As the movement of people across the world creates more multicultural societies, can trade help communities maintain their identity? This is the question at the heart of a concept known as “food sovereignty”.

Food sovereignty has been defined as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods” and, critically, the ability of people to own their food systems.

Culturally appropriate food refers to the cuisine eaten by a certain group, which reflects their own values, norms, religion and preferences. It is usually dynamic and may change over time.

In my journey across different food landscapes, I have discovered that people consume food not just to satisfy hunger but for cultural, religious, and social reasons. And I have learnt that there are ways that international trade can help facilitate this.

How trade affects cuisine

My journey was shaped by my experiences examining the preferences of people from Afro-Caribbean descent, South Asians and Chinese people in the Greater Toronto Area of Canada.

The Chinese have a huge palate for bok choy, chinese eggplant, and gailan (also known as Chinese broccoli). South Asians love okra, bitter melon and eggplant. People of African descents tend to love okra and amaranth (a leafy green vegetable), at times substituting the latter with spinach because of scarcity.

The interesting thing about these groups is that they share a lot of food in common, though the preparation may differ.

This makes sense: one of my main findings has been that everyone’s cuisine has been affected by migration and trade. This pattern is ever more pronounced in the contemporary world, as people explore and learn from other cultures by including other food traditions in their own cuisine.

Enriching food culture

The integration of cultures does not negate culturally appropriate food, it enriches it. London’s curries are a result of migration, and in Nairobi the inclusion of channa (chickpea) and chapati (flatbread) in the diet is a result of the Indians trading and settling in the region.

Cultural groups have different definitions of good or appropriate food. The elite (who can afford it) and people who are environmentally conscious, for instance, believe in organic or local produce; Jews eat kosher food; and Muslims eat halal.

The challenge lies with making sure food is appropriately labelled – as organic, local, kosher or halal – and the key here is the authenticity of the certification process.

It can be quite difficult to trace the origin of certain foods, whether they’re produced locally or internationally. This educates consumers, allowing them to make the right choice. But it may be an additional cost for farmers, so there is little incentive to label.

The case for transparency and authentication

To ensure that trade allows people to have access to authentic and culturally appropriate food, I recommend a new, digitised process called “crypto-labelling”. Crypto-labelling would use secure communication technology to create a record which traces the history of a particular food from the farm to grocery stores. It would mean consistent records, no duplication, a certification registry, and easy traceability.

Crypto-labelling would ensure transparency in the certification process for niche markets, such as halal, kosher and organic. It allows people who don’t know or trust each other to develop a dependable relationship based on a particular commodity.

If somebody produces organic amaranth in Cotonou, Benin, for instance, and labels it with a digital code that anyone can easily understand, then a family in another country can have access to the desired food throughout the year.

This initiative, which should be based on the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin, can be managed by consumer or producer cooperatives. On the consumer end, all that’s required is a smartphone to scan and read the crypto-labels.

The adoption of blockchain technology in the agricultural sector can help African countries “leapfrog” to the fourth industrial revolution.

Leapfrogging happens when developing countries skip an already outmoded technology that’s widely used in the developed world and embrace a newer one instead. In the early 2000s, for instance, households with no landline became households with more than two mobile phones. This enabled the advent of a new platform for mobile banking in Kenya and Somalia.

Similarly, crypto-labelling will lead to a form of “electronic agriculture” which will make it cheaper in the long run to label and enhance traceability. With access to mobile technology increasing globally, it’s a feasible system for the developing world.

The right kind of trade

But using digital platforms to enhance food sovereignty is only plausible if international trade is not disruptive.

This is not the case now. A whole roasted turkey and condensed milk are cheaper in Hillacondji (Benin Republic) and SanveeCondji (Togo) than they are in Europe because of what economists call “dumping” – when a product is cheaper in a foreign market than in the domestic market.

Because of the low cost of imported products, local farmers in these francophone West African countries simply cannot compete. There’s no incentive to produce locally if you won’t recoup the cost of production.

