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By: Peter Gubbels, Nathanial Matthews, and Deon Nel

This article was originally published on October 23, 2020 on AgriLinks.

The pandemic has acted as a giant magnifying lens. It has shed light on inequality, the vulnerability of people’s livelihoods, and the fragilities of a hyperconnected global economic system.

Optimists say the pandemic is focusing policy minds on the need for more decisive, collective action on many resilience issues, including food and agriculture. As governments invest enormous resources to recover from COVID-19, many civil society groups are insisting on changing the system for the better.  Optimists are saying: “build back better”.  

Pessimists respond that the pandemic is only a moment that sheds light on well-known flaws and injustices before going back “to business as usual.” Once economies stabilize, the overall global system will continue unaltered. Various interest groups, who helped create the status quo before the pandemic, are still powerful players.

This tension between COVID-19 optimism and pessimism is currently playing out in dialogues regarding the farming and food system of sub-Saharan Africa.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, the African food system was in crisis. In 2018, more than 250 million people in sub-Saharan Africa experienced severe food insecurity, most of them in rural areas. More than 30 percent of children are stunted partly due to poverty and poor diets. 

The socio-economic benefits of investing in small-scale farm families, who often constitute more than 60 percent of the population, are obvious. Many governments in sub-Saharan Africa, however, favor agri-business, larger-scale commercial farms and the promotion of cash crops. The prevailing thinking is that “modernizing” agriculture requires mechanization, irrigation, increased use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and the use of hybrid seeds. The focus is primarily on increased yields and profits.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights that African countries have become highly dependent on large international food industries and the global imported food market. Last year, according to the African Development Bank, approximately $35 billion worth of agricultural products were imported into Africa. This expected to rise to $110 billion by 2025.

Importing such massive amounts of food weakens the resilience of African economies. It decimates the livelihoods of small scale farmers. It exports rural jobs away from Africa. The aggressive expansion of imported processed foods also negatively affects human health. They are proven to contribute to growing levels of obesity and diabetes in West Africa.

Imagine what African governments could do to strengthen their farming and food system if they implemented policies and programs that re-directed resources spent on importing cheap, often highly processed, food to the support of their own small scale farmers, and the localized production, processing, and marketing of grains, fruits and vegetables? 

Post COVID-19 investments should promote a farming and food system that is not only productive, but also sustainable, resilient, nutrition-sensitive, and not dependent on expensive external inputs. Nowhere is this more important than in the Sahel region of West Africa, where the farming and food system has long been in deep crisis. Nearly 30 million people are struggling to produce enough food in the wake of climate change and land degradation.

In the context of Africa, one of the best ways to bolster a person’s health and resistance to diseases such as COVID-19 is through nutritious diets. Recognizing this, Groundswell International and the Global Resilience Partnership are sounding a clarion call for governments to support actions to improve food and nutrition security through the promotion of “agroecology”. This approach to agriculture enables small scale farmers to develop a farming system that is not only productive but also climate-resilient, sustainable, and nutrition-sensitive. The proven innovations include better integration of crops and livestock, conservation agriculture, using woody perennials in fields and landscapes to ecologically increase the productivity of more diverse food items. The underlying principle is to foster more integrated and equitable farming systems that use species diversity as a source of resilience and diversified diets while reducing the use of harmful chemicals.

One example is Groundswell’s work in Burkina Faso, which was supported by the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP). Our local network partners are working with farmers’ movements to promote agroforestry, mixed cropping, rainwater harvesting, and composting. They are obtaining incredible results despite the water scarcity near the encroaching Sahara desert. With these practices, they have reclaimed abandoned land for farming and obtained up to 130% yield increases of millet and sorghum, while regreening the landscape and adapting to climate change. In agroecological systems like these, the use of diverse and native species bridges wild and cultivated areas, helping to manage pests while also providing vital pollinators with continuous habitat.

These practical examples, supported by research evidence, are the building blocks that provide starting points for a new political discourse about agriculture.  With direct effects on diets, pollution, climate change, and disaster risk reduction, transforming agriculture must become central in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa.

Groundswell, GRP and their partners and allies seek to persuade many others to become COVID-19 recovery optimists.

