Download or read book The African Green Revolution and the Food Sovereignty Movement written by Helena Shilomboleni and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT Although there is consensus among academics and policy makers that how we grow and distribute food needs to be more sustainable, the most appropriate ways of doing so remain unclear and are at times deeply contested. Over the last decade, two vastly different approaches to food security and sustainability have become increasingly prominent in Sub-Saharan Africa. One is the African Green Revolution, implemented by a consortium of partners comprised of African governments, the private sector, philanthropic donors, and multilateral institutions. The other is the African food sovereignty movement, headed by Africa's peasant unions and civil society organizations. The ontological backgrounds of these two agrarian models inevitably influence their respective approaches to food security and sustainability in the different regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. The African Green Revolution is bent in favor of modern rationalist notions about structural transformation and development. The food sovereignty model is inspired by historical structural theories that tackle issues of power and (in)justice embedded within global political and economic structures. These diametrically opposed ideological foundations help to explain the polarization and tensions that exist between the two models. Such tensions, however, also hinder fruitful discussion about how to effectively address key concerns in Africa's food systems. To advance the academic debates, this dissertation explores the following question: in what ways can sustainability assessment frameworks give insights into the potential contributions of the African Green Revolution and food sovereignty approaches to food security and sustainability in rural Mozambique? This study had three research objectives: (1) to refine conceptually and apply a sustainability assessment framework that merges key food security and sustainability goals in southern Africa's food and agricultural systems; (2) to better understand the perspectives of stakeholders implementing the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty models as well as the farmers that they serve to determine what each model offers in terms of food security and sustainability; and (3) to tease out the implications of the two models' activities on the ground, including their potential impact on food and agricultural policies. In 2014 and 2015, fieldwork was conducted in Mozambique, where both agrarian models are being implemented by two organizations. The African Green Revolution is supported by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), and the food sovereignty model is represented by the National Union of Mozambican Peasants (UNAC).The field-research was designed to comparatively assess how the activities of these two organizations contribute to food security and sustainability from farmer perspectives. Various techniques were used to gather data, including a comprehensive literature review, semi-structured interviews with key informants (n=71) and participant observations. The research identified five interrelated sustainable food system indicators that were informed by farmer perspectives and sustainability assessment literature: access to quality seeds, activities to improve soil health, income opportunities, land rights and policy engagement. Taken together, these indicators can help to address both the technical aspects of meeting food security (issues of production) and the policy and political economy issues that facilitate (or hinder) the means to achieving food security. The research finds that the African Green Revolution and food sovereignty models respond to the needs of Mozambican smallholder farmers in more complex and nuanced ways than mainstay discussions in academic and public forums reveal. While some scholars and actors contend that the African Green Revolution and food sovereignty models are incongruent, Mozambican smallholder farmers utilize some of the resources that the models offer in complementary rather than competing ways. Neither model addresses critical components of food security and sustainability in their entirety. Where possible, farmers engage both models-taking from each what helps them to meet these two goals. The conflicting interplay between the African Green Revolution and the food sovereignty movement at the broader political-economy level, versus farmers' complementary engagement with the two models, illustrates that meeting food security and sustainability objectives is, in some contexts, messy. This realization suggests a need for further research, particularly on options that may serve broad-based sustainability goals in Africa's food systems.

Download or read book We Are Not Starving written by Joeva Sean Rock and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical text is a timely ethnography of how global powers, local resistance, and capital flows are shaping contemporary African foodways. Ghana was one of the first countries targeted by a group of US donors and agribusiness corporations that funded an ambitious plan to develop genetically modified (GM) crops for African farmers. The collective believed that GM crops would help farmers increase their yields and help spark a “new” Green Revolution on the continent. Soon after the project began in Ghana, a nationwide food sovereignty movement emerged in opposition to GM crops. Today, in spite of impressive efforts and investments by proponents, only two GM crops remain in the pipeline. Why, after years of preparation, millions of dollars of funding, and multiple policy reforms, did these megaprojects effectively come to a halt? One of the first ethnographies to take on the question of GM crops in the African context, We Are Not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana blends archival analysis, interviews, and participant observation with Ghanaian scientists, farmers, activists, and officials. Ultimately the text aims to illuminate why GM crops have animated the country and to highlight how their introduction has opened an opportunity to air grievances about the systematic de-valuing and exploitation of African land, labor, and knowledge that have been centuries in the making.

