift shaping every food debate: urbanisation. Belay calls it a \u201chuge\u201d challenge, but he refuses a simplistic rural romanticism. Youth leaving farms can reduce land fragmentation; remittances can support rural households. The real danger is unplanned urbanisation\u2014slums, weak infrastructure, and rural underinvestment that accelerates the loss of farming knowledge and local food systems.<\/p>\n

You can raise yields while destroying resilience\u2014and the costs show up later in health, degraded land, and social breakdown.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When asked whether any governments are taking food sovereignty seriously, Belay is cautiously optimistic. He names Ethiopia and Uganda as places where leaders express support, and points to movements in Ghana, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and beyond. The momentum, he argues, has been accelerated by shocks that exposed Africa\u2019s vulnerability.<\/p>\n

COVID was one. Belay recalls how vaccine access made the global hierarchy brutally visible: \u201cwhen push comes to shove, you are on your own.\u201d The war in Ukraine was another: fuel, fertiliser, and wheat prices surged, triggering a basic question\u2014why should Africans starve because of a war elsewhere? And trade disruptions, including tariff politics associated with the Trump era, reinforced the case for strengthening intra-African trade and reducing dependency.<\/p>\n

Yet Belay warns that \u201csovereignty\u201d is a contested word. Governments may adopt the language while pursuing a model that still poisons soils, promotes pesticide-heavy farming, or treats agriculture as export business rather than feeding people. \u201cIf you understand food sovereignty as increasing only productivity,\u201d he says, \u201cthen there is a problem.\u201d You can raise yields while destroying resilience\u2014and the costs show up later in health, degraded land, and social breakdown. That is why he raises \u201ctrue cost accounting\u201d: measuring what industrial systems hide.<\/p>\n

Overhanging all of this is the constraint that rarely makes it into glossy agriculture pitches: debt. Belay points to repayments to private lenders, banks, and major international institutions as a siphon on public investment\u2014money that could otherwise support agroecology, health systems, and jobs for a very young continent. And because repayments are tied to hard currency, governments are pushed to earn dollars through exports\u2014often reinforcing the very commodity systems food sovereignty tries to escape.<\/p>\n

Belay\u2019s message is not that Africa should retreat or reject innovation. It is that Africa should choose the terms of innovation\u2014rooted in ecology, cultural confidence, and justice, rather than dependency packaged as progress. Food sovereignty, in his telling, is not a niche activist demand. It is a strategy for survival in a world where the global food order is increasingly brittle\u2014and increasingly controlled by people who are not accountable to the communities who eat the consequences.<\/p>\n

Listen to the whole interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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