The Kofi Annan Eminent Speakers’ Lecture Achieving Food Security through Globalisation ‘from Below’: Issues for Structural Transformation, Inclusive Economy and Sustainable Development in Africa
Thursday, 7th November 2024
Distinguished Guests,
Dear Friends,
May I say how honoured I am to be with you today and for the invitation I received from President Adesina and the African Development Bank to give the 2024 Kofi Annan Eminent Speakers’ Lecture.
It is a pleasure to share a space of discussion on sustainable development in Africa with the distinguished speakers we have just heard – Professor Kevin Urama and Dr Akinwumi Adesina.
May I take this opportunity too to thank Dr Adesina for his kind remarks and for the meetings which we had previously in Dublin and Dakar which led to such positive discussions. Indeed may I compliment the Bank on the recognition it has received for effectiveness in governance, and even more importantly for transparency, and I am pleased that Ireland is a contributor and participant to the bank.
In providing an opportunity for speakers to set out new ideas, agendas and sustainable solutions for international cooperation and diplomacy, with a focus in particular on those issues that Secretary-General Kofi Annan prioritised during his term as seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006 – issues that included peace-making, peacebuilding, and the strengthening of the international multilateral system – the Kofi Annan Lectures help us recall Secretary-General Annan’s role in championing rules-based co-operation and the vital role of multilateralism.
Today a revived and invigorated multilateralism is called for more than ever if we are to respond, with a sense of global responsibility to our present circumstances of multiple interlocking global crises – political, social, economic and, most importantly, ecological. This global context has produced what I believe is an existential moment affecting the future of humanity.
In attempting to address issues of structural transformation, inclusive economy and sustainable development in Africa today, I would like to provide as part of my contribution to the series, a reflection on the topic of food security and global hunger.
I believe that we must start anew in addressing food security and this will involve re-defining what is meant by ‘development’. I believe that there are some basic issues that cannot be ignored any longer, issues for example relating to gender, land ownership, commodity choices, the external purchase of African land and, most fundamentally, though difficult to achieve, the need to redefine ‘development’ itself in terms of sufficiency as a concept sensitive to contemporary conditions in such a way as is inclusive of the best aspirations for life, enabling for the fullest participation in life and indeed in government, all of this achieved with ethics, and bearing responsibility always for future generations in mind.
We must earn the trust of people in diverse circumstances. In achieving this, we are challenged, however, by the fact that our delivery on commitments already made on sustainable development and climate change have been so much less than what was committed.
Empirical research also tells us of how we are living through a pervasive, and deepening, inequality that scars our world. Never have so many had so little and so few accumulated so much without responsibility. Are such circumstances ones to which we can continue to be indifferent?
Policymakers usually invoke a sustaining scholarship as source of their proposals. Standing behind policy formulation there always lie dominant assumptions as to the theoretical connection between economy, society and ecology.
For example, Modernisation Theory’s long hegemony in academic curricula and in policy reflected the influence of the seminal, for so long, uncontested Princeton Studies, by authors such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, Samuel Huntington, Lucian Pye, David McClelland, and others, was of such a character.
Moving from early polarities of modern and traditional society, contrasted as to their features, such studies sought to construct a continuum stretching from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’, listing features associated with traditional society that were perceived as inhibiting an inevitable journey to ‘modernity’, a journey and a destination associated with advanced achievements. That neoliberal capitalism was the inevitable and desired outcome for all people was an unstated, foundational assumption of such work.
Rejecting the assumptions and outcomes of these studies, building on a different set of assumptions, constituted, for example, a starting point for the work that was needed in seeking to establish the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The slow progress on the Sustainable Development Goals reflects too I believe the obduracy of the assumptions that formed the paradigm that has produced our interacting crises. We are wrestling with the consequences of a globalisation ‘from above’, led by the powerful, largely without transparency, and certainly without consideration as to social justice or ecological consequences, and because of its embedded nature in bureaucratic structures and the academy, for many, it is difficult to let go.
Building on this, and as a response, it is my strong belief that a new, inclusive globalisation ‘from below’ can achieve a new, invigorated, inclusive policy of provision and fulfilment, one that will include food sufficiency, such policies and practices given lead by those on the ground, and which if accompanied by the delivery of universal basic services, will enhance democracy, improve participation and be a source of leadership needed to create a sustainable shared future.