Download or read book We are Not Starving written by Joeva Rock and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Africa, projects organized under the African Green Revolution seek to introduce genetically modified (GM) seeds into African markets to increase crop yields. This dissertation examines controversy surrounding the commercialization of GM crops in Ghana with a focus on international and Ghanaian officials working on GM projects, a social movement opposing those projects, and farmers caught in the middle. In particular, the dissertation shows; 1) how U.S. development policy is tied to the upswing of interest in biotechnology in Africa; 2) how scientists and activists are bonded by a mutual dissatisfaction with donor influence in state-making, and; 3) how, after years of un-development, farmers are skeptical of donor projects and technologies that require intensive capital, raising questions over future adoption of GM seeds. By showing the local articulations of a global technology, this dissertation demonstrates how state sovereignty, citizenship, food and agriculture are intimately tied, and troubles popular narratives of Africans as passive recipients of aid and victims of modernity.

Download or read book Africa s Green Revolution written by William G. Moseley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the dominant neoliberal agenda for agricultural development and hunger alleviation in Africa. The text reviews the history of African agricultural and food security policy in the post-colonial period, across a range of geographical contexts, in order to contextualise the productionist approach embedded in the much heralded New Green Revolution for Africa. This strategy, supported by a range of international agencies, promotes the use of hybrid seeds, fertilisers, and pesticides to boost crop production. This approach is underpinned by a new and unprecedented level of public–private partnerships as donors actively work to promote the private sector and build links between African farmers, input suppliers, agro-dealers, agro-processors, and retailers. On the consumer end, increased supermarket penetration into poorer neighbourhoods is proffered as a solution to urban food insecurity. The chapters in this volume complicate understandings of this new approach and raise serious questions about its effectiveness as a strategy for increasing food production and alleviating poverty across the continent. This book is based on a special issue of African Geographical Review.

Download or read book Translating Food Sovereignty written by Matthew C. Canfield and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its current state, the global food system is socially and ecologically unsustainable: nearly two billion people are food insecure, and food systems are the number one contributor to climate change. While agro-industrial production is promoted as the solution to these problems, growing global "food sovereignty" movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems. Translating Food Sovereignty accompanies activists based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. In contrast to social movements that frame their claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists are one of the first to have articulated themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance. While this global regulatory framework emerged to deepen market logics, Matthew C. Canfield reveals how activists are leveraging this order to make more expansive social justice claims. This nuanced, deeply engaged ethnography illustrates how food sovereignty activists are cultivating new forms of transnational governance from the ground up.

Download or read book The African Food Crisis written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Eating Tomorrow written by Timothy A. Wise and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful polemic against agricultural technology." —Nature A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise's Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests. Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.

Download or read book Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty written by Marc Edelman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a pioneering contribution to the study of food politics and critical agrarian studies, where food sovereignty has emerged as a pivotal concept over the past few decades, with a wide variety of social movements, on-the-ground experiments, and policy innovations flying under its broad banner. Despite its large and growing popularity, the history, theoretical foundations, and political program of food sovereignty have only occasionally received in-depth analysis and critical scrutiny. This collection brings together both longstanding scholars in critical agrarian studies, such as Philip McMichael, Bina Agarwal, Henry Bernstein, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, and Marc Edelman, as well as a dynamic roster of early- and mid-career researchers. The ultimate aim is to advance this important frontier of research and organizing, and put food sovereignty on stronger footing as a mobilizing frame, a policy objective, and a plan of action for the human future. This volume was published as part one of the special double issue celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Download or read book Food Sovereignty and Urban Agriculture written by Anne Siebert and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-08 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the interplay of urban agriculture and food sovereignty through the innovative lens of the "critical urban food perspective". It focuses on the mobilisation of urban food producers as a powerful response to highly exclusionary dynamics in the agri-food system including insufficient food access and disastrous land dispossessions. This volume particularly aims to fill the gap in the current literature by engaging with food sovereignty discourses and movements in urban areas. Related activism of urban food producers in the Global South remains underrepresented in practice and in literature. Therefore, this book engages with the lived realities of an urban agriculture initiative in George, South Africa. Building on theoretical notions of the "right to the city" and "everyday forms of resistance", the book illuminates how deprived food producers expose inequalities and propose alternatives. The findings of in-depth empirical research reveal that dwellers perceive farming as a mean to overcome historical segregation, high food prices, and unhealthy nutrition. Hence, they breathe life into food sovereignty in practice and suggest further alliances beyond the city. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of alternative food politics, agrarian transformation, and food movements as well as rural-urban intersections.

