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Perhaps a practical way forward is to confront the real question: what’s the value added of INGOs and what do they need to devolve to others, and to let go of? As one participant remarked: would the poor pay for your services? While marketisation in this way probably takes things too far, it’s a provocative question. Would a poor farmer think its valuable for me to write and present a paper at a high level UN panel, on the causes of her impoverishment, or would it be better to simply give her the cheque (more income than she might see in years) and let her do what she wants with it?

Maren claims that all the aid agencies in Somalia knew that relief food was being stolen, but neglected to mention this fact in their reports or during fund-raising campaigns because millions of dollars and thousands of jobs were at stake. He says that neither the US Government nor United States Agency for International Development (USAID) officials were interested in his revelations, perhaps because, as this month’s New African magazine suggests, all of the United States’ food aid programmes ‘are designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities in world markets’.

These last 20 years we have faced a major change: the financialisation of capitalism. Now, nobody can do anything without capital. Finance controls each and every sector of society.

Immediately after Kenya’s independence (1963), a great many important liberation figures were imprisoned, exiled or killed, such as Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. Each time a leader had the courage to rebel, Europe and the United States forced them to back down. We then came to know an empty period until the mid-1990s, when people began to resist and organise themselves again. Today in Kenya, spaces for discussion and debate are not lacking. It’s vibrant, alive and a general trend, including in Europe.

Look at Tunisia: you hear that the revolution was caused by Twitter – this can’t be serious! Pens were also used as a means of information and mobilisation. Does this mean that pens caused the revolution? This illustrates a tendency towards technological determinism, towards hi-tech fetishism. We imagine that mobile phones, SMS (short message service), Twitter and Facebook have a power. This type of discussion tends to underestimate the role of those who use them.

In Tunisia, protesting in the road called for a lot of courage. A protestor who embraces a soldier, as is seen in a photo, is not produced by technology. It’s thought that this can resolve everything, but a third of Africans have one and there hasn’t been revolution everywhere.

Take for example agriculture: the bulk of what’s produced in Africa goes to feed Europe, multinationals and supermarkets. In Kenya we produce millions of flowers. Every day, they leave for Amsterdam. The amount of water used and the chemical products involved destroy our environment. While this goes on, populations have difficulty gaining access to water and food. The countryside ought to be used to produce food!

Agricultural production needs to be democratised.

I think that Latin America is a dozen years ahead of us. Structural adjustment policies began there two decades ago. I think that in Africa a popular movement will rise up from this from 2020. Chávez is not an exception; he is the product of his history, of a movement for emancipation, like Lula. The question is, how can we ourselves politicise this process? It’s not easy; there’s no technical solution. Workers and farmers need to become organised. This takes time. The positive thing is that this point is now discussed; this wasn’t the case 10 years ago.

The widespread food protests were not simply crazed “riots” by hungry masses. Rather, they were angry demonstrations against high food prices in countries that formerly had food surpluses, and where government and industry were unresponsive to people’s plight

the diversion of large quantities of grains and oil crops for the growing industrial feedlots in the emerging economies, as well as the diversion of land and water for “green” agrofuels, has put significant pressure on markets for many basic foods.

This shift from food self-sufficiency to food dependency has been accomplished by colonizing national food systems and destroying peasant agriculture.

hough the farmer-to-farmer-NGO partnership has been highly effective in supporting local projects and developing sustainable practices on the ground, unlike Vía Campesina, it has done little to address the need for an enabling policy context for sustainable agriculture.

Ironically, the strength of these farmer-to-farmer networks—i.e., their capacity to generate farmers’ agroecological knowledge in a horizontal, widespread, and decentralized fashion—is also a political weakness. On one hand, there are no coordinating bodies within these networks capable of mobilizing farmers for social pressure, advocacy, or political action. On the other, their effectiveness at developing sustainable agriculture at the local level has kept its promoters focused on improving agroecological practices rather than addressing the political and economic conditions for sustainable agriculture.

efforts to bring agrarian advocacy to farmer-to-farmer networks have run up against the historical distrust between development NGOs implementing sustain- able agriculture projects and the peasant organizations that make up the new agrarian movements. Aside from having assumed many of the tasks previously expected of the state, NGOs have become an institutional means to advance social and political agendas within the disputed political terrain of civil society.

Though the MST initially promoted industrial agriculture among its members, this strategy proved unsustainable and economically disastrous on many of its settlements. In 1990 the movement reached out to other peasant movements practicing agroecology, and at its fourth national congress in 2000, the MST adopted agroecology as national policy to orient production on its settlements.

Like its predecessor, the new Green Revolution is essentially a campaign designed to mobilize resources for the expansion of capitalist agriculture.

The alternative, smallholder-driven agroecological agriculture, was recognized by the IAASTD as the best strategy for rebuilding agriculture, ending rural poverty and hunger, and establishing food security in the Global South. To be given a chance, however, this strategy requires a combination of strong political will and extensive on-the-ground agroecological practice to overcome opposition from the well-financed Green Revolution.