In theory, it’s desirable for these to import such products because they are so inexpensive. But in practice, food sovereignty is compromised once a country needs to import staple foods that could easily be produced domestically.

Local production guarantees food safety if consumers purchase directly from farmers or through community shared agriculture. It promotes healthy eating, especially for perishable foods, that lose quality as a result of long-distance travel. It also strengthens the local economy through creation of employment and value-added products.

La Via Campesina, the international peasant’s movement interested in the welfare of farmers, wants the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to stop interfering with agriculture. But it is possible for the WTO to develop processes and procedures that will facilitate trade in Africa, based on its Trade Facilitation Agreement.

The WTO should also support developing countries in protecting their farmers, reusing seeds, and developing indigenous knowledge. Trade should not tamper with farmers’ right to plant what they want, when they want.

Intertwined sovereignty

Africa has been trading with different parts of the world for centuries, as reflected in the continent’s diverse diet. The national cuisine of the Somalis, for instance, is influenced by India, (because of the Indian Ocean trade); the Arabian Peninsula (Arab immigrants kept coming in different waves and in the process exchanges of ideas, culture and commodities took place); Ethiopia (because of trade caravan networks); and Italy (because it colonised Somalia for half a century, from 1889 to 1936).

The same thing is seen among the Swahili people of the Kenyan and Tanzanian coastal areas. There, trade has flourished for centuries, enriching the food sovereignty of several countries in Africa – that is, until multilateral organisations started performing experiments with uncertain outcomes.

I have enjoyed palm wine and pounded yam with egusi soup with a farmer called Adedeji in Ile-Ife; asked for more ugali and hot nyama choma in Nairobi while hanging out with two researchers of food and agricultural development, Makau and Magomere.

And as empirical evidence for showing food travels across borders, I have eaten kisra and okra in Edmonton with the Abibakris, a Sudanese family.

During this journey, I realised that food sovereignty is intertwined and we have a lot more in common than we tend to acknowledge. Of course food sovereignty and international trade can coexist – as long as the private sector is socially responsible and governments develop appropriate policies.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the stark reality of Africa’s extreme dependence on imports to feed our populations. In West Africa, 40% of the rice consumed is imported; African countries do not produce enough processed agricultural products to sustain their populations, with the three highest agricultural imports being wheat, rice, and vegetable oil; and local agriculture across the continent is dependent on imported inputs for production and therefore dependent on foreign exchange.

For Africans to chart a course away from extreme dependence on food imports prevalent now, the policies and thinking of early post-independence Africa—countries like Ghana and Tanzania —and international peasant movements, like La Via Campesina—offer a wealth of lessons.

As key countries adopted restrictive measures in their attempts to manage the spread of COVID-19—including the closure of air, land, and sea borders, and agricultural export restrictions—Africa is seeing a significant disruption of the supply chain due to the resulting decrease in the volume of imports. If exporters of cereals and staple foods, also affected by the pandemic, were to suddenly cease production, the many African countries dependent on these imports would be unable to feed their populations.

The monoculture cash crop and export agriculture system that pervades in Africa is a colonial legacy that has, over time, been maintained by the global neoliberal trade regime, trapping countries in a vicious cycle of dependence. By primarily exporting low value, unprocessed agricultural products with volatile prices in the global market, countries often fall short on the foreign exchange necessary for purchasing essential food stuff, and they are forced to turn to predatory conditional World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF) loans that further undermine agricultural diversification and modernization by pushing for reductions of agricultural subsidies and price support policies for small farmers.

As well as impacting government revenues and foreign currency resources, the fragility of Africa’s agricultural sector directly impacts farmers’ incomes. Curfews, quarantine, and the closures of markets, schools, restaurants, and businesses have completely disrupted local supply chains, and producers have found themselves stuck with perishable food with no market prospects. This has highlighted serious shortcomings in terms of logistics, transportation, and the isolation of some marginalized regions. The resulting drop in the income of producers, most of whom are small farmers, has also jeopardized future harvests due to the lack of inputs.

