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By: Edwin Escoto, Regional Coordinator for Latin America & the Caribbean

In Latin America, centuries of intractable social inequality and the accelerating deterioration of ecosystems, which are rooted in the neoliberal economic “development” model, have dramatically exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation has become so dire that the lives of millions now hang in the balance. These long-smoldering social and environmental crises demand urgent action if we have any hope of salvaging the project of civilization in much of the region.

Farming and social leaders agree that Latin America is currently facing an unprecedented crisis in small and medium-scale agricultural production, which is manifesting itself in growing food insecurity and poverty in the countryside, conflict, and permanent, forced migration of the region’s youth. The breakdown of rural communities and their diversified, local farming is caused, in large part, by a globalized corporate food system and free trade agreements that favor corporations and wealthy landowners over smallholder farm families.

Over the past three decades, agroecology has gained much attention as the basis for the transition from conventional agriculture and external-market oriented production to ecological, localized agriculture that cannot only provide rural families with significant social, economic, and environmental benefits, but can also sustainably and more equitably feed urban populations.

Agroecology has been shown to substantially boost agricultural production, increase agro-biological diversity, strengthen resilience and improve nutrition. Additionally, it often contributes to improvements in community infrastructure for sanitation, hygiene and health, as well as improved community dynamics and increased leadership opportunities for women and youth.

COVID-19 has been especially hard on vulnerable populations that struggle to feed themselves even during good times. In this crisis, often it has been small farmers who have stepped up to feed their communities. These short and direct farmer-to-consumer relationships have demonstrated many advantages over the long supply chains that characterize most modern food systems. We see in their positive example the urgent need to promote new local food systems that guarantee the production of and access to abundant, healthy food for all.

In this context, Groundswell International has placed increased emphasis on building locally owned and operated businesses and connecting farmers to local markets, which helps ensure their incomes while also securing the communities’ access to food amid the widespread supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic.

In communities where our partner Vecinos Honduras works, there has been an influx of “coyotes”, which is the local term for the intermediary buyers of basic grains. Food shortages in urban centers has increased the number of coyotes searching for corn, beans, and other staples in rural communities. They offer farmers above-market prices, sometimes of up to 30%, for their produce and then sell for much higher prices in the surrounding cities.

Fortunately, many Honduran farmers have resisted selling to coyotes because they understand that securing their communities’ source of food is much more important than having a little more cash in their pockets. Farmers also know that the population in their communities will continue to increase in the coming months as people flee from the cities, and they want to be sure they have enough food to feed their relatives, friends and neighbors.

In addition to revealing the fragility of the just-in-time food system, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown light on exploitative trade and labor practices in Honduras and elsewhere. When the prevailing neoliberal economic model is operating smoothly, many farmers and other rural people from developing countries flock to urban centers in search of employment because they cannot make ends meet in their villages. In Honduras, cities where many maquiladora (foreign-based) companies have set up shop are called “seagull capitals”, because the corporations fly from country to country evading responsibilities with their workers. This model becomes unsustainable in times of crisis, like COVID-19, since they depend on open borders and free trade agreements.

As we see with each new crisis, there is also opportunity. The current pandemic is no exception. People who have returned to their communities – mostly young people under 30 years of age – have found in agriculture the opportunity to reintegrate into the economic and social fabric of the places where they grew up. This has had profound benefits at many levels:

• For themselves: the ability to produce their own food on their own land has helped salvaged and strengthen ancestral knowledge, for example, on the production and saving of local seeds. Also, young farmers are reclaiming their identities by innovating and diversifying ecological farm production using local resources and knowledge, launching new rural businesses, building new relationships that strengthen their communities, and participating in local savings and credit groups that help finance their farms and which also support local markets.

• For their families: having more people working the land in sustainable ways helps ensure the availability and access to healthy and diverse food, expands the knowledge base for solving problems, makes farming a multi-generational endeavor as it used to be, and highlights the contribution and role of women and youth in the family economy.

• For their communities: more farming families applying the best agro-ecological practices strengthens local food sovereignty and food security, helps restore the ecosystem, and contributes to a stronger local economy. It also strengthens the asset base of the communities when more people get involved in local savings and credit structures. And, finally, the integration of young people into the social dynamics of local organizations and politics makes the communities more dynamic.

COVID-19 has exposed the true face of neoliberalism and its consequences for people and the planet. Rather than trying to remake the old agenda, we should replace the existing paradigm with a new political and economic model centered around empowering and supporting individuals and communities in ecologically responsible ways. We are seeing glimpses of what sustainable local food systems can generate in the way of social, economic and environmental wellbeing. Now, regardless of where this pandemic takes us, we must embrace the path that has been revealed.