The model I suggest is a model of sufficiency, services that meet needs universally and, beyond that, participation in a fair international trade and that is respectful of diverse cultures, indigenous or imposed, that are there in the history of Africa, but have not been given sufficient recognition.
It is my belief that in Africa, and elsewhere in the heavily populated world, policies must reflect a new beginning in theoretical and policy terms as to how we define concepts such as ‘development’, and indeed ‘globalisation’.
We are at a significant moment in African history. Africa is the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continent. Today, 40 percent of all Africans are under 15 years’ old. That percentage is set to rise by the end of the century when Africa could have over 4.2 billion inhabitants, 40 percent of the predicted global population.
Our redefinition of ‘development’ or ‘globalisation’ must take account of such demographic projections, which should be seen both as a challenge and an opportunity. It represents not just a continental challenge but a global one – an opportunity to do things differently with new purpose in so many parts of our world.
The Africa of the future, the Africa of the young, can, I suggest, constitute an arrow for the new thinking we need globally, rather than being a target for exploitation or simply as a new pool of consumers.
Existing conditions in Africa are a cause for concern. Africa has some 475 million people living in poverty, which is about one third of the continent’s population and, shockingly, about 50 million more than in 2019.
This is part of a global crisis. The recent Global Report on Food Crises highlights that dangerous levels of acute hunger affected a staggering 282 million people across the world last year, up from 193 million in 2021– the sixth year in a row that food insecurity has worsened.
More than 1 billion people in Africa struggle to afford a healthy diet while 20 percent of the population is undernourished. An estimated 868 million people experienced moderate to severe food insecurity in Africa in 2022, with over one-third of those facing severe food insecurity.
In responding to the challenge of providing sustainable lives for such populations, we must now move past previous reactive emergency humanitarian responses and undertake the tasks of tackling the underlying structural causes of hunger.
What Africans will achieve in tackling its challenges with new economic models that are inclusive will also constitute a gift I believe of a new, better economics for all of humanity.
Responding to our present interacting crises will require an entirely different model to that which came from Modernisation Theory, one that usually portrayed an uncritical version of development as a single hegemonic model, one ending in an industrialisation and urbanisation that was responsive to market conditions, towards which the world was structured to evolve.
I speak from my own personal experience at the receiving end of the modernisation model at Indiana University. I was one of those graduate students who went from my own country, Ireland, to learn about its supposed ‘backwardness’ and the cultural and human impediments to economic growth and development through the culturally ethnocentric, linear and reductionist prism that was ‘Modernisation Theory’.
Responding to global hunger must be seen I believe above all as a response to human needs, needs that have a historical and cultural context that cannot be ignored. In our present circumstances, including Africa, decisions will have to be made, for instance, as to what form of agriculture should prevail over the coming decades and what form of agricultural practice can best align with the Sustainable Development Goals. Most important of all, who will participate in agricultural production and – it is a contentious and important point – who will be left with ownership of the land of Africa?
While food security is a human right embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966, there remain contesting approaches on how it is to be defined.
Professor Glenn Denning is one of the eminent scholars who has been at the forefront in the debate on the future of agriculture and food security. Arguing for the use of the term universal food security over the more commonly used global food security, Professor Glenn Denning has defined universal food security as “a world where every person enjoys a healthy diet derived from sustainable food systems”, thus establishing an aspiration to reach every person on Earth.
In my proposals for a globalisation ‘from below’, I go further and suggest that food security is best seen as an essential part of universal basic services and, in that way, it can best make a key contribution to the delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030.
A fundamental issue that arises from the current circulating proposals as to future agricultural production, including in Africa, is the issue of intensification. The different proposals are not neutral in terms of their impact on the Sustainable Development Goals. For example, proposals that suggest extensions into existing unused lands have implications that cannot be ignored for patterns of land use – communal, ancestral and familial. Indeed some of the proposals on offer require deforestation.
Professor Howard Stein is among the contemporary scholars who have noted how African land commons are rapidly shrinking, with effects that will reverberate far into the future. With rogue actors grabbing customary land, and corrupt elites exploiting weak land governance, the result is a land alienation which, when taken together with the evolutionary trajectory towards the promotion of private, individualised property rights as a necessary element of ‘development’, so called, results in what has been referred to as “the drama of the grabbed commons”.