The COVID-19 crisis pushes us to reflect on the agricultural production in Africa, highlighting the urgent need to develop more sustainable food systems and more resilient family farming systems. But this is not a new debate. In the period immediately after independence in the 1960s and 1970s, different governments on the continent designed and implemented policies to achieve what was known at the time as food self-sufficiency.

Governments led by figures like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere pursued policies to feed their populations sustainably from their own production and also develop a strong agricultural sector that could boost decent jobs. Self-sufficiency was seen as integral to sovereignty as they recognized economic dependence allowed their former colonizers to exert power over their domestic political space. Policies included setting up agricultural cooperatives and state farms; establishing storage and distribution facilities; expanding grants and facilities for agricultural research; and land reform including establishing communal rights.

The drive for self-sufficiency was supplanted through structural adjustment policies in the 1980s—which made WB/IMF loans conditional on the “reduction or removal of export taxes, quotas, and government controls, reduction of import tariffs and removal of import restrictions, removal of internal market regulations and private-sector restrictions; and reduction in public production and infrastructure services”—and later the notion of food security in the 1990s. Rather than emphasize the importance of agricultural production to meet the needs of a specific state, such as enough foodstuffs to feed its population, food security emphasizes access to affordable food, whether it’s imported or otherwise. For example, Singapore, classified as one of the most food secure countries, only produces 10% of its own consumer products. It is a neoliberal concept that encourages import substitution in lieu of strong domestic agricultural production, the weakness of which is evident today.

In contrast, the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina, call for food sovereignty—the right of the people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced with sustainable methods, prioritizes local agricultural production to feed the population, ensure peasants’ access to land, natural resources, seeds, and loans, and protect the rights of small farmers to produce and consumers to decide what they want to consume. This notion encourages and depends on diversified family and peasant agriculture as opposed to industrial agriculture. Family agricultural systems are based on short cycles, and they have the capacity to both feed the family and also supply local markets, prioritize sustainable agricultural practices that use traditional knowledge, and build on recent ecological innovations. Family agriculture is the predominant agricultural system in African countries, but it is oriented towards monoculture production for export at the expense of production for domestic consumption and it is not effectively linked to other sectors in the economy.

In the aftermath of COVID-19, it is critical African countries diversify and improve productive capacities and create economic opportunities for small-scale producers. This includes adopting targeted policies that guarantee access to vital inputs for agriculture such as finance, land, and technology, and rethink resource management, including water, which is in competition between extractive industries and agriculture. It is also clear we need to revert to policies oriented towards bolstering the smallholder agricultural economy that seeks to improve their technical and material production conditions, like access to technology, finance, and land.

When we talk about technology, of course this includes all irrigation services, extension services, training, technical support services which have, under structural adjustment and other neoliberal policies, been drastically reduced. It is important to shift back to active investment and financing policies in the sector and focus on processing agricultural products in Africa so that the added value remains on the continent. This will also help us develop more productive sectors, create value-added jobs, and foster a vibrant local and regional economy while linking agriculture to other key sectors.

In recent years, Senegal and Mali have included food sovereignty in their national platforms, and various continental and regional initiatives have emerged, including from the Economic Community of West African States. Food sovereignty is also referenced in the Egyptian constitution. However, the continuing growth of food imports in Africa highlights the gaps in these models and the profound constraints posed by global capital and the free trade agreements and neoliberal economic institutions that leave it unchecked. Early post-independence governments in Africa had a clarity around the critical links between food self-sufficiency and national sovereignty that has been eroded by decades of neoliberal ideological onslaught. With COVID-19 and the climate crisis disrupting value chains and escalating price volatility, and concepts like food security simply repackaging food dependence, early post-independence policies offer an anchor for contemporary efforts.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

May 13, 2021 will be etched in the annals of Kenya’s history as another pivotal moment when,  once again,  the  Judiciary boldly upheld and affirmed the sovereignty of the people,  and the supremacy of the constitution, while reclaiming its independence.

