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COVID-19 is spreading to developing countries, where high levels of poverty, inequality and inadequate healthcare infrastructure make controlling the virus even more challenging than it is in developed nations. Almost three billion people across the developing world do not have access to clean water, and hundreds of millions do not have access to adequate healthcare and live in crowded conditions where social distancing is all but impossible. Without urgent action, the COVID-19 pandemic will kill hundreds of thousands of people and set millions more on a downward spiral of ill health and poverty that will undermine the hard-fought development gains we have made in recent years.

Since 2009, Groundswell International has worked with people in some of the world’s poorest and most marginalized places to catalyze the transition from unsustainable conventional agriculture to ecologically-sound farming and food systems, strengthen resilience, and restore local economies. Our network of local partner NGOs and communities in West Africa, the Americas and South Asia reaches more than 500,000 people, using a “learning by doing” approach that empowers them to analyze their situation, identify existing problems, examine the various alternatives to overcome these challenges, and then choose, plan, and implement the best solutions. Such a localized, empowering, and easily replicable approach is critical to limiting the COVID-19 pandemic in places far from population centers where the vast majority of resources will be focused.

While Groundswell remains committed to our core mission of supporting rural communities to increase their agroecological food production, we are also responding to requests to meet the unique challenges posed by COVID-19.  Groundswell is mobilizing local knowledge, creativity, and initiative rather than externally based knowledge and technology. After consulting with local partners and communities, Groundswell is prioritizing actions to address immediate health needs and medium-term food security and livelihoods concerns:

• Rapid needs assessment: In coordination with community leaders and local governments, Groundswell’s NGO partners in all 10 countries are undertaking rapid needs assessments to inform response plans.

• Information campaigns: Initial reports indicate that most communities are aware of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is also apparent that many people continue to receive incomplete and/or inaccurate information. Groundswell is supporting local partners to develop information campaigns to reinforce behaviors, such as social distancing, hand washing and disinfecting high traffic areas, that can slow the spread of the virus.

• Hygiene: During the first phase of the response, we are investing the bulk of our resources in essential water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure and supplies to ensure that households have the means to wash their hands and disinfect high touch surfaces. For example, we anticipate working with communities to distribute soap and antiviral cleaning solutions, as well as setting up hand washing stations in public areas, such as “tippy taps”, which are a low-cost solution for hands-free washing that is especially appropriate for rural areas where there is no running water.

• Mobilizing community health workers: Where public health workers are not present, we are mobilizing community health promoters to support their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health promoters are key to reinforcing messaging about the ways the virus spreads and ways people can limit its transmission, as well as to supporting public health authorities to identify and isolate potential COVID-19 cases.

• Personal protection equipment (PPE): PPE is in short supply worldwide. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. While manufactured products would be ideal because they provide the best protection, in their absence, Groundswell is supporting local people to produce face masks, gowns and other forms of improvised PPE that provide some level of protection to healthcare workers and those caring for loved ones who have fallen ill with COVID-19.

• Food production and rural livelihoods: After immediate health needs are being met, Groundswell will focus on the activities that contribute to the agroecological and rural livelihoods activities that have been at the core of our work for the past 10 years. In the context of this emergency, we anticipate providing emergency capital to existing savings and credit groups to cover the anticipated increase in household expenses that result from illness to economically active adults and the loss of livelihoods. Additionally, Groundswell will recapitalize farm households that have been forced to sell their livestock, which are a critical form of savings and a key livelihood and food security asset. We will also work with communities to establish grain banks and seed banks, and, where they already exist, we will capitalize them to meet the anticipated increase in demand among farmers. Capitalization of these core community resources will help limit the economic impact of the crisis.

• Market access: Finally, because many farmers are finding it difficult to access local markets because of lockdowns, Groundswell and its partners will develop innovative ways of commercializing local products to ensure that farmers can earn at least some income during the crisis.

As these people-centered solutions take hold, we will employ methodologies and technologies in ways that facilitate multiplication (i.e., spontaneous spread) of efforts to reach the maximum number of people in the shortest possible time. Time is of the essence. We must act now to enable developing countries to limit the spread of the virus, improve health systems to care for those affected, and safeguard livelihoods to bolster food security and allow people to recover once the pandemic abates. Please join us.

The front page headline of Ghana’s Business and Financial Times for January 17, 2020 reads:  “National Well-being wins over foreign interests as the gov’t ditches GMOs.”   The article quotes a dramatic statement from Ghana’s Agriculture Minister Dr. Akoto Owusu Afriyie, rejecting the need for GMO seeds in Ghana.  “I’m a scientist,” said Minister Afriyie. “I believe in science. GMO is a method of science. But it’s like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. Ghana does not need to go GMOs… Forget about GMOs. There is no GMO in what we are doing. It’s only when we have exhausted all the beautiful work done by our own scientists that we may have to fall on it, and that will be another 100 years.”