Carlos Lopes is another scholar who has argued so well for so many years now that recognising the critical importance of structural transformation for African countries in a manner that will allow inclusive and sustainable development is best enshrined in internationally agreed, as well as regional, development agendas.
Fundamentally, there are two competing models of food security vying for adoption: one based on industrial agriculture and re-positioning in global supply chains, the other, stressing the agency of smallholders, is focused on the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. This second, I believe, can best deal with the consequences of climate change, is focused on breaking dependency and, by being people-led, has a resonance that enables and enhances democracy.
Such a model, based on a globalisation ‘from below’, recognises the interconnected nature of our global crises, is also best connected, I believe, to our international obligations as agreed through the Sustainable Development Goals, and in its practice will make a significant contribution to participation and citizenship.
Following a path of globalisation ‘from below’ offers not only the best prospects for sustainability, the breaking of dependence and the achievement of a food security model in which Africans can participate which has African agency.
It would also be a significant and necessary contribution to global economics, and is necessarily a better fit with ecology and the principle of inclusion. It is an approach that is already paying dividends in instances where it has been utilised in Asia and South America.
It is paramount that any model of food security and suggestions for change in practices must deal with local realities, and will always benefit from utilising evidence ‘from below’.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations’ Fact Finding with Rural People, now almost 70 years’ old and used in response to the Asian food crisis of the 1950s, while remaining a touchstone piece of research, it also offers a powerful example of how a tool of fact-gathering made available to rural people can have real and empowering results.
While Fact-Finding with Rural People was a tool designed to achieve better results in terms of produce, its use, however, sparked a powerful stimulus to economic literacy and participation as a result. That report, and the social survey contained therein, showed how instruments previously used in scholarship for a colonising purpose in the past, such as anthropology and social inquiry, could be employed in our contemporary times to be a source for better policy, economic literacy and would facilitate participation.
May I suggest that what I would describe as “the great giving back” takes place – by which I mean that all of those tools of investigation and analysis used in previous centuries for among other purposes, colonising purposes, can, by building on such work as that of the FAO, and by being put into new hands, be used in an emancipatory way to redefine ‘development’ in a manner which will include the achievement of food security.
With, for example, the tools of anthropology thus used by Africans themselves to discover, address and examine real experiences on the ground, they may enable a critique of the impact of initiatives being advocated or introduced in the name of assisting them.
Utilising such tools can help to empower Africans by their acquisition of the information necessary be active rather than passive in the tasks of building their own future.
By using such tools, they will be enabled to make a critique of proposals from the State and non-State institutions. Such experience will constitute a powerful driver for democratic participation and community-based leadership.
It could lead, inter alia, to a necessary, recovered discussion on the role of the State in making and proposing initiatives and the consequences of balance or imbalance between State and private interests.
The State’s role is crucial. The agriculture sector in many parts of Africa was liberalised during the 1980s with disappointing results. As Howard Stein has written:
“[Liberalisation] did little to create a robust and prosperous agricultural sector.”
Rejecting State-initiated models was an ideological position developed by international agencies such as the World Bank. Professor Stein, and others, have repeatedly advocated an alternative strategy, one that is aimed at re-incorporating State-led policies to generate a sustainable agriculture sector.
I find their proposals, which are sourced in empirically based research, to be both convincing and socially just in their valuing of inclusivity.
The purpose of the new anthropology from an African perspective can also help inform us as to how the consequences of climate change are being experienced, how interventions are succeeding or not succeeding, which strategies of intervention facilitate citizen involvement, inclusion, acknowledge rights of women and children, how science and technology skills are best transferred. Such practice will fit well with the project of contributing to the undoing of, and compensation for, loss and damage.
To deliver ethical food systems, recognising the links between food insecurity, global poverty, debt and climate change, requires a new model of food production and distribution, one that can employ the tools of science and technology in an equitable manner and for the benefit of humankind as opposed to profit maximisation for the few.
However, the most urgent inhibiting factor facing so many African countries is the now unmanageable burden of debt service. The international community must recognise that there is an urgent, severe debt service (or “liquidity”) crisis facing many countries. It is a problem that will, according to IMF forecasts, continue to worsen, and it has to be given priority if anything else is to be achieved.