Groundswell looks forward to continuing to work with people and partners everywhere to create a new and better world for all from the ground up.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963

Food justice, racial justice and economic justice are deeply connected.  Justice in the U.S. is linked to justice in Haiti, Ghana, Guatemala, Nepal and other countries where Groundswell International works with partners, strengthening communities and social movements to create better lives.  We stand and act in solidarity with the millions of citizens in the U.S. and around the world who, appalled by the recent killing of George Floyd and the taking of too many Black lives for far too many years, are working to create a more just society and end the legacy of racism.

In solidarity,

Steve Brescia
Executive Director

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Further Reading

We stand with AFSA’s Statement on AfDB’s Dakar 2 Food Summit

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What are the solutions to “feed Africa?” Please read this important statement from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).  Groundswell International, through our West Africa network, is an active member of AFSA, the largest civil society network on the continent.  Diversity, not false solutions, is key to achieving food sovereignty and resilience in…

Continue Reading We stand with AFSA’s Statement on AfDB’s Dakar 2 Food Summit

New Evidence of Impact: Agroecology as a Poverty Solution in Haiti

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Since 2009, Groundswell International has been collaborating with Partenariat pour le Développement Local (PDL) in Haiti to strengthen farmers’ associations in the north of Haiti’s Central Plateau basin to regenerate their farmland and improve their lives. PDL has strengthened 14 peasant organizations, with over 9,900 farmers adapting agroecological farming strategies and spreading them farmer-to-farmer. These organizations also manage community savings & credit coops, seed banks, grain reserves, and cooperative enterprises for value added food processing and local marketing.

Continue Reading New Evidence of Impact: Agroecology as a Poverty Solution in Haiti

By: Steve Brescia, Executive Director

This article first appeared online in Springer Nature on May 18, 2020. It will appear in print in Agriculture and Human Values: Volume 37, Issue 3 in September 2020.

In a few short months an urgent question has absorbed people around the world. How and when do we end the COVID 19 pandemic? The answers depend on what actions we take. They also depend on recognizing the profound connections between our human health and the health of our ecosystems, economies, communities and societies. All of these rest on our agricultural and food system.

Groundswell International works with family farming communities in West Africa, the Americas and South Asia to sustainably overcome poverty and improve lives. These communities are accustomed to facing crisis. They are pioneers innovating solutions on the front lines of global challenges. When they experience crises in their farming and ecosystems, created by political and economic dynamics and practices, it often motivates smallholders to organize and develop more agroecological farming and local food systems. Their choice is to change, migrate or perish. Similarly, when epidemics (like cholera in Haiti) or natural disasters (like earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal) strike, we have seen how communities’ capacities for resilience allow them to limit damage and recover. So who better to learn from about responding to a crisis like COVID 19, or longer-term crises like climate change and chronic diseases?

Crises hit the most vulnerable the hardest. The World Food Program reports that COVID 19 may double the number of people facing acute hunger by the end of 2020. People around the world are already facing the devastating impacts of climate change. Non-communicable, chronic diseases tied to the Western diet and excess weight are now the leading cause of death in many countries. Our industrialized agriculture and food system are major contributors to these crises. Communities and social movements we support are reversing the downward cycle of ecological degradation, poverty and hunger, by promoting agroecology and strengthening local food economies.

Lankoande Francois and his family in eastern Burkina Faso are an example. Like 20 million people in the West African Sahel, they face the collapse of soil fertility and food production, leading to chronic poverty and hunger. In response, they have organized with neighbors and tested ways to regenerate their barren land. They dig small planting pits to hold rainwater, learn rapid composting techniques, access local seeds with a shorter growing season, and regenerate trees on their farms instead of slashing and burning fields. After 4 years, Lankoande and his family have recovered six acres of land, are producing 3.5 times more food, and have enough grain stored for the year, with surplus to sell. They are part of a farmer-to-farmer agroecology network spreading these approaches across 80 villages.

On eroded mountainsides in Central America, Haiti, and the Andes, farmers install soil and water conservation barriers, use cover crops to fix nitrogen and restore organic matter to soils, and diversify farms for improved resilience, production and nutrition. To escape debt and ensure food security, they mobilize assets in savings groups, community grain reserves, and seed banks. Cooperative farmer enterprises and alliances of farmers and consumers are working to rebuild local food markets.

What lessons can we draw as we work to build back better from current crises?

• Human solidarity above self-interest: Positive social change requires trust and organization.
• Regeneration not extraction: Produce in balance with nature, rather than destroying the ecosystems we depend on.
• Healthy farming and food: Link production that is healthy for the planet with consumption that is healthy for people.
• Ground-up innovation: Provide the right support for farmers and consumers to create sustainable agriculture and food systems.
• Democracy not centralized power: Design farming and food systems based on the interests of people organizing locally for their wellbeing, not the short-term financial interests of concentrated corporate and political power.