It seems the Minister of Agriculture has heard the voices of Ghana’s farmers, citizens, and local scientists, who have been organizing to develop and spread real agroecological solutions, and to express their democratic demands that the government support farmers’ interests.  Bern Guri, the Director of the Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Organisational Development (CIKOD) stated: “For almost a decade CIKOD, the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG), and other civil society organizations in the country have been advocating for the adoption of agroecology to sustainably increase food production and improve the livelihoods of small farmers in Ghana. From the beginning we have had stiff resistance from various governments who have been greatly influenced by foreign industrialists like Monsanto, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others to promote their products. Yesterday’s statement by the Minister for Agriculture, who has been the main proponent for GMOs, is an important achievement.  But we must continue to work for a shift in the government’s budget towards support for the work of local scientists to increase local seed production as well as address the real challenges of small farmers.”  Groundswell has been working closely with CIKOD as our partner in Ghana since 2011, supporting rural communities to improve their lives by strengthening community-led agroecology, local markets that incentivize agroecological production, and strengthening the movement for more supportive policies that respond to farmers’ interests.  

PFAG reacted to the Ministers statement as well. “The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU), Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) and Centre for Indigenous Knowledge & Organizational Development (CIKOD) who have been championing the GMO campaign for years welcome the government position and call on all institutions, individuals and multi-national corporation who are benefiting from proceeds from MONSANTO to promote GMO in Ghana to rather join Ghanaian scientists and farmers to promote the local seed industry.”  The group further encouraged government to invest more resources in agroecology as a way of developing the agricultural sector and combating climate change.

This is a dramatic example of what democratic organizing can do, especially when grounded in effective agroecological innovations developed by local farmers.  It is particularly dramatic given that Ghana is a primary focus country of flagship programs of the Gates Foundation: the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), as well as the Alliance for Science based at Cornell University.   The latter quickly reacted with an article posted on their website: “Scientists and farmers dispute ag ministers claim that Ghana doesn’t need GMOs.”  As the article points out:  “Anti-GMO activists immediately seized upon his remarks to declare an end to GMOs in Ghana. But while Afriyie is a powerful player in Ghana’s agricultural industry, the authority for GMO approval lies with Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, the minister for Environment, Science and Technology.” 

In other words, they aren’t about to give up.

This brings to mind the stinging critique of philanthro-capitalists by Anand Giridharadas in his best-selling book,Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018).  Giridharadas was aNew York Times journalist, former McKinsey consultant, and fellow at the Aspen Institute immersed in the world of elite philanthropy, who saw that these efforts often ignored elites’ responsibilities in contributing to the very problems the seek to solve without addressing root causes.  Here is an excerpt from a 2019 interview with Giridharadas in the New Statesman.  

“This ‘fake change’ is actually part of how we maintain the systems of exclusion and inequality.” …

“Even if you’ve made the money in a clean way, and you’re giving it away in the wisest ways, it’s still too much power for one person in a democratic society that is committed to people having equal power,” Giridharadas said.  Rather than democratically elected governments determining social priorities, unaccountable billionaires increasingly do so. “You may say Bill Gates is a good guy in philanthropy, which I would say is true relative to some others, but he still violates the democracy principle.”

So here is a cheer for the Ghanaian civil society and farmers organizations working to promote the most essential innovation in agriculture:  democracy.   The only way to address the huge challenges of hunger, malnutrition and climate change is people power:  agriculture and food systems of, by and for the people. Technologies matter, but the ones that work best are rooted in the creative capacity of local smallholder farmers and in authentic democracy.  That is what agroecology is all about.  May it grow and thrive.

By Steve Brescia, Executive Director of Groundswell International

“There is a lot of learning that still needs to be done about how to scale or amplify agroecology,” says Peter Gubbels, Groundswell’s Director for Action Learning and Advocacy in West Africa.  “Some valuable principles have been identified, but there are not a lot of good, practical examples of how to do this.  What are the steps and pathways?  It is a crucial area of learning because we have to scale agroecology effectively to transform and fix our global agricultural and food system.”

The recent IPPC report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) emphasizes nature-based solutions as the best way to adapt to and mitigate climate change.  We have to change industrial agriculture.  It also comes down to how 500 million family farmers across the world farm.  They are the ones who produce 70% of the food people consume.  Major resources need to be invested in these solutions, but there is a big risk of a top-down, cookie-cutter approach that would fail for the same reason that so many large scale initiatives fail.  

Tsuamba Bourgou, Groundswell’s coordinator for West Africa emphasizes: “There isn’t enough attention to involving communities, farmers’ and women’s organizations and movements in leading the process. That is the difference between scaling agroecology and scaling a single technology or franchise.  Agroecology has to be adapted to each ecological, social and cultural context, and that requires communities and farmers organizations leading the process.  For those of us providing support, it requires that we systematically involve and engage them in the ongoing process of innovation and transition.  Farmers have to be leading agents of change.”

 “While each context demands specific steps to scale up agroecology, this guide provides very practical insights into concrete strategies that work in the Sahel,” says Janneke Bruil, co-author of the briefing.  “The progressive integration of women’s self-empowerment, new types of governance and nutrition into agroecology is key. In addition, experience shows that issues related to equity and inclusion are fundamental in the scaling process, in order for everyone to be on board. It is true that others have pointed at these factors too. But this guide offers new insights as to how to do this”

“We can’t overemphasize how urgent the task of scaling agroecology is,” adds Gubbels. “Climate change is already having a huge impact on food production, food security and people’s lives around the world – especially the most vulnerable who have done the least to contribute to it.  We can’t be content with islands of success or scattered projects.  We hope this paper will contribute to the action and learning so many are engaged in, on how to scale agroecology to address the crisis.”