As a prelude to Africa’s participation in the 2025 Nyeleni Global Forum organized by the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty’s (IPC), the Africa region organized its consultation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to discuss and adopt common positions.
For three days, about forty participants from West, Central, East, and Southern Africa, and more than eighty participants who registered online, representing small farmers, artisanal fishers and fish workers, herders-pastoralists, ethnic minorities, and indigenous peoples, agricultural workers, consumers, women, youth, forest dwellers, NGOs, and urban poor, discussed and built a common political agenda, strategies, and working methods to transform the global system to achieve economic, social, gender, racial, and environmental goals and ultimately achieve food sovereignty.
The discussions included the progress made by the food sovereignty movement in the region since 2007, the analysis of the current situation in the African region, the key themes and struggles on which the movements had engaged, as well as the main successes, the analysis of the main challenges and obstacles to food sovereignty and justice in Africa, the main opportunities, key trends, policy arenas, strategies, agendas, actors, and political forces for justice and food sovereignty in the region, and next steps.
Indeed, in 2007, the IPC played a critical role in uniting small-scale food producers and their allies to establish a common vision of food sovereignty and implement strategies to make it a reality. Over time, a robust global movement for food sovereignty emerged, gaining significant political recognition. Together, they succeeded in democratizing the world food and agricultural scene, including reforming the Committee on World Food Security.
Their struggles also influenced food sovereignty policies in various national contexts and resulted in important milestones and standards for the rights of peasants and indigenous peoples: the ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources with the concept of farmers’ rights; the Voluntary Tenure Guidelines (VGGT) and the Voluntary Guidelines on Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines); and international conferences on agroecology.
These achievements were under threat due to a long period of systemic crises. Extremism, political forces, authoritarian regimes, and corporate capture of democratic governance spaces rose globally, alongside the dismantling of the United Nations multilateral system. Human rights violations against peasants and indigenous peoples, as well as climate change, biodiversity loss, armed conflict, and hunger, rapidly intensified. Moreover, new threats to food sovereignty came from new business configurations, in which speculative corporations, hedge funds, and digital titans joined forces to support a failing agro-industrial production system.
In this context, the IPC advocated for a new global Nyeleni process, leading to the next Global Nyeleni Forum in India in 2025. Recognizing the power of people’s movements, it aimed to build solidarity and unity by connecting local and global struggles. Efforts were made to adopt an intersectional perspective to effectively address the multidimensional global crisis.
As part of this Nyeleni process, all civil society and indigenous organizations, social movements, or NGOs that had already worked within the framework of the principles of food sovereignty and/or were willing to engage with food sovereignty from an intersectional perspective participated.
A global steering committee has been set up to guide the process, with IPC members and international allies from other sectors such as health, trade unions, and solidarity economy. This Nyeleni process is being built on regional consultations in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, MENA, and Asia and the Pacific. Each region aims to involve as many allied organizations as possible, to open up politically to allow other social organizations and movements to contribute, and to establish a regional steering committee responsible for leading convergence towards the Nyeleni Global Dialogues, which would take place in 2025 and beyond.
The results of this consultation will strengthen discussions at the global forum.
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