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing and expecting different results. The COVID 19 crisis is now leading to necessary changes in human behavior, economic and political responses, and resource allocations. We must also respond to wider crises and build more agroecological farming and food systems. The creative capacity of the world’s smallholders to farm productively with nature instead of against it, and build alliances with all of us who want to eat healthy food, is a powerful force to overcome poverty, hunger, disease and climate change. Let’s nurture these ground-up solutions.

By: Peter Gubbels, Director of Action Learning and Advocacy for West Africa

For over 10 years, I have been working with Groundswell International to support our national level network members to improve food and nutrition security in rural communities across the Sahel, in West Africa.  I am based in northern Ghana. In addition to my role with Groundswell, my wife and I have a small farm where we grow much of our own food.

I am deeply and personally concerned with how the COVID-19 pandemic is evolving here.

So far, the COVID-19 infection across West Africa is not severe. For reasons that puzzle those who study epidemics, the spread of the virus has been slow. But the virus will inevitably come.  When it does, the Imperial College of London and the World Health Organization’s models indicate that fragile countries, including those in sub-Saharan Africa, will be hit the hardest.

If severe illness spreads widely in rural areas of Africa, where small-scale farmers produce 80% of the food consumed, food production may plummet.

Farmers and rural communities are highly vulnerable to the Coronavirus. Many rural communities lack basic infrastructure for sanitation and shortages of clean water challenge the all-critical need for good hygiene. Underlying medical conditions in Africa, including prevalent tropical diseases such as malaria, and malnutrition, increase vulnerability to COVID-19.  The impossibility of maintaining physical distancing in crowded urban areas, in local markets, and with communal living arrangements all portend high rates of infection.

If measures to control COVID-19 prevent small scale farmers from working their land, caring for their animals, accessing markets to sell produce, buying food, or get seeds, hunger will increase.

African governments are currently making health their primary concern. However, it is essential they do not neglect livelihoods or food security. If food supply chains become disrupted and livelihoods untenable, vulnerable populations will move in search of assistance – with the unintended consequence of potentially further spreading the virus and possibly encountering heightened social tensions. 

As we living in West Africa watch the rich and powerful nations of Europe and the United States fracture under the strain, we feel pangs of dread of what will happen here.

Among all the preventive measures that are possible to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the availability and access of healthy and nutritious food is neglected. This is the major focus of Groundswell’s contribution to help mitigate COVID-19 in West Africa. One of the best ways to bolster a person’s immune system and resistance to disease is through eating healthy food.

The food security situation, however, is bleak. People here face a dual crisis of a deepening pandemic coupled with already high levels of food insecurity. Even before the pandemic, there were 237 million people in sub Saharan Africa suffering from chronic malnutrition.  The majority of them live in rural areas. In West Africa’s Sahel region, nearly 30 million are struggling to find food.

The World Bank predicts that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to cause a 7% decline in agricultural production and a 25% decline in food imports.  In wake of stringent government measures to restrict movement, there have been disruptions to the agriculture supply chain, reduced imports and closures of many informal markets. The result has been the spike of food prices. 

Ghana has already seen a 7.9% increase on the average cost of food. On the other end of the spectrum, the cashew nut, a major export crop for Ghana dropped in price by 63% between January and March.

What the COVID-19 pandemic highlights is that African countries have become too dependent on large international food industries and the global market. For decades, governments did little to protect small farms and food producers. Governments grew increasingly dependent on a few major suppliers of cheap, imported food.  Since the 1980s, Africa has been a net importer of agricultural goods. 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 from international sources weakens African economies. It decimates the livelihoods of small scale farmers. It exports rural jobs away from Africa. In the growing urban centers, local peasant markets gave way to supermarkets. The aggressive expansion of imported processed foods also negatively affects human health. Over-processed foods are less nutritious. They are proven to contribute to growing levels of obesity and diabetes in West Africa.

The COVID-19 pandemic is pushing many to recognize the risks of dependency on international food imports. In poor communities in Africa, the breakdown of global supply chains has resulted in a fall in cheaper imports and a shift to local produce.

In this context, Groundswell International and its allies are sounding a clarion call about the importance of food sovereignty – the right of people to control their own food and agricultural systems and their right to produce and consume healthy and culturally appropriate food.

African countries are currently focusing their efforts on blocking the transmission of COVID-19. However, they urgently need to think about actions to improve food and nutrition security.  They must also pay particular attention to supporting farming communities in adopting proven ways to produce high quality and nutritious food.

This involves the promotion of agroecology. This approach to agriculture enables small scale farmers to develop productive, climate resilient, and sustainable farming system. For example, in Burkina Faso, Groundswell is  working with farmers’ movements using agroforestry, mixed cropping, rainwater harvesting, and composting to gain 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.

Working with small scale farmers and their knowledge base, and linking these farmers to consumers in localized markets has two benefits. Agroecological farming methods are improved, and there is an increasing awareness among local consumers of the relationship between food production methods and improved nutrition and health.

Improving local links between agroecological food production and human nutrition is a critical step in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in West Africa.