Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the potential of traditional agricultural knowledge in Southern Africa for increasing food sovereignty in contexts of an accelerating climate crisis and asks how local practices can be scaled up and become politically influential.

Paper long abstract:

The productive capacity of African smallholders is increasingly under threat from climate change as well as the global food regime dominated by industrial monocultures and few large corporations. To increase food sovereignty on the continent thus remains of utmost importance – as one step towards a transformation of the global food regime, and to address the yield gaps that remain vast in many countries in the region. So far, existing government and international support schemes for smallholder farmers are tied to a “Green Revolution” approach through the provision of chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds, underpinned by the promotion of industrial technologies. These, however, are ill-suited to make farming more environmentally sustainable or farmers more independent. Locally adapted, less commercialised methods and inputs would be better suited for this but are often crowded out.

Against this background, my paper investigates the role that traditional knowledge can play in increasing food sovereignty in Southern Africa, a region that has been hard hit by recurring droughts over the past few years. Various small-scale initiatives exist that aim to work with, and promote, Indigenous agricultural knowledge and my paper asks how these practices become politically influential; how they are shared, scaled up, and can possibly instigate macro-level change. Based on ongoing research in Botswana and Zambia, and using a prefigurative politics framework, the paper discusses emerging findings and presents a larger research agenda of interdisciplinary collaboration with participatory methodologies, in order to also bring practical benefits to the farming communities themselves through mutual learning.