Ethiopian activist, Million Belay, talks to The Mint about the fight to take back control of Africa’s food.
In a world where food is increasingly treated like a financial product—priced, packaged, shipped, and speculated on — long-time organiser of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Million Belay Ali, wants to return it to something more basic: culture, health, land, and justice.
AFSA’s roots go back to the late 2000s, when a new contest for Africa’s agriculture was gathering pace. By 2006, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations and other actors were initiating what would later become widely known as a renewed “Green Revolution” push on the continent. In 2007, movements including La Via Campesina met in Nyéléni, Mali and sharpened the global concept of food sovereignty—framing it around core principles rather than just an attractive slogan. A year later, African networks began to coalesce around building something continental. AFSA was formally named in 2009.
But Belay is careful not to present AFSA as a simple “anti-Gates” reaction story. The spark, he says, was also internal: a sense that scattered African civil society networks were not achieving enough alone. “Individually, we felt that we were not achieving what we wanted to achieve,” he explains—so it made sense “to come together and fill a gap in African food sovereignty policy.”
The risk, as he sees it, is that African farming is pushed into a system where survival depends on outsiders.
That “gap” matters because Africa is not a marginal player in its own economy. Belay points out that more than 80% of Africans are farmers, and that agriculture accounts for a large share of economic activity. Yet the direction of travel has been towards dependence: inputs, seeds, land deals, distribution, and “the economy around foods” increasingly shaped by “a few actors” with global reach. The risk, as he sees it, is that African farming is pushed into a system where survival depends on outsiders.
This is where the movement draws a hard line between two phrases that often get blurred in international forums: food security and food sovereignty. Food security, Belay argues, can be satisfied by one crude measure—food on the table—without asking who controls that food system or how that food was produced. It can ignore whether food is treated as a commodity, whether production respects ecosystems, or whether farmers and communities have power over land, seeds, and markets. Food sovereignty, by contrast, forces those questions to the centre: control, ecology, and political agency.
If food sovereignty is the “why,” agroecology is the “how.” For Belay, the movement’s most important strategic move was to “tie it with agroecology”: farming that respects nature and the people who produce food, while improving soil, health, nutrition, and resilience in the face of climate shocks. He rejects the caricature that agroecology is nostalgic or anti-science. “It’s a cutting-edge science,” he says—full of innovations that can raise productivity and strengthen local economies without locking farmers into chemical dependence.
AFSA’s approach has included building communities of practice, supporting agroecological entrepreneurship, and developing “territorial markets” and cross-border trade that keep value closer to producers. Belay also notes that international crises have unintentionally helped the agenda by exposing the fragility of import-dependent systems.
The biggest barriers, however, are not technical. They’re ideological—and heavily funded.
Belay describes a set of narratives that have been drilled into politicians, scientists, and public institutions: that African seeds are “tired,” that African land in African hands is “not producing,” that Africa can only feed itself by reorienting agriculture into “market business,” and that progress means adopting high-yield varieties, agrochemicals, and GMO-led pipelines. These stories serve clear commercial interests: the “Green Revolution agenda will allow them to sell their agrochemicals [and] their high-yielding varieties.”
Part of AFSA’s answer is to work through pride, taste, and everyday life — not just policy papers.
The deeper problem, he argues, is the emotional power of “modernisation theory”—a worldview imported from Europe that treats development as a single linear path from “backwardness to modernity.” In that frame, traditional practices are automatically dismissed: “your land is backward, your seed is backward… your technology is backward.” It isn’t just persuasion; it’s a status system.
So how do you counter a belief that operates at the level of identity?
Part of AFSA’s answer is to work through pride, taste, and everyday life—not just policy papers. Belay points to a campaign called “My Food is African”, built on research into the value of African foods and a simple premise: people want food that reflects who they are. He also describes organising African chefs to champion African ingredients and cuisines—creating a “powerful statement” that African food is good, and that innovation can come from mixing traditions across countries to speak to a younger generation.
It’s also, plainly, a fight over attention and access. “Bill Gates can come today… [and] easily get an appointment with the president,” Belay says. “The doors are open to them and not to us.”
Then there’s the structural shift shaping every food debate: urbanisation. Belay calls it a “huge” challenge, but he refuses a simplistic rural romanticism. Youth leaving farms can reduce land fragmentation; remittances can support rural households. The real danger is unplanned urbanisation—slums, weak infrastructure, and rural underinvestment that accelerates the loss of farming knowledge and local food systems.
You can raise yields while destroying resilience—and the costs show up later in health, degraded land, and social breakdown.
When asked whether any governments are taking food sovereignty seriously, Belay is cautiously optimistic. He names Ethiopia and Uganda as places where leaders express support, and points to movements in Ghana, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and beyond. The momentum, he argues, has been accelerated by shocks that exposed Africa’s vulnerability.
COVID was one. Belay recalls how vaccine access made the global hierarchy brutally visible: “when push comes to shove, you are on your own.” The war in Ukraine was another: fuel, fertiliser, and wheat prices surged, triggering a basic question—why should Africans starve because of a war elsewhere? And trade disruptions, including tariff politics associated with the Trump era, reinforced the case for strengthening intra-African trade and reducing dependency.
Yet Belay warns that “sovereignty” is a contested word. Governments may adopt the language while pursuing a model that still poisons soils, promotes pesticide-heavy farming, or treats agriculture as export business rather than feeding people. “If you understand food sovereignty as increasing only productivity,” he says, “then there is a problem.” You can raise yields while destroying resilience—and the costs show up later in health, degraded land, and social breakdown. That is why he raises “true cost accounting”: measuring what industrial systems hide.
Overhanging all of this is the constraint that rarely makes it into glossy agriculture pitches: debt. Belay points to repayments to private lenders, banks, and major international institutions as a siphon on public investment—money that could otherwise support agroecology, health systems, and jobs for a very young continent. And because repayments are tied to hard currency, governments are pushed to earn dollars through exports—often reinforcing the very commodity systems food sovereignty tries to escape.
Belay’s message is not that Africa should retreat or reject innovation. It is that Africa should choose the terms of innovation—rooted in ecology, cultural confidence, and justice, rather than dependency packaged as progress. Food sovereignty, in his telling, is not a niche activist demand. It is a strategy for survival in a world where the global food order is increasingly brittle—and increasingly controlled by people who are not accountable to the communities who eat the consequences.
Listen to the whole interview here.