Debt is crippling so many African countries who are now facing the worst debt crisis in history. In many countries, spending on health and education is being cut, with nearly half of budgets being used to pay creditors.
According to a recent report issued by Debt Relief International for Norwegian Church Aid, more than 100 countries are struggling to service their debts, resulting in deferral of urgently required investment in health, education, social protection and response to climate change.
Africa is likely to pay $163 billion in 2024 alone in debt service, up from a figure of $61 billion in 2010.
Africa is not alone in this circumstance. Debt service is absorbing 41.5 percent of budget revenues, 41.6 percent of spending, and 8.4 percent of GDP on average across 144 developing countries.
What an appalling statistic it is that debt service exceeds social spending by two-thirds in Africa and low-income countries.
As a result of the debt crisis, children are starving, AIDS victims are dying, the planet is burning, extreme poverty is rising, human rights are being abused, and thousands of species are disappearing.
We must not forget that the sources of the external sovereign debt crisis and economic challenges facing so many African countries are largely attributable to surviving features of the colonial structure of the economy, features which make them vulnerable to even minor shocks.
How policy is sourced, and the intellectuals who are its source, is of the utmost importance in evaluating options. A problem in many countries in Africa, as noted by Horman Chitonge and Howard Stein, is the impact of neoclassical economic training on policy advisors who provide governments with little understanding on how to promote sustainable industrialisation beyond the flawed logic of fiscal consolidation and austerity, advisors who remain stuck in what I have described as the assumptions of the Princeton-influenced development model.
A third source behind the debt crisis relates to the international financial architecture of the neoliberal model. It is an architecture that has developed a hierarchy of currencies that has been used to define a country’s standing in the global order. Its usage has impeded the structural transformation of African economies while perpetuating the avenues of accumulation of wealth and power of elites, native and foreign, that have reproduced such striking global inequities.
Again quoting Howard Stein:
“African countries find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy with currencies that are unstable with no international circulation and are under constant pressure to accumulate dollars.
Neoclassical economists tend to blame the lack of exchangeability on the lesser developed countries themselves due to their poorly developed financial systems, weak institutional capacities and macroeconomic mismanagement. In their view, the key to building up currencies are the usual orthodox recommendations of fiscal and monetary responsibility, flexibility in exchange rates, deregulation to attract FDI and the development of domestic bond and securities market. However, numerous studies have shown that countries that have pursued these policies have often been worse off economically, continue to be dependent on raw material exports and are unable to break out of the cycle of debt and crisis.”
The ability to break out of a dysfunctional, imposed or inherited system requires the development of a new set of constructs, ones that both understand and are willing to confront, if necessary, the sources of power that are perpetuating the system and invite a discourse as to where and how that power can be contested.
Without urgent action on debt relief, problems will persist into the 2030s. Pressures are greater now than those that prevailed during both the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, which resulted in its day with the ‘Brady Plan for Latin America’, reducing debt service and assisting countries back to the capital markets, or the debt crisis of the 1990s which prompted relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative. Current debt relief frameworks are simply not working.
Among the suggestions made in the report by Debt Relief International, to which I have referred earlier, recommendations that I support, include debt relief being available to countries of all income levels and regions, and tailored to their needs.
Debt relief should be provided in a manner that reduces debt service payments to less than 15 percent of budget revenues, and it should provide legal protections for debtors against holdouts and lawsuits in all major financial centres. All of this makes for good international economics and I congratulate the African Development Bank for its initiatives in this regard.
Cancellation of debt service over the next five years would, for example, as Matthew Martin of Development Finance International has stated, fund the United Nations plan for a much-needed stimulus to aid the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Reducing debt service to 15 percent of revenue for countries outside capital markets and halving borrowing costs for those market-dependent countries would save Sub-Saharan Africa at least $97 billion annually – money that could be available to fund social and environmental policies and measures to 2030.
Other important proposals in Debt Relief International’s report include credit enhancement measures to reduce borrowing costs in global, regional and national markets, a 10-year debt service holiday for those accessing global markets less frequently, with debt cancellation for the worst affected and for those hit by climate-related natural disasters, and measures to cancel debt service for three years following a disaster to aid the recovery-and-rebuild exercise. These proposals, in my view, are all so relevant and worthy of support.
