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October 16th, we observed World Food Day. However, the enormous contradictions confronting humanity under contemporary capitalism onslaught are nowhere more conspicuous than in the global food system. An age of tremendous technological advancement in agricultural production is simultaneously an age of hunger, food insecurity, ecological destruction and corporate concentration. This is not simply a paradox of development; it is a manifestation of the political economy governing the production, distribution and consumption of food. The concomitant struggles of peasants, pastoralists, agricultural workers and working-class communities against this arrangement constitute a decisive terrain of resistance. Food sovereignty therefore demands more than an overhaul of agricultural practices. It requires a seismic transformation of the social relations determining who controls land, seeds, production, markets and, ultimately, people's right to eat.
World Food Day must be understood beyond its ceremonial significance. It should be a moment to interrogate the structures of power that have cuffed the global food system and to renew collective action for its emancipation.
The Political Economy of Food
While the world remains captive to the totalitarian logic of capital, people's bellies must be full before they can meaningfully organise to challenge and transform the food system. Hunger is not merely a question of insufficient production; it is also a question of access, ownership, distribution and power.
Small-scale producers remain indispensable to the global food chain. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), farms smaller than two hectares account for about 84 per cent of farms worldwide, operate approximately 12 per cent of agricultural land and produce around 35 per cent of global food. Their contribution varies considerably between countries, and these figures should not be confused with estimates for family farms of all sizes. These findings, set out in FAO's global small-farm findings, challenge inflated claims while underscoring the disproportion between small farmers' contribution and the land available to them.
Yet small-scale producers often bear the greatest risks: precarious working conditions, climate shocks, insecure tenure, limited access to finance and unequal bargaining power in markets. Meanwhile, corporate concentration across seeds, agrochemicals, biotechnology, processing, logistics and retail gives a relatively small number of companies substantial influence over the food chain. Monthly Review's analysis of agribusiness and ETC Group's research on corporate concentration help illuminate how market power can extend from agricultural inputs to the conditions under which food is bought and sold.
The argument is not that technological advancement is inherently detrimental. The issue is who owns, directs and benefits from it. Under unequal relations of production, innovations that could improve livelihoods can instead become instruments of dependency, intellectual-property enclosure and market domination. Commercial inputs may be promoted as the only legitimate route to modernisation, marginalising locally adapted knowledge and farmer-managed systems. The result can be agro-dependency: producers become increasingly reliant on purchased seeds and inputs while losing control over decisions that were once made within farming communities.
This is why food sovereignty, as articulated by La Via Campesina's food-sovereignty framework, is more far-reaching than food security understood as the availability of commodities. It concerns peoples' ability to shape their own food systems, protect ecological conditions and determine what they grow, how they grow it and for whom.
Frontiers for Food Sovereignty
World Food Day must remind us that the food question cannot be understood outside politics and economics. Food sovereignty is inseparable from struggles over the organisation of society, the distribution of productive resources and the authority to determine agricultural priorities.
Africa has proclaimed the aspiration of continental unity for generations. Yet unity must be more than a diplomatic slogan: its institutional form and material beneficiary’s matter. Colonial history offers a warning.
Colonial bandit Cecil Rhodes (the arch butcher) pursued a vision of British imperial expansion across Africa, demonstrating that political and geographical integration can serve antagonistic class and imperial interests. Pan-Africanist projects associated with Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere must therefore be distinguished from compradorian or imperial projects of integration. The question is not simply whether Africa should unite, but whose interests that unity advances.
The African Union, East African Community (EAC), Southern African Development Community and ECOWAS have developed frameworks for regional cooperation, trade and agricultural policy. Their contribution to food sovereignty should be assessed materially: do these institutions protect small-scale producers, strengthen regional food production and distribution, and defend farmers' seed rights? Or do their policies primarily facilitate larger markets for capital? Regional integration should serve working people rather than merely create new opportunities for corporate accumulation.
This debate is particularly urgent in relation to the proposed East African Community Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025. The Bill seeks to harmonise regional rules concerning the evaluation, release, registration, certification and marketing of plant varieties, as well as the protection of breeders' rights. EALA held public hearings across the eight Partner States from 26 to 28 August 2026. The EAC's account of the August 2026 hearings confirms that farmers' organisations, regulators, breeders, private-sector associations and civil society were among the stakeholders invited to contribute.
The ESAFF Uganda's position paper and farmer advocacy provides a substantive critique from a small-scale farmer-led movement. It states that farmer-managed seed systems account for approximately 85 per cent of seeds planted in Uganda and the EAC generally. ESAFF's central concern is that the Bill gives strong recognition to formal certification, variety registration, private-sector multiplication and breeders' rights, while giving inadequate recognition to farmers and their seed systems.
The paper identifies specific shortcomings. Clause 2 does not define key terms such as smallholder farmer, farmer-managed seed system, farmers' variety, landrace, community seed bank or Farmers' Rights. Clause 3 establishes a regional committee without guaranteeing smallholder farmers' representation or voting rights. ESAFF further argues that the evaluation and uniformity requirements under Clause 6 may disadvantage diverse local varieties and landraces; that cataloguing and certification provisions in Clauses 7 and 8 need to accommodate farmer seed practices; and that Clause 12 recognises breeders' rights without sufficiently balancing farmers' rights to save, reuse, exchange and share seed. These are ESAFF's interpretations and recommendations, not judicial findings about the Bill.
The concerns engage wider principles in the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, particularly Article 9 on Farmers' Rights. ESAFF calls for legal recognition of farmer-managed seed systems, farmers' varieties and community seed banks; permanent farmer representation in seed-governance bodies; affordable and proportionate quality assurance; and safeguards against the unfair appropriation of community genetic resources and associated knowledge. It also calls for clear rules on gene-edited and genetically modified crops, including biosafety assessment, labelling, protection against unintended gene flow and safeguards against unfair liability for farmers.
The political stakes are clear. Seed is not simply a commodity; it is also accumulated knowledge, biodiversity and a basis of social reproduction. A law that protects commercial breeders while leaving farmers' customary practices uncertain risks shifting authority away from the people who have conserved and adapted seed over generations. GRAIN's work on seeds and corporate power documents the broader struggle over seed markets and corporate control. In Tanzania, organisations such as MVIWATA are important to building farmers' collective voice. The debate should be followed through regional farmer networks and critical research, including the Review of African Political Economy.
Land, Agrarian Relations and Ownership
The land question remains paramount to any meaningful agrarian transformation. Colonial land legislation reorganised African systems of tenure and use in ways that served colonial administration and export-oriented production. Postcolonial states inherited much of this institutional architecture, even as they introduced new laws and protections. In Tanzania, the Land Act and Village Land Act of 1999 established an important framework, but tensions between customary rights, state authority, commercial investment and actual enforcement remain.
Urban expansion, often celebrated as an unquestionable measure of development, can place severe pressure on peri-urban agricultural communities. Speculative property markets, infrastructure projects and changing land-use plans may undermine the livelihoods of producers surrounding growing towns and cities. Farmers can be pressured to surrender land, change production systems or sell holdings on unfavourable terms. When land is treated primarily as an asset for accumulation rather than a productive resource sustaining communities, agrarian dispossession becomes a recurring feature of development.
The consequences are visible in Tanzania. A communication submitted to UN Special Procedures records that 855 residents from 23 villages in Mbarali District filed a case in the East African Court of Justice in December 2023 in relation to threatened evictions under Government Notice 754. The communication raises concerns about compensation, consultation and the absence of a resettlement plan. These are allegations reported to the UN mechanisms and should be understood as such; they nevertheless reveal the stakes for rural livelihoods and food production. See the UN Special Procedures communication on Mbarali.
Similar questions arise in relation to Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania, where conservation boundaries, land claims and resettlement have generated sustained disputes. A separate UN communication records allegations concerning forced evictions and pressure on Maasai communities in Loliondo and Ngorongoro. Conservation cannot be a licence to dispossess communities whose livelihoods and knowledge have shaped these landscapes. See the UN communication on Maasai Indigenous Peoples.
Climate Capitalism and New Frontiers of Land Appropriation
World Food Day should also prompt scrutiny of the relationship between climate change, corporate responsibility and the expanding carbon economy. Carbon markets are promoted as instruments for reducing emissions, but offsetting can allow major polluters to purchase credits rather than make sufficiently rapid reductions at source. Where projects are imposed on territories in the Global South, questions arise over land rights, consent, transparency, benefit-sharing and the distribution of risks.
Tanzania's National Audit Office examined the management of carbon-trading projects in its March 2025 performance audit. The audit found weaknesses including outdated greenhouse-gas baseline data, delays in review, inadequate coordination, weak monitoring, non-transparent carbon-credit pricing and limited oversight of costs and benefit-sharing. It also identified gaps in the review of contracts. These findings do not establish that every carbon project causes dispossession; they do show why robust public oversight and community safeguards are indispensable. The findings are available in Tanzania's 2025 carbon-trade performance audit.
The broader principle is environmental justice. Communities should not bear the cost of a climate crisis they have contributed least to, nor should their land and customary resources become collateral for corporate claims of carbon neutrality. FIAN International's right-to-food work and PLAAS research on land and agrarian questions provide useful frameworks for examining how land, livelihoods, food rights and climate interventions intersect.
Towards Agrarian Emancipation
The struggle for food sovereignty requires more than opposition to individual corporations or policies. It demands a coherent political project capable of transforming the structures governing agricultural production. Such a project must protect the rights to save, use, reuse, exchange and locally sell farm-saved seed; secure communal and customary land rights; strengthen public investment in agricultural research and infrastructure; support agroecological practices; and build regional systems of production and distribution that prioritise people's needs over speculative profitability.
It must also recognise peasants, pastoralists, agricultural workers and indigenous communities as political subjects with the right and capacity to shape agricultural policy, not as passive beneficiaries of development interventions. Farmers' organisations need meaningful representation in decision-making, transparent public institutions and accessible mechanisms to challenge dispossession and corporate abuse.
Ultimately, the food system cannot be emancipated while its productive resources remain subordinated to monopolies and financial interests. Nor can political independence alone deliver food sovereignty if the material relations of production continue to reproduce dependency and class inequality. The horizon must be an agrarian order in which those who produce food exercise meaningful control over the conditions of its production, distribution and consumption.
World Food Day should therefore be a day of collective reflection, political education and organised action. Food must cease to be merely a commodity through which capital accumulates wealth. It must be recognised as a fundamental condition of human life and collective emancipation. Food sovereignty is not a charitable concession; it is a political and economic struggle. Let World Food Day be observed as such.
About an author
Muhemsi Mwakihwelo is a Tanzanian political analyst, Writer, and Pan-African thinker whose work focuses on anti-imperialism, African sovereignty, and global power structures.