The last time the spirit of constitutionalism coursed so strongly through a decision of the Kenyan judiciary was on 1 September 2017, when then Chief Justice David Maraga led the  Supreme Court in emphatically asserting the authority, independence and rightful role of the Judiciary in the constitutional order. The majority decision of the Supreme Court annulled the August 8, 2017 election of Uhuru Kenyatta as president of the Republic of Kenya in a petition that was brought by former Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his running mate Kalonzo Musyoka. The palpable sense of pride and affirmation of the entire Judiciary in the Supreme Court’s 2017 ruling on the Raila petition was captured in the anecdotes told of judicial officers symbolically retaking their oaths of office days after the monumental judgment. The judiciary, it was said, had finally come of age, judicial independence had been attained.

Sadly, that independence would be short-lived — lasting just sixty days. Following the Raila 2017 decision, an angry President Uhuru Kenyatta would wield his power to make good his threat to retaliate against the judicial organ of state, emasculating the institution and leaving it whimpering.

The hope in the judiciary that had been ignited by the Maraga Court was once again rekindled on  13 May  2021  by the five-judge bench of the  High Court consisting of Justices Joel Ngugi,  George Vincent Odunga, Jairus Ngaah, Teresiah Matheka and Chacha Mwita. The five justices delivered a brave, straight-shooting, bold and stellar decision on several consolidated constitutional petitions challenging the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) process towards a constitutional referendum.

Ironically, BBI was birthed out of the effects of the 1 September 2017 decision and was the brainchild of President Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, who had been symbolically sworn in as  “the  People’s  President”  at a  mock ceremony held after the dispute over the two presidential elections in 2017.

It is poetic justice that this time around,  both President Kenyatta and  Raila Odinga are on the receiving end of the judicial rod. This boldness in the affirmation of the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law is what Raila Odinga fought for in his 2017 presidential election petition.  He, therefore,  has no choice but to accept the  High  Court decision with grace and humility and reconsider where,  like the biblical  Samson, he allowed Delilah to cut off the source of his strength and vision. There is yet hope because, like Samson, Raila Odinga has a chance to reclaim his strength and bring down the Philistines’ pillars, the edifices and indeed the entire temple.

For the Odinga column, particularly the eminent legal scholars who rightly lauded the 1 September 2017 decision, it is easy to see and understand their conflict and struggle in faulting the High Court bench and the BBI judgment. They will struggle to fall on their swords, but fall they must.

The fact that the 13 May High Court decision may be challenged in the Court of Appeal and may possibly even go before the Supreme Court is a perfect opportunity for the judiciary to consolidate this significant gain and reassert its independence beyond assail. In 2017, the Maraga bench thought that they could domesticate a wild animal and dompt a serially rogue executive. It did not work and the administration of justice has been greatly suffering the ramifications of that mistake since.

They will struggle to fall on their swords, but fall they must.

The executive targeted the four Supreme Court judges who authored the majority judgment in the 2017 Raila decision in an attempt to induce fear in the rest of the judicial ranks. Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu is living testament of the lengths to which the promise “to revisit” the Judiciary could be taken. We must never lose sight of the fact that the attack on DCJ Mwilu was a veiled threat and an attack on the entire institution of the judiciary.

Therefore,  the judiciary must draw lessons from  2017  and ensure that this time around it holds the line and does not give in to the nastiness and brutishness of any executive assault. The respondents have already indicated that they intend to appeal against the BBI judgment, as is their right. It is thus likely that this matter may go all the way to the Supreme Court. An affirmation of the High Court judgment by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court will give the entire judiciary the rare opportunity to speak with one strong voice and stamp its constitutional authority.  The constitutional stars have aligned and this is the moment for the entire Judiciary to rein in an unwieldy creature of the constitution and put an end to the undeserved and misguided narrative that it is “the weakest link”. The judiciary is not a link – it is an organ of the state.

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A version of this article was originally published by The Standard.