Dear all,
Today the listserve ‘Corporate agriculture in Africa’ is launched. It is intended to be a tool to share information about initiatives like the G8’s New Alliance, AGRA, GROW and the broader trend to expand corporate control over African Agriculture. The list is also a space to communicate our plans for mobilisation and action against these initiatives. It includes civil society organisations, social movements and producers' organisations from Africa, as well as organizations in the North who share similar concerns. A central objective of the list is to ensure that civil society groups can get the information and documentation they need to effectively organize in their struggles. We urge you to use this list as a way of supporting awareness raising, mobilization and organizing against the corporate capture of agriculture in Africa and for the benefit of small holder food producers who feed the continent.
The idea for this listserve first came from an event called the "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in the dock: perspectives from civil society and African producer's organisations". This was organised by the EuropAfrica consortium which is a joint initiative between three regional African farmers’ networks (ROPPA, PROPAC and EAFF) and several European NGOs, and by Miseror and CIDSE. During the event several of the African speakers, highlighted the lack of access to information on what is happening on the ground across the continent as one of the basic challenges in organising CSOs and producers' organisations in the region. Since then the proposal for the listserve has also been discussed by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
Recently, in mid September, civil society groups in Africa met in Liberia for a consultation of the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) about the current negotiations there on responsible agricultural investments. In the statement from that meeting they said:
Today the listserve ‘Corporate agriculture in Africa’ is launched. It is intended to be a tool to share information about initiatives like the G8’s New Alliance, AGRA, GROW and the broader trend to expand corporate control over African Agriculture. The list is also a space to communicate our plans for mobilisation and action against these initiatives. It includes civil society organisations, social movements and producers' organisations from Africa, as well as organizations in the North who share similar concerns. A central objective of the list is to ensure that civil society groups can get the information and documentation they need to effectively organize in their struggles. We urge you to use this list as a way of supporting awareness raising, mobilization and organizing against the corporate capture of agriculture in Africa and for the benefit of small holder food producers who feed the continent.
The idea for this listserve first came from an event called the "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in the dock: perspectives from civil society and African producer's organisations". This was organised by the EuropAfrica consortium which is a joint initiative between three regional African farmers’ networks (ROPPA, PROPAC and EAFF) and several European NGOs, and by Miseror and CIDSE. During the event several of the African speakers, highlighted the lack of access to information on what is happening on the ground across the continent as one of the basic challenges in organising CSOs and producers' organisations in the region. Since then the proposal for the listserve has also been discussed by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
Recently, in mid September, civil society groups in Africa met in Liberia for a consultation of the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) about the current negotiations there on responsible agricultural investments. In the statement from that meeting they said:
“The Peasant Organizations and CSOs present denounce initiatives such as the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and the World Economic Forum’s "Grow Africa", that promote and put multinational corporations rather than small producers in control of food production and in the front line of the fight for food security, and distort the FAO guidelines into an instrument for the privatization of land.”
The full statement is attached in English and French.
We encourage you to share further civil society statements and analysis (in English or French), along with information and intelligence about agribusiness projects such as the New Alliance, AGRA and Grow Africa.
In solidarity,
Gisele Henriques
