Pitfalls of ignoring community voices in food systems

MOST conversations on food systems and climate change at global conferences and capital-city workshops continue to overlook practical community voices. When community representatives are invited, their participation is often superficial, mainly serving to legitimise events through media visibility.

In some cases, development organisations enter communities and introduce projects such as goat rearing or horticulture without conducting thorough baseline surveys or clearly explaining how these initiatives will strengthen the local food system.

As a result, sustainability is compromised: imported goat breeds often underperform in local conditions, while hybrid vegetable varieties risk contaminating indigenous crops.

The value of understanding local food baskets

Food systems and climate adaptation interventions cannot succeed without detailed knowledge of local food baskets. Unfortunately, high-level discussions on climate adaptation rarely examine how local food baskets can make climate finance more relevant and meaningful to communities. Generating such crucial intelligence requires working closely with communities to develop frameworks that recognise and document knowledge embedded in local