African Heads of States and Governments met in Dakar under the auspices of Food Sovereignty and Sustainability ending this week.
Several suggestions and proposals were discussed, aimed at combating the challenge of hunger in the Continent.
But I have to be honest with my audience here. It’s more important to consider the shame of hunger and her aiding agents.
First, the statistic…..
280 million people goes hungry in Africa daily, what the food activists call Chronic hunger. Out of 1.4 billion Africans.
However, more homely, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia makes up 2% of World’s population, of which 70% of these people are extremely food insecure.
When these countries were under the rule of the imperial colonisers, there were no such fire needs of food. Agriculture has been at the core of the masters until agitation for self rule came in. Our own black masters seemed to have ignored the fact of hunger. Took for granted, the policies of land utilization that were put in place by the colonialists. They wholly desecrated the land use laws, and invaded them with the aim of enriching them and cronies.
In Dakar, 70 years of self rule and still discussing hunger poke holes to an extremely failing thought processes, and retrogressing political sovereignty. Democracy may be improving, but development and gain that such democracy should guarantee are missing.
Thomas Sankara in his 1987 OAU speech on food aid, elaborated steps that individual African countries can take to address hunger.
Among them, he insisted on what worked for the Burkinabe people. Massive roll out programs which called for national psyche to encourage farming in all available lands.
From all to medium, to the large scale farmers, the President led the initiative and supervised the farmers across the landlocked Republic.
In 6 months, Burkina Faso was exporting food to Mali, Algeria, Egypt and Middle East. Because the Knowledge and Need to feed oneself, was preached more important than the Food and its Need.
We must be bold and decisive if we shall feed our population. If we don’t, we will have to contend with the reality that all junk foods will be dumped in our nations. And not for free. But at a cost that will weaken our currency.
Food Sovereignty is a big term. And we all look at our borders to secure them against external aggression, forgetting that food aggression by other nations weakens our borders and reign on the hungry masses.
It was shameful to see that Kenya’s CS for Trade delivered a begging letter to the President of Uganda, beseeching him to bring eggs, milk and other basic foods to our country. What this will do CS Moses Kuria, is no magic. It will destroy the prices of local eggs because our farmer is not subsidized. It will weaken the price of milk farmer, because cow feeds are still unreasonably high.
By allowing eggs and milk from other countries to compete with Kenya’s, you have actually sent to the corner of loss, your hustler farmers. In 3 months, effective the day you open trade borders of these products, you’ll remember this.
Food unSovereignty is not a simple word, as we usually assume. It’s worse than Military Invasions.
I apologize to hustlers for attempting to open the blind mind, since for such a state of mind, eyes are useless.