The Barefoot Guide to Surviving COVID-19  addresses how people across Africa can weather the COVID-19 pandemic, and, in the process it debunks many of the misconceptions that exist in the food industry, provides real, sustainable solutions to the challenges families face in their pursuit for access to healthy food, and explains how families can start their own gardens.

The Natural Food Barefoot Guide Writer’s Collective, which includes Groundswell International’s Peter Gubbels, wrote the book. It is the first book in a new agroecology series produced by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a broad-based alliance of civil society actors that are part of the struggle for food sovereignty and agroecology in Africa. 

We spoke with Peter about this Guide and what it can do for families in vulnerable communities.

Peter, tell us a little bit about your role at Groundswell and your experience with agroecology and sustainable food solutions.

I am one of the co-founders of Groundswell International, and I have been working in rural development for 38 years. For the past 28 years, I have lived and worked in West Africa, helping rural communities promote sustainable agriculture, agroecology, and nutrition. My wife and I live in a village north of Ghana where we have a small farm and produce our own food.

What can African families take away from the Barefoot Guide to Surviving COVID-19?

The COVID-19 pandemic hit everyone hard, but in vulnerable countries, high levels of poverty, inequality, and inadequate healthcare made controlling the virus more challenging. Nearly 3 billion people in developing countries don’t have access to clean water, and social distancing has been all but impossible for those that live in crowded conditions.

However, resilience to COVID-19 involves more than access to PPE. Healthy food is a must to boost the immune system. This guide is meant to assist citizens in the quest for nutritious, chemical-free food. It explains in simple, easy-to-understand terms why a balanced diet of natural, unprocessed food helps to strengthen immune systems, allowing a person to cope with and heal from infectious diseases like COVID-19.

You can find and read the guide on our website.

Environmental consequences disproportionately impact the poor and marginalized because they are excluded from decision-making processes that affect the places where they live. This has been true for generations, but today the stakes are greater than ever as environmental challenges, such as climate change, generate uneven environmental consequences on a global scale. 

People living in low-lying places, especially island nations that are just a few feet above sea level, are obviously vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by a warming planet. Until more recently, it was less clear how climate change impacted people living in environmental fragile areas that are susceptible to drought, flooding and extreme climate events. The Dry Corridor in Central America is one of these places. 

Recurrent drought and increasingly unpredictable annual rains have exacerbated the already difficult conditions facing farming families in the Dry Corridor. They have resulted in massive crop losses in these rain-fed systems, causing widespread food insecurity and increased malnutrition rates in already vulnerable populations. Thus, climate, and more specifically rainfall and temperature, undermine the livelihoods and food security of smallholder farming families in these environmentally fragile areas even though they have virtually no ability to influence carbon emissions in developed countries or environmental policies that could encourage carbon sequestration or climate change adaptation measures that could help them adjust to the new climate reality.

In the absence of global leadership to help marginalized people address this new reality, organizations like ours – Groundswell International – are working with rural communities to develop and implement effective strategies to address the root causes of environmental problems, as well as the associated issues of food insecurity, social marginalization, economic vulnerability, and forced migration. While each of our local partners responds in its own way to the unique people, context and challenges where they operate, Groundswell-supported programs everywhere:

• Work with farmer leaders to test and adopt agroecological methods and spread them to more people through farmer-to-farmer training, allowing these farmers to produce more healthy food and restore hundreds of thousands of acres of degraded land.
• Empower women farmers to participate in savings and credit groups, improve ecological production, gain access to productive assets, and diversify their livelihoods, which in turn improves their families’ food security, incomes and resilience.
• Strengthen local markets and increase farmers’ incomes through savings and credit groups and community-based agricultural enterprises that add value to locally grown crops.
• Nourish vulnerable families by explicitly integrating gender equity and nutrition into agricultural programs. Our holistic approach links agroecological farming to family nutrition.
• Support citizens to engage with local decision makers on enabling local policies, and produce influential case studies, policy briefs, and reports to facilitate sharing across our networks and with other stakeholders to expedite the necessary transition to agroecology.

In Honduras, Groundswell works with Vecinos Honduras to support family farmers to create regenerative food and farming systems that address these complex challenges. 

Watch our latest video to learn more about our partnership with Vecinos Honduras and how, together, we are empowering marginalized farmers, providing alternatives migration, and countering the effects of climate change: