I have spent more than 20 years visiting communities and working with farmers around Uganda and across East and southern Africa. I have come to realize that there are many farmers who are trying their best to produce food in a way that harms neither the environment nor consumers. But many of these farmers are trapped in a corrupt system designed to benefit those who provide – and profit – from inputs. How do we help them to break out of this bubble, and how do we create a network where they can share their motivations, their feelings, their practical knowledge and their experiences? Farmers need to be brought together so that they help each other move towards good, clean and fair production of food. And they need to be brought together because farmers are also bearers of knowledge. Uniting them in a network is the best way to free themselves from the trap of growing input-heavy, export-focused monocultures. My name is Edward Mukiibi. Since 2022 I have served as the president of the world’s largest food movement, Slow Food. In 2007 I was just an agriculture student at Makerere University in Kampala, but I was already working closely with farmers. I volunteered for a project to promote a new hybrid maize variety, supposedly drought-resistant, in western Uganda. I was convinced that this was the right way to produce more food: more high-yielding varieties grown with more external inputs like fertilizers. Edward Mukiibi in the field. Image courtesy of Slow…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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