In 2020 the G20 group of leading developed and developing countries launched the Common Framework, a scheme designed to speed up and simplify the debt relief process. However, progress has been much slower than was anticipated, reflecting the fact that much of the debt owed by developing countries is now owed to China and private bondholders.
The report of Debt Relief International suggests that the Common Framework is falling “way short of expectations in terms of timeliness, participation by creditors, and the scale of relief provided”.
Countries availing of the relief on offer would still be paying an average 48 percent of their budget revenue on service after relief, and consequently few were applying to join the process.
In any ethically based consideration of development in Africa, we must address, too, the role that the Global North has played in its limiting of options for helping the needs of contemporary African nations, in its contribution to suboptimal outcomes in terms of development policy.
Climate finance grants from the Global North for climate-hit countries are still grossly insufficient to support climate action and the necessary transitions required. Climate finance grants amount to just 5 percent of the Global South public finance that is going to fossil fuels and industrial agriculture.
As a result, Global South renewable energy is receiving 40 times less public finance than the fossil fuel sector, while trillions of dollars in climate finance from the Global North to the Global South are necessary to address adequately the climate and development crises we face.
A recent Action Aid report deals with the corporate capture of public finance. It concludes that climate-destructive sectors are benefiting from subsidies amounting to an average of $677 billion in the Global South every year, money that could pay for schooling for all sub-Saharan African children 3.5 times over.
These numbers illustrate a deeply worrying pattern about the state of the planet’s finance flows, and how corporate capture of public finance is actively undermining the needs of climate-vulnerable countries, as well as global climate commitments.
Let us not forget that the Global North is responsible for 92 percent of ‘overshoot’ emissions – that is, the damage caused by climate breakdown, yet the Global North continues to retreat from its commitments to climate policy, biodiversity, ecology, to all that was promised for a re-engagement with Mother Nature.
Since 2000 the growth of material use has outpaced GDP growth. Instead of dematerialising, the so-called ‘developed world’ is re-materialising.
The 2024 Report of the Sustainable Development Goals informs us that, for the first time this century, per-capita GDP growth in half of the world’s most vulnerable nations is slower than that of the advanced economies. That report also provides detailed evidence that demonstrates how our delivery on commitments made on sustainable development and climate change have been inadequate, how we are in fact regressing in so many areas of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.
As to food security, there are so many issues that must be urgently addressed. We must tackle profound dysfunctions not sufficiently recognised regarding the delivery of food, where success in production is often defeated by costly transportation. The issues of ownership of seeds, fertilisers, tools of production and their distribution, obstacles to the migration of science and technological innovations, questions as to the lending policies of the financial institutions – all of these issues cannot continue to be ignored, and must be pushed to the fore in the discourse.
There is an absence of authenticity in the reported discourse. We know, for example, that some of Europe’s largest lenders assisted fossil fuel companies to raise in excess of €1 trillion from the global bond markets since the Paris climate agreement.
Ending global hunger and preventing future famines, requires that we face up to a range of sobering facts, facts which illustrate the dysfunctionality of our current food systems: how half of the world’s over 8 billion population are defined as malnourished, how 2 billion people are experiencing under-nutrition, how over 2.5 billion people consume low-quality diets or too much food, while 3 billion people could not afford a healthy diet – yet 1.6 billion tonnes of primary food production are wasted each year in what are described as ‘developed’ countries where obesity levels continue to spiral.
Such facts point to the need, not for minor adjustments or refinements to our current food production and distribution model, but I suggest for a radical paradigm shift.
This requires us to tackle food speculation in crops, especially in wheat production. While recent volatile prices for crops are certainly a result of geopolitical movements as well as weather conditions, these variations have been exacerbated, as studies of recent famines show, by excessive financial speculation, a speculation that is also affecting transparency as to reserves.
Food storage must be addressed. The over-concentration of wheat reserves, for example, among just a handful of nations, must be tackled. China now holds over half of all wheat reserves globally. Excessive stockpiling is driving up international food prices, having devastating consequences for poorer food-insecure nations.
I welcome the recent Oxfam report, ‘Food Wars: Conflict, Hunger and Globalisation’, I do so in particular for the manner in which it combines all the different elements that flow from hunger, including the connection between hunger, displacement and conflict.
