Building food sovereignty through ecofeminism in Kenya: From export to local agricultural value chains

Les auteures ont revisite le district de Maragua au Kenya et ont analyse les protestations des fermieres face a l'exploitation du cafe en 1990. En 2016 elles ont note une transition tres claire vers une agroecologie biologique caracterisee par des alliances genrees et generationnelles demarrees il y a plusieurs annees par les femmes qui protestaient. Depuis elles ont imagine le partage des sols, elles ontpreserve une variete de semences quelles ont semees et ont ajoute certaines connaissances ecologiques et des preferences culinaires locales. Reprising Kenyan Women's Struggle Against the Coffee Economy, 1986-1997 In 1997, in the pages of Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, we co-authored an analysis of a women-initiated movement of Kenyan farmers to break free from long-standing coffee commodity value chains in which they had been entangled for a century. The article described how coffee was first grown in the temperate Central Kenyan highlands on white settler plantations in the early part of the twentieth century. By 1940, coffee was one of the most lucrative commodity markets in the world. After protest against discriminatory coffee licensing practices, large land-holding African farmers were allowed to grow coffee. Smallholders were later provisionally given license to grow coffee, but restrictions still barred the majority, whose under-four acre farms were deemed in policy as uneconomical for coffee production. By the 1980s, the World Bank was actively advocating for farmers to grow more coffee, and for governments of peasant nations to adopt policies that would facilitate increase of export production, in part as a means for those governments to repay international loans. Corporate coffee value chains came to benefit auctioneers and middle men, as well as foreign bankers, far more than the average farm husband, whose name was on the land title, the production contract, and the bank account (Brownhill, Kaara and Turner 43). That piece described the gendered class dynamics within which peasant women in coffee growing districts like Maragua in Central Kenya uprooted coffee trees, and in tandem planted food crops on their small farms. Our 1997 analysis emphasized the ways that women collectively asserted their usufruct rights to grow food on their own family land. In asserting this claim, women broke the male deals (1) that had bound husbands (and wives) into unfair production and trade relationships with men of the state and of international capital, relationships which were becoming harmful to the environment through chemical application, and to producers' health and well-being through exposure to chemicals but also significantly to loss of food gardens when the coffee economy expanded. The article also examined the ethnicized gendered class that emerged to support women's return to cultivation that prioritized local food value chains, starting with feeding farm families and supplying basic nutritious foods, like organic bananas, to urban markets. Women farmers found allies among young men who worked in transport and trade, and who built links between rural farmers and urban eaters. We held up the case as an example of the contemporary state of global struggle that saw the enclosures of neo-liberal corporate rule being resisted by peasant women, whose efforts in alliance with young, dispossessed men were aimed at enabling the re-emergence of subsistence-oriented agriculture and local trade. Twenty years later, how far have women and men in places like Maragua succeeded in re-establishing what we can call in contemporary parlance, local food sovereignty? The Coffee Economy Transformed: Maragua in 2016 In March 2016, I, Leigh Brownhill, returned to Kenya to visit my co-author, sister, and friend, Wahu Kaara. During that stay, we made a daytrip to the collective farm of a youth group in Maragua to learn about the progress of the agricultural transformation there, in the heart of a region that spurned coffee some thirty years ago. …

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