By Million Belay (PhD)
For too long, Africa’s agricultural future has been narrated as a story of rescue: outside finance, outside technology and outside expertise arriving to modernise farmers who are assumed to be waiting for solutions.
That story is not only incomplete; it is politically dangerous. It obscures the knowledge, innovation and resilience that African farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, women and youth have built over generations.
The question is not whether Africa needs science, investment or partnerships. It does. The question is who defines the problem, who decides what counts as innovation and who controls the resources.
Too often, African farmers are treated as beneficiaries or adopters of technology rather than as knowledge holders and co-creators of the food systems that sustain the continent.
The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa exists to challenge that imbalance. AFSA is a Pan-African alliance working for food sovereignty and agroecology, bringing together networks of farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, women, youth, faith communities, consumers and civil society organisations. It connects more than 48 member networks active in 50 African countries.
AFSA’s central message is simple: Africans must have the right and capacity to decide what they grow, what they eat and what kind of food system they want.
The failure of the Green Revolution
This debate matters because the dominant Green Revolution model has promised much and delivered far less than advertised. Its message is politically attractive: raise yields through commercial seed, synthetic fertiliser, mechanisation, irrigation, digital tools and value-chain integration. But a food system cannot be judged only by tonnes of maize per hectare. It must also be judged by whether farmers are less indebted, soils are healthier, diets are more diverse, biodiversity is protected and communities are more resilient to shocks.
AFSA’s recent assessment argues that, across AGRA’s 13 priority countries, the number of chronically undernourished people rose by 58% since 2006, while fertiliser use more than doubled and cropland expanded substantially. The lesson is not that production never increased anywhere. The lesson is that increasing production of selected crops is not the same as building a food system that nourishes people, protects ecosystems and strengthens farmer livelihoods.
Easing path dependency
That is why Africa must ask a more courageous question before investing billions in the next agricultural transformation: what did the previous transformation actually deliver?
Agricultural policy is shaped by path dependency. Once subsidy programmes, research systems, extension services and private-sector relationships are organised around commercial inputs, changing direction becomes difficult. What begins as an agricultural programme becomes an institutional ecosystem.
The alternative is not romanticism, isolation or a rejection of science. It is agroecology combined with food sovereignty.
Agroecology works with ecological processes: diversity, healthy soils, nutrient cycling, trees, water conservation, biological pest management and locally adapted crops. It combines scientific research with farmers’ and Indigenous knowledge. It strengthens farmer-managed seed systems while using public research and participatory breeding to improve crops with farmers, not for them.
But production is only one part of the story. Agroecology also requires processing, storage, finance, territorial markets, public procurement and viable agroecological enterprises.
Agroecology is not low-input poverty. It is knowledge-intensive, biodiversity-rich and economically viable agriculture in which farmers have greater control over seed, soil, markets and knowledge.
Senegal case study
Senegal offers an important signal, not because it has completed a national agroecological transformation, but because it shows that another policy imagination is possible.
AFSA’s member, The Dynamic for an AgroEcological Transition in Senegal, known as DyTAES, brought farmers, grassroots organisations, researchers, NGOs and other actors together to contribute to national policy discussions on agroecological transition.
Across the continent, similar processes are emerging through farmer movements, national strategies, local implementation and public-policy debates.
Urgency and security
Climate change makes this shift urgent. A country that cannot feed itself is vulnerable to external shocks. Covid-19, disruptions in global food and fertiliser markets, volatile energy prices, droughts and floods have all shown how fragile dependence can become. A food system built on a narrow range of crops, imported fertiliser, imported seed and long international supply chains creates strategic vulnerability.
Agroecology should therefore be understood not only as an environmental agenda, but as a resilience and sovereignty investment. Healthy soils, diverse seeds, functioning local markets and farmers who can continue producing during a crisis are as strategically important as roads, ports and power lines. Food sovereignty is resilience.
A country that can nourish its people from diverse, locally rooted food systems is inherently less vulnerable to climate shocks, geopolitical disruption and volatile global markets.
Africa does not need another agricultural future designed elsewhere and delivered downward. It needs investment that starts from African realities, strengthens African knowledge and gives farmers real power in shaping policy. The future of African food systems will not be secured by replacing farmers’ knowledge with imported prescriptions. It will be secured when farmers, communities and public institutions build a sovereign, ecological and democratic food system together.
Cheers,
Million Belay (PhD), is the General Coordinator, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA)
The article was published at www.afsafrica.org and the African Integration Think-Tank forum.