The Oxfam report highlights a number of food-and-conflict disasters, including those in Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as in Gaza. Conflict is now the main driver of food insecurity, affecting 135 million people across 20 territories.
The report rightly notes that UN Security Council Resolution 2417, adopted in 2018, condemned intentional starvation as a war crime, yet notes that there is not yet accountabilities for such ‘starvation crimes’.
Economic shocks were the second driver of food insecurity, affecting 75 million people, while climate change-related weather conditions accounted for food insecurity among a further 72 million people.
Conflict, and anticipation of conflict, deflects interest and funding from the tasks of hunger alleviation or prevention.
In their report, ‘Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2023’, published in April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute highlighted that world military expenditure increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2023, to a figure of $2,443 billion. This represents an annual increase of 6.8 percent, the steepest year-on-year increase since 2009 and the highest level the Institute has ever recorded.
What a great failure this ratcheting up of armaments expenditure constitutes, especially at a time of existential crises, at a time when people are dying of preventable hunger.
War is not the natural condition of humanity, cooperation is. When wars and conflicts become seemingly unending, humanity is always the loser.
For example, the forgotten war in Sudan risks triggering the world’s largest hunger crisis. An immediate ceasefire is needed to prevent a complete collapse in Sudan and further regional destabilisation as millions flee into neighbouring countries.
As conflict rages, 18 million people face acute hunger. Of these, nearly 5 million are in emergency levels of hunger. This is the highest number ever recorded during the harvest season.
The food crisis in Gaza is exceptional, too, for its source is entirely man-made. Conflict between Israel and Hamas, including Israel’s siege of Gaza has restricted humanitarian access across the Gaza Strip, and attacks have taken place on aid convoys while people are suffering from starvation.
Gaza’s entire population, about 2.2 million people, is classified as ‘Crisis’, ‘Emergency’, or ‘Catastrophe/Famine’. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has told us that this represents,
“the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity […] ever classified for any given area or country.”
Israel’s escalation of the war into Lebanon, a country already suffering from food insecurity owing to high debt and inflation, will result in yet more food insecurity as the country endures a five-year-long economic crisis during which the national currency has lost 95 percent of its value.
While it is inextricably linked to many of the planet’s crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss and conflict, the alleviation of global food insecurity would, on the other hand, have multiple co-benefits.
Hunger is at the heart of the involuntary mass migrations which we now see, migration which leads to contested spaces.
It is clear to me, and indeed to so many others, including scholars such as Professor Pádraig Carmody, that we need a ‘new departure’ with regard to food production models, one that deals with local realities, one that benefits from evidence ‘from below’, emerging from a new, empirical and peer-reviewed use of social research, including a new anthropology guided by African scholars. Such a model offers a transparency and a security that a complete dependency on the market indicators of the international food value chain can never offer.
To yield new models that can serve the diversity of our needs in sufficiency in a sustainable way requires a recognition of the flawed assumptions upon which our current food production models are based, assumptions which carry the weight of a chequered past.
Ideas matter. How they are used matters, and they have a history. Modernisation Theory did not fall from the sky. From an early emphasis on the subjugation of Nature came the imposed hegemonic idea of “progress”, followed by Modernisation Theory, Evolutionist Development Theory, such as that outlined, and led by the Princeton Studies of the 1960s to which I have already referred, that would go on to guide the practices of the World Bank.
But ideas proved to be bad do not die. They can reappear in policy, often by stealth. For example, the relationship to land being reduced to a titled collateral for debt as in the De Soto model is typical of such unspoken, but repeated, bad policies.
Institutions carry ideological assumptions across borders and generations. As Howard Stein has put it:
“The shift of the World Bank and other donors toward [land] titling was a natural outcome of its growing domination by neoclassical economics and its convergence with donor priorities and international capital. A similar shift in the domination of neoclassical economics in universities and government agencies on the continent of Africa has provided shared ideologies and constructs that have empowered these policies.”
May I ask with humility: what a price we have paid for an uncritical adoption of ideologically laden modernisation-influenced Development Theory, with its inherent bias against indigenous practices and local cultural agency.
The ongoing reliance, persistence in uncritical settings of such Development Theory has resulted in so many prominent, respected and well-funded actors in the development policy area averting their gaze from the basic structural issues that influence food insecurity.
