Financing Food Security and Nutrition: Defunding industrial agriculture and re-purposing support for agroecology in Africa
Last month, IATP had the privilege of attending two important and interrelated events in Nairobi on defunding industrial agriculture and promoting agroecology. The first event was convened by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and centered on Developing a Continental Campaign Roadmap aimed at challenging financial flows to industrial agriculture and shifting financial power by redirecting funding to agroecology. The event brought together over 70 farmers, activists, researchers, and policymakers.
The second event, convened by Biovision Africa Trust, Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture and over 20 partners, was the 2nd Eastern Africa Agroecology Conference (EAAC25) on Harnessing the Potential of Agroecology in Transforming and Sustaining Resilient Agri-Food Systems. This event attracted over 800 participants from 43 countries across Africa and beyond. It included representatives of governments, the private sector, farmers associations, NGOs, academia, researchers, investors, and development partners.
In his technical presentation, Markus Arbenz, Senior Consultant and Project Leader at FiBL Switzerland’s Department of International Cooperation, observed that today “we have a food system that is not serving the people well,” resulting in populations that are undernourished or obese. Responding to these shortcomings, the meeting motivated stakeholders to invest in interventions that can transform current unsustainable food systems by transitioning towards more environmentally friendly solutions (agroecology) with long-term vision and planning.
Industrial agriculture in Africa—an enduring colonial legacy
Industrial agriculture is the large-scale, intensive production of crops and animals, often involving the use of chemical fertilizers on crops or the routine, harmful use of antibiotics in animals to encourage fast-tracked growth and weight gain. It can involve crops that are genetically modified, dependent on pesticides, and use other practices that degrade the soil and increase various forms of pollution and emissions, while leaving farmers more vulnerable to environmental damage.
In noting the need for a shift in funding priorities, Anne Maina, National Coordinator of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (BIBA Kenya), argued that the current financial system overwhelmingly favors industrial agriculture, stating, “This extractive, monoculture-driven model undermines our food sovereignty, depletes our soils, and erodes the resilience of our farmers.”
In Africa, like in the United States, the consolidation of farming reinforces and incentivizes production of a narrow range of commercial crops like corn, wheat and soybeans, with little incentive to grow much else, especially much-needed fruits, vegetables and legumes that are essential for dietary diversity and healthy nutrition.
Industrial agriculture and the industrial food system present a barrier to realizing the potential climate benefits in agriculture. Large “factory farms” encourage over-production, degrade the soil, waste fertilizer and mishandle manure, which all serve to increase emissions. On the other hand, they discourage environmentally sustainable practices like intercropping, crop rotation and the use of shade crops that extract carbon dioxide from the air, store it in the soil and improve soil health. A major concern with industrial agriculture is how it squeezes small farmers as they incur financial losses, and shifts production and ownership of land to much larger farming operations over time.
Jo-Anne McArthur / Sibanye Trust / We Animals
In recent decades, consolidation in the industry has intensified as agriculture has experienced “vertical integration” in which small, diverse farms producing a variety of crops and livestock have been overtaken by an industrialized system dominated by multinational corporations. Today in the U.S., over a third of cropland exists on farms exceeding 2,000 acres, which is twice the acreage of large farms 30 years ago. The drivers behind this ongoing expansion involve a complex mix of market forces, politics, technology and corporate power that is stacked against small family farms across the world. Ultimately, industrial agriculture has transformed agriculture into a business that resembles the fossil fuel industry, which extracts value out of the ground with relentless efficiency while leaving a trail of pollution as well as destruction of local food cultures and communities in its wake.
African governments, in their quest to enhance food security, agricultural productivity, value addition and exports, find themselves increasingly aligning with corporate-driven industrial agriculture. This involves pushing for greater chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, reliance on hybrid seed varieties and adoption of cost-intensive technologies such as use of drones for application of agrichemicals. This trend is a replaying of colonial agriculture systems in Africa which, by design, were structured around cash crop exports such as cocoa, tobacco, sugar cane, coffee and cotton, supplying European economies while leaving African communities vulnerable to food shortages.
This system—which remained largely intact after independence and was reinforced by international financial institutions through various lending programs and structural adjustment programs—reinforced a model of commercial and industrial agriculture, built around large plantation and low wage labor. Thus, industrial agriculture in Africa today continues to serve foreign interests as opposed to African farmers, locking farmers in a cycle of debt, exposure to external shocks and supply chain volatility (including prices). Speaking at the AFSA conference, AFSA General Coordinator Million Belay expressed the importance of a pan-African coalition to challenge the financial structures that underpin industrial agriculture that result in an extractive system largely benefitting global agribusiness giants. He added that agroecology is not just about farming, it is a movement for food sovereignty that rejects colonial food systems.
Industrial agriculture goes directly against the objectives of agroecology. Africa is one of the richest continents in natural resources, biodiversity, and agricultural potential. Yet the region continues to be highly exploited due to a deeply entrenched system of neo-colonial extraction through which Africa’s vast agricultural resources (commodities) benefit foreign corporations, financial institutions, and political elites rather than the African farmers and communities who work the land.
