21 February 2024 – The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) unveiled a comprehensive report critically examining the African Development Bank’s ambitious Dakar II initiative, part of the broader Feed Africa program. This initiative, titled ‘Feed Africa: Food Sovereignty and Resilience’, aims to revolutionize African agriculture with a focus on turning the continent into a global breadbasket. However, AFSA's analysis raises significant concerns about its approach and implications for small-scale farmers across the continent.
AFSA’s in-depth review of the 40 “country compacts” under the Dakar II initiative reveals a strategy heavily reliant on industrializing food systems with a proposed $61 billion budget. This strategy, critics argue, risks marginalizing small-scale farmers, compromising biodiversity, and increasing dependency on multinational corporations for seeds and agrochemicals.
The President of Ireland and other voices have highlighted the initiative’s one-size-fits-all methodology, emphasizing large-scale monocropping and high-tech solutions that may be inaccessible to small-scale farmers due to their cost and environmental risks.
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