As to food, diet and nutrition itself, it is worth asking: how did so many in Africa become so dependent on so few staples, the production, distribution and consumption of which they have so little control? How did the complex dependencies of global value chains emerge and how are they sustained inter-generationally?
Dear Friends, change is possible. We can, for example, use science better.
What a moral outrage it has become, what a great failure, with all the material resources available, given our boundless capacity for creativity and innovation, that the fruits of science and technology remain directed in so many parts of the world, not on the ending of global hunger or famine, or the promotion and preservation of peace, or indeed on reducing sources of inequality, but on the pursuit of ever more deadly technologies as instruments of war, and indeed that the results of science and technology are so often abused in the promotion, through irresponsible advertising, of a model of consumption and insatiable accumulation as the most desirable, even inevitable, version of a life of fulfilment.
Possibilities for scientific co-operation with ethical purpose must be made better, sought out and embraced, including in the area of food security. It is through the sharing of scientific ideas that we may share the joy of scientific discoveries that co-operation facilitates, even serendipitous discoveries, thus advancing the truly emancipatory potential of science for society and for all of life, ensuring that the fruits of science can contribute solutions to the great global, social, economic and ecological challenges we face on our planet, seek to advance the possibilities of fulfilment for all that are there beyond the narrow provision of a source of wealth for any single individual or corporation.
I stress the role of science, as will be engaged in by young scholars, of the importance of taking into account responsible collaboration between the current and next generation, of their combined ingenuity in science, technology and innovation, and of critiquing investments in key areas of food and agriculture, of there being no borders to the application of ethics in science and technology.
I do so with the firm belief that science can assist us in the delivery of a food-secure world. We now need the best ecological practices in agriculture, including agroecology, to become widespread. This is substantially different from mere adjustments to the productionist agronomy model, or adjustment of a colonially imposed food system, one which has exacerbated food insecurity by creating over-dependence on a small number of staples and an over-reliance on imported fertiliser, pesticide and seeds.
Putting this into practice requires that we must acquire a space for the discourse that is needed if we are to achieve the necessary transformation in policy and practice. We have some road to travel on this objective. We need to give the time required for a serious review of our policies and the assumptions on which they are based.
There has been such an emphasis, incorrectly in my view, and simplistically, on ever-increasing food production and yields, irrespective of structure, as an appropriate way for our growing world population. This has been a simplification that we must move beyond if we are to tackle the root causes of food insecurity.
I believe that what is crucial is the addressing of the social structures in which such an increase in production and distribution of food is achieved – where the food is produced, what is produced and how, and with whose participation.
Should we be considering and accept as sole outcome an industrial-style agriculture for the export market with an incidental outcome for Africa? This is the direction favoured by some following the African Food Summit in Senegal in 2023. I believe we need to critique such a model for all of its consequences.
My own view, which I have expressed in the papers I delivered in Rome and Dakar last year, is that we need to move beyond measures of output and intensification, and instead build an approach that can focus on reforms that break food dependency and build on the privileging of smallholders of land in the introduction of change, allowing for the retention of African land in African ownership.
The African Development Bank’s Dakar II initiative, ‘Feed Africa: Food Sovereignty and Resilience’, while ambitious in its scale, must not result in any one-size-fits-all approach with an emphasis on large-scale monocropping, formal seed systems, and high-tech solutions such as climate-smart agriculture, digital and precision agriculture, and chemical inputs. These methods may have a place, but they are out of reach for small-scale farmers due to their cost, risk to the environment, and threat to their autonomy and traditional practices.
I was grateful in preparing my paper to receive the views of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), representing as it does a coalition of 41 member networks across 50 countries.
The Alliance has emerged as a vocal critic of the Dakar II compacts, advocating instead a shift towards agroecology and food sovereignty, emphasising the importance of sustainable agriculture and the empowerment of small-scale farmers.
AFSA makes a convincing case for smallholders’ land rights being protected from arbitrary dispossession of their lands for large-scale industrial agriculture projects. Prioritising the needs and voices of small-scale farmers will result, they suggest, and I agree, in the adoption of inclusive and participatory approaches, foster citizenship and will contribute to a vibrant democracy. In this regard, the FAO’s Asian experience is a powerful example, one that can, in collaboration with other agencies, be repeated in Africa.
