Dakar is preparing to host the 2025 Africa Food Systems Forum, organized by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), from August 31 to September 5. The event, which will bring together top decision-makers in global agriculture and 5,000 other participants, is intended to be a forum for exchange and reflection to "take action toward a sustainable and resilient food future for Africa and the world."

 

Under the theme "Young People Leading the Agri-Food Revolution," the forum will paradoxically be held to the exclusion of the real agricultural players: family farmers. At least, according to Amadou Kanouté, executive director of CICODEV.

Chairing the African journalists' workshop on African food systems this Thursday, August 28, Mr. Kanouté made a major revelation. According to the director of CICODEV, journalists will have to pay 125 US dollars, or 71,000 CFA francs, to participate in this forum.

 

"Asking farmers to pay 71,000 CFA francs to register and participate is a tax-based approach. It's exclusionary," he insists, stressing that this approach does not allow for a pluralistic debate and inclusion, which "must be the first element of any public policy that aims to be sustainable." He considers it absurd that a minority should decide on policies for the benefit of a majority that is itself excluded from the decision-making process.

 

"These small family farmers farm 95% of Africa's agricultural land. They feed two-thirds of Africa's population and also employ two-thirds of the working population in Africa. So, they are not small. How can we decide on behalf of these people by asking them to pay 71,000 CFA francs to be able to participate in a forum that concerns them?" he wonders, stunned by this decision by the organizers, in this case AGAR and the State of Senegal via its Ministry of Agriculture.

 

The other issue at stake in this event, according to Amadou Kanouté, is the so-called certified seed model promoted by AGRA, which is none other than genetically modified organisms (GMOs), whose dangers to soil and health are well-documented. Seed, he says, "is the basis of life and family farming."

"If we fail to control and master seeds in Africa, our survival will be over. We will depend on multinationals, on other countries, to have the basis of life, which is seeds," he warns.

 

The point of view of CICODEV and the AFSA network (Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa) of which it is a member, is that "the only seed that can ensure the survival of family farms and ensure food sovereignty is peasant seed."

 

Following with great interest the conclusions that will emerge from the Dakar forum, CICODEV and other pro-agroecologists invite the State to take into account the interests of family farmers and sustainable agriculture.