The West African Caravan: Defending Food Sovereignty through Land, Water and Peasant Seeds

The West African Caravan for Land, Water and Peasant Seeds has become one of the region's most visible grassroots mobilizations for food sovereignty, agroecology and communities' rights over natural resources. Initiated by the Global Convergence of Land and Water Struggles – West Africa (CGLTE-OA), the Caravan brings together farmers' organizations, pastoralists, fishers, women's and youth movements, civil-society organizations and agroecology networks. Since its first edition in 2016, it has sought to make the voices of rural communities heard in debates over land, water, seeds and agricultural policy. 

The movement itself brings together more than 300 organizations and has involved major regional networks including the Network of Peasant
Organizations and Agricultural Producers in West Africa (ROPPA), COPAGEN, the West African Committee for Peasant Seeds (COASP), La Via Campesina Africa, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and We Are the Solution.

From a regional caravan to a movement for food sovereignty

At the heart of the Caravan is a simple principle: food sovereignty is difficult to achieve when
farming communities do not control the resources required to produce food. Access to land and water is therefore inseparable from farmers' ability to save, reproduce, exchange and improve their own seeds. From its first edition, the Caravan explicitly connected these rights with family farming, peasant agroecology and food sovereignty, while challenging land, water and seed grabbing. Its vision emphasizes locally rooted food systems, biodiversity, farmers' control over seeds and respectful relationships between producers and consumers.

The Caravan is particularly significant because it takes these debates out of conference rooms and into farming communities. Rather than organizing a single regional meeting, delegations travel between countries and stop in communities where farmers, traditional authorities, women's groups, young people and policymakers can exchange experiences. Local struggles consequently become part of a regional political agenda. Research on the movement has highlighted precisely this ability of the Caravan to connect localized struggles over natural resources with broader West African and international movements for food sovereignty and climate justice.

Peasant and indigenous seeds at the centre

Peasant, traditional and indigenous seed systems are fundamental to this struggle. Generations of farmers have selected crops and varieties according to local soils, rainfall patterns, food cultures, nutritional preferences and farming systems. These systems maintain agricultural biodiversity while continuously adapting crops to changing environments. Seed sovereignty therefore goes beyond having physical access to seed: it concerns farmers' ability to save, select, multiply, exchange and transmit planting material and associated knowledge from one generation to another.

This is especially important for Africa's neglected and underutilized species (NUS), traditional crops and indigenous foods. Many such crops survive not because they have been prioritized by commercial seed companies, but because farming communities—often women—have continued cultivating, selecting, cooking and exchanging them. The erosion of farmer-managed seed systems can therefore mean more than the disappearance of varieties. It can also lead to the loss of traditional knowledge, food cultures, dietary diversity and locally adapted genetic resources.

The Caravan consequently raises a fundamental question about the future of African agriculture: who controls the seed? A food system increasingly dependent on a narrow range of commercial varieties risks marginalizing the diversity maintained in farmers' fields. By contrast, strengthening farmer-managed seed systems can complement formal breeding and genebank conservation by keeping crop diversity alive and evolving under real farming conditions. Previous Caravan activities have explicitly promoted common farmer seed banks alongside agroecological practices.

Women as custodians of seed diversity

The Caravan also brings attention to the often insufficiently recognized role of women in conserving agricultural biodiversity. In many West African farming and food systems, women are involved not only in production but also in selecting seed, storing planting material, processing crops and maintaining knowledge about preparation, nutrition and cultural uses. During earlier editions of the Caravan, organizers explicitly highlighted women's land rights and described women as important guardians of seeds.

Protecting indigenous and farmer-managed seeds must therefore go hand in hand with strengthening women's access to land, resources, decision-making and markets. A seed may be conserved in a genebank, but maintaining it as part of a living food culture requires farmers who continue to grow it and consumers who continue to value it.

The 2026 Caravan: converging on Cotonou

The fifth West African Caravan, held from 19 July to 9 August 2026, significantly expanded this regional mobilization. Two routes crossed West Africa: a Sahelian route from Senegal through Mali and Burkina Faso to Togo, and a coastal route from Guinea through Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana to Togo. They subsequently converged in Benin, where participants also met a Central African Caravan travelling from Cameroon through Nigeria ahead of the 17th World Social Forum in Cotonou. Organizers projected more than 500 participants, 18 stopovers and mobilization involving more than 20,000 people, particularly rural communities, women and youth.

The launch in Tambacounda, Senegal, already demonstrated the broad coalition behind the initiative. Participants included representatives from Senegal, Mauritania, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, alongside farmers' organizations, social movements, community leaders and local authorities. The launch was supported by the Dynamic for an Agroecological Transition in Senegal (DyTAES) and Enda Pronat.

(see: CGIAR Trust Fund (2024) Dynamic for the agroecological transition (Dytael) in Fatick - Senegal. Relocalization of the millet value chain for the territorialization of agroecology

The West African Caravan was initially stopped by Beninese police and sent back toward the border on 3 August 2026, reportedly amid problems concerning authorization and cross-border entry procedures for the large convoy of more than 400 participants from multiple West African countries.

The arrival in Cotonou was therefore more than the conclusion of a journey. It brought a decade of grassroots experience—from the Caravan editions of 2016, 2018, 2021, 2023 and 2026—into a global civil-society forum. Land governance, access to water, peasant seeds, agroecology, food sovereignty, climate change, social cohesion and peace could consequently be discussed not as separate issues, but as components of the same transformation.

From seed conservation to transformation of food systems

The importance of the West African Caravan ultimately lies in its insistence that seeds are simultaneously biological resources, cultural heritage, sources of livelihoods and instruments of food sovereignty. Conserving indigenous crops without strengthening the communities that cultivate them is insufficient. Likewise, promoting agroecology without addressing farmers' access to land, water and diverse seed can only achieve limited transformation.

For neglected and underutilized species, this message is particularly powerful. Their revival requires a chain connecting farmers and seed custodians → community seed systems → research and characterization → agroecological production → processing and entrepreneurship → markets and consumers → supportive policies. The Caravan helps ensure that the first actors in this chain—the farmers and communities who have maintained this diversity—remain central to decisions about its future.

After ten years of mobilization, the West African Caravan demonstrates that the struggle for food sovereignty is also a struggle for agricultural biodiversity and control over the foundations of food production. Its recurring message—rights to land, water and peasant seeds are a common struggle—has particular resonance at a time of climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing concentration within agricultural input systems. Protecting Africa's indigenous and farmer-managed seeds is therefore not about returning to the past. It is about ensuring that the extraordinary diversity created and maintained by generations of African farmers remains available for future breeding, resilient farming, diversified diets and locally determined food systems.

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