Efforts should be made to preserve agricultural biodiversity by supporting the maintenance of a rich variety of crops and breeds managed by small-scale food producers. This approach would also assist the resilience of smallholder farmers and the environmental sustainability upon which their livelihood depends.
While the Dakar II initiative represents a significant investment in the future of African agriculture, its current trajectory does raise concerns as to inclusivity, environmental sustainability, and the long-term viability of small-scale farming.
May I suggest that the model for Africa must be recalibrated to create an economy of sufficiency that will include an agroecology appropriately adjusted for demographic and cultural realities, in which the first objective is not merely the satisfying of hunger but to create nutritious produce, with exports from the surplus being a consideration after the first objective has been achieved.
We must thus set out all of the endogenous and exogenous issues that require addressing, the latter including issues such as debt, inequitable trade, over-reliance on export crops in unsustainable market conditions and food dependency.
By doing this, we have an opportunity to be part of the putting right of the consequences of decades of colonisation of Africa, the exploitative extraction of resources from Africa for the benefit of others.
In addition to the solving of one of the great moral outrages that we face, that of global hunger and food insecurity on a planet of plenty, the pursuit of resilience in food systems may help us also to see beyond disagreements and to begin resolving conflicts, enable us to recover, envisaging maybe a capacity for peace rather than the species failure that is war.
The growing convergence of food systems and climate diplomacy should prompt us to overcome competing and wasteful silo approaches in multilateral diplomacy and to recommit to the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, our collective, shared blueprint for a sustainable world and thriving humanity.
Food insecurity has no respect for borders, and no country can overcome it alone. Our best strategy for lifting millions of people out of food insecurity, hunger and famine is to act together, with urgency and with solidarity. This is why multilateral institutions like the United Nations must lead on this agenda.
It is clear, as the Secretary General has indicated on several occasions in recent times, that we must undertake work to reform our international institutional architecture. This includes UN reform at the highest level, including the Security Council which must be enlarged so that it is representative. We must as well ensure a revitalisation of the General Assembly.
If a United Nations, with its current structure, is unable to prevent war and conflicts, unable to end famine and hunger, unable to manage migration, we must ask ourselves what needs to be done, and we must do it with great urgency, make such changes to the structures and institutions of the UN so as to ensure that such fundamental goals, as were the founding pillars of the United Nations all those years ago, can be delivered.
Food insecurity is a moral failing that stains us all. It is beyond time to achieve its end. We are challenged, together, to take meaningful steps to enable a fruitful re-engagement with nature using the best of tools available to us, including, notably, anthropology, but all of the tools of social science.
We are challenged to turn a corner on past failed models, often imposed without consensus and based on flawed assumptions. We are challenged instead to embark on a new beginning, one that is inclusive, life-affirming and celebratory of diversity, one that can work in a variety of settings, including Africa, the continent of the young, upon which so much of our hope for the future rests, one that adequately responds to climate change and the needs of sustainability, one that offers the best prospects for avoiding unnecessary conflict and achieving peace within and between peoples.
In the future, people may look back and celebrate what was an African initiative, what was chosen as the best path to a form of connection between economy, social justice and ecology that might best serve humanity. This African initiative may be quoted in the future as the corrective to the modernisation model for which not just scholars, but communities, have been waiting.
Such a model can save economics itself as a discipline by its redefinition and recovery as to moral purpose, restore a new equilibrium between economics, ethics, social justice and ecology.
We must endeavour, together, in our diverse world, seek to enable such an African initiative, and in doing so play our part in the construction of a co-operative, caring and non-exploitative global civilisation.
We have an opportunity to make this century the century of which a new African initiative is a part, of a shared human project, in which we rid the planet once and for all of global hunger, one that will see a shared commitment to a global food-secure family, one based on the firm foundations of respect for each nation’s own institutions, traditions, experiences and wisdoms, founded on a recognition of the solidarity and vulnerabilities that bind us together as humans, and an acknowledgement of the responsibility we share for our vulnerable planet and the fundamental dignity of all those who hold life on it.
May I thank once again the African Development Bank and Director-General President Adesina for the honour which you have bestowed on me through the invitation to me to deliver this lecture, and may I thank you all present for taking the time to listen.
Mo bhuíochas ó’m chroí libh.
Thank you.