Download or read book An African Green Revolution written by Keijiro Otsuka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-22 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the usefulness of the Asian model of agricultural development for Africa, where, even before the recent world food crisis, half the population lived on less than on dollar a day, and a staggering one in three people and one third of all children were undernourished. Africa has abundant natural resources; agriculture provides most of its jobs, a third of national income and a larger portion of total export earnings. However the levels of land and labor productivity rank among the worst in the world. The book explains Africa’s productivity gap and proposes ways to close it, by examining recent experience in Africa and by drawing on lessons from Asia.

Download or read book Food Sovereignty in International Context written by Amy Trauger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food sovereignty is an emerging discourse of empowerment and autonomy in the food system with the development of associated practices in rural and some urban spaces. While literature on food sovereignty has proliferated since the first usage of the term in 1996 at the Rome Food Summit, most has been descriptive rather than explanatory in nature, and often confuses food sovereignty with other movements and objectives such as alternative food networks, food justice, or food self-sufficiency. This book is a collection of empirically rich and theoretically engaged papers across a broad geographical spectrum reflecting on what constitutes the politics and practices of food sovereignty. They contribute to a theoretical gap in the food sovereignty literature as well as a relative shortage of empirical work on food sovereignty in the global "North", much previous work having focussed on Latin America. Specific case studies are included from Canada, Norway, Switzerland, southern Europe, UK and USA, as well as Africa, India and Ecuador. The book presents new research on the emergence of food sovereignties. It offers a wide variety of empirical examples and a theoretically engaged framework for explaining the aims of actors and organizations working toward autonomy and democracy in the food system.

Download or read book Food Sovereignty written by Ernest Cañada and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book SAFA Guidelines written by and published by Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO). This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) Guidelines were developed for assessing the impact of food and agriculture operations on the environment and people. The guiding vision of SAFA is that food and agriculture systems worldwide are characterized by all four dimensions of sustainability: good governance, environmental integrity, economic resilience and social well-being.

Download or read book Innovations as Key to the Green Revolution in Africa written by Andre Bationo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 1339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa can achieve self sufficiency in food production through adoption of innovations in the agriculture sector. Numerous soil fertility and crop production technologies have been generated through research, however, wide adoption has been low. African farmers need better technologies, more sustainable practices, and fertilizers to improve and sustain their crop productivity and to prevent further degradation of agricultural lands. The agricultural sector also needs to be supported by functional institutions and policies that will be able to respond to emerging challenges of globalization and climate change.

Download or read book Farming While Black written by Leah Penniman and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Farming While Black is the first comprehensive "how to" guide for aspiring African-heritage growers to reclaim their dignity as agriculturists and for all farmers to understand the distinct, technical contributions of African-heritage people to sustainable agriculture. At Soul Fire Farm, author Leah Penniman co-created the Black and Latino Farmers Immersion (BLFI) program as a container for new farmers to share growing skills in a culturally relevant and supportive environment led by people of color. Farming While Black organizes and expands upon the curriculum of the BLFI to provide readers with a concise guide to all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters Penniman uplifts the wisdom of the African diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described--from whole farm planning, soil fertility, seed selection, and agroecology, to using whole foods in culturally appropriate recipes, sharing stories of ancestors, and tools for healing from the trauma associated with slavery and economic exploitation on the land. Woven throughout the book is the story of Soul Fire Farm, a national leader in the food justice movement." --

Download or read book Food Sovereignty Agroecology and Biocultural Diversity written by Michel. P. Pimbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contestations over knowledge – and who controls its production – are a key focus of social movements and other actors that promote food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity. This book critically examines the kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing needed for food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity. ‘Food sovereignty’ is understood here as a transformative process that seeks to recreate the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of autonomous food systems based on agroecology, biocultural diversity, equity, social justice and ecological sustainability. It is shown that alternatives to the current model of development require radically different knowledges and epistemologies from those on offer today in mainstream institutions (including universities, policy think tanks and donor organizations). To achieve food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity, there is a need to re-imagine and construct knowledge for diversity, decentralisation, dynamic adaptation and democracy. The authors critically explore the changes in organizations, research paradigms and professional practice that could help transform and co-create knowledge for a new modernity based on plural definitions of wellbeing. Particular attention is given to institutional, pedagogical and methodological innovations that can enhance cognitive justice by giving hitherto excluded citizens more power and agency in the construction of knowledge. The book thus contributes to the democratization of knowledge and power in the domain of food, environment and society. Chapters 1 and 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book Business as Usual written by Craig Calhoun and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A co-publication with the Social Science Research Council."