[Food Tank] “The Politics of Knowledge” is a new compendium from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food about ways funders, researchers, and policymakers can help scale agroecological practices across the globe.
“Companies and governments have supported [industrial agriculture] by billions of dollars of investment, which has gone into systems that lock farmers into certain types of production,” says Ronnie Brathwaite, Senior Agriculture Officer at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), at a recent symposium focusing on the African region.
Industrial agricultural systems rely heavily on inputs from a few major suppliers and often require shipping food products across the globe, Brathwaite says. And weaknesses in these systems threaten food security across Africa and the globe, as recent crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have exposed.