Continuing the fight for agroecology transitions in Africa
It is important for activists to present a solid data-driven case for agroecology to demonstrate its superiority over conventional agriculture if we are to lobby successfully for widespread adoption of agroecology and repurposing of finance to this approach. Several experts at the two events spoke at length on the empirical case for agroecology as the best case for a sustainable food system. Markus Arbenz of FiBL Switzerland addressed some of the criticisms of agroecology as a viable alternative to industrial agriculture, including that agroecology requires a lot of land (and is not suitable for smallholder agriculture), is expensive the implement, cannot feed the world and cannot be profitable or scalable. Countering these arguments, he noted that evidence from trials in countries like Kenya, Bolivia and Indonesia demonstrated that over several years of observation—coupled with good agricultural practices—agroecology performed equally or better than conventional agriculture in terms of yields and productivity for crops like potatoes. It required less energy and was better for the environment as it involved less emission and helped rebuild organic carbon in soil. Thus, agroecology was found to be critical for climate adaptation and building resilient food systems.
Building on these sentiments, Rémi Cluset, agroecology advisor for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) discussed FAO’s Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) which was launched in 2019. TAPE is a multicriteria digital tool to produce global evidence on the multidimensional performance of agroecology and support the agroecology transition. It is used to analyze different types of production systems and agricultural sub-sectors across various local contexts and provides a characterization of the level of agroecological transition of local farms and assesses their performance across the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. These dimensions include land tenure, productivity, income, added value, exposure to pesticides, dietary diversity, women’s empowerment, youth employment, biodiversity, and soil health. Currently, TAPE is being used for data collection in 58 countries, and the results from sub-Saharan Africa—based on data collected in 2021 and 2022—so far look encouraging. Farms with higher average scores over the 10 elements of agroecology exhibit greater results on economy (value added by capita and net revenue per capita), resilience, youth employment, dietary diversity, agrobiodiversity, management of pesticide and soil health impacts.
A call to action
On the back of such data-driven assessments, IATP and our allies advocate for defunding industrial agriculture by the private sector and international financial institutions, and for shifting the financial and policy landscape in favor of sustainable, farmer-led food systems (for example in the livestock sector).
In her opening remarks at the AFSA conference, Anne Maina reiterated the core principles of agroecology which foster farmer-led seed systems, ecological farming practices, localized food economies, and community resilience. She lamented the environmental and social costs of industrial agriculture, stating that despite the overwhelming evidence of agroecology’s benefits for climate resilience, biodiversity, and nutrition, financial flows continue to prop up industrial agriculture at the expense of people and the planet. She called for actionable steps to disrupt the financial systems sustaining industrial agriculture.
In heeding this call and building on AFSA’s Healthy Soil, Healthy Food initiative, stakeholders at the AFSA conference agreed to continue to map financial flows and devise ways to achieve strategized divestment from industrial agriculture and for repurposing of funding towards agroecology investment. Agroecology goes beyond just an approach to farming—it is also a model for food sovereignty that rejects colonial agricultural systems while strengthening farmer-led seed systems and the rights of indigenous people to land, seeds and preservation of their ecological farming practices. The model promotes local food economies and restores power to African farmers and other food producing communities.
Dismantling the industrial agriculture debt cycle requires African governments and international financial institutions to redirect agricultural funding to agroecology and prioritize policies that support smallholder farmers, such as local food production, market regulation programs and through upholding rights and access to land as well as farmers’ seed sovereignty. It also requires allies to continue to track financial flows and expose how industrial agriculture is being funded and by whom.
The call for defunding industrial agriculture is not a call to defund the agriculture sector. We welcome increased investment in agriculture, but it must be of the kind that is responsive to the environment and the people who are at the center of sustainable agriculture, including smallholder farmers, and meets society’s dietary and sustainability goals. Such investments must not concentrate power and profit within a few multinational companies.
In terms of future action, the AFSA conference delegates agreed on the following selected priorities:
- Analyze and map the financial networks supporting industrial agriculture and build strategies to disrupt these flows through policy advocacy, public pressure and financial sector engagement.
- Promote and amplify funding for agroecology through different funding institutions.
- Develop a solid set of advocacy actions and strategies to be implemented at local, national, and international levels, ensuring wide engagement and a cohesive campaign.
- Strengthen partnerships and collaboration among African and global civil society, networks to coordinate efforts in shifting the financial landscape in favor of agroecology.
- Engage policymakers to encourage prioritization of agroecological programs in national budgets and policies.
AFSA and its allies (including IATP) are committed to advancing agroecology and food sovereignty through social movements while resisting the industrialization of African food and farming systems. It is imperative to continue to build the foundation for agroecology and to oppose the destructive methods promoted by industrial agriculture. We call on international financial institutions to increase transparency around financial flows to agriculture and to provide greater support for a genuine transition to agroecology and food sovereignty.
The issues around defunding industrial agriculture, and financing agroecology for systemic food system transformations are also important for member states to consider as they meet in multilateral spaces such as the UNCFS’s Collaborative Governance Dialogue on Financing for Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) in April to discuss financing for food security and nutrition and at the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) from June 30–July 3 in Seville, Spain.
FFD4 offers an opportunity to situate financing for development in the broader context of structural barriers such as debilitating debt burdens that keeps many developing countries, especially the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) trapped in the vicious cycle of food import dependency. Financing FSN needs to be directed towards building on the strengths of local food producing communities and the rich knowledge they have on conserving their biodiverse food systems, while removing the barriers they face in accessing appropriate technology, bio-based agricultural inputs and fairtrade markets, both in terms of building appropriate institutions and infrastructures. Financing FSN must be such that it simultaneously addresses the environmental and socio-economic and cultural externalities of the food systems, and this calls for close coordination and collaboration at the national level with other financing plans on biodiversity, climate and poverty alleviation, among others. IATP joins our allies across the world in urging the CFS and the Rome Based Agencies to rethink financing to make it work for food producing communities, not corporations.
