“The chemical based model of farming drains income because you have to buy seeds and buy fertilisers, to buy insecticide and buy pesticide. Organic farming is a lot more successful [and I don’t have] to buy from the shop.” – Hadija Kibwana, small-scale organic farmer, Tanzania.
With her wise words, Hadija Kibwana, a small scale organic farmer in Morogoro – Tanzania, was making the case for ecological organic agriculture over chemical-based conventional farming. This is not only significant to our small holder farmers but is also a message to donor countries to stop loading the country with chemical inputs supplied by large international corporations (e.g. Bayer, Monsanto and Syngenta) which bind farmers who were once in control of their livelihoods to debt whilst simultaneously destroying the natural health of soils.
When Global Justice Now came to Tanzania last November, they wanted to hear from small scale farmers who preserve their food sovereignty by building their livelihoods upon ecological organic agriculture. What they heard was “a story without the multi billion pound investments. But instead it has people power. Millions of small-scale farmers across the world are building an ecological model of farming that increases yields but doesn’t require chemicals, making it better for the environment and importantly gives control over food growing to the farmer rather than a corporation.”
Whilst in Tanzania, Global Justice Now met with ecological organic farmers who work with Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT) in Morogoro. They documented their findings in a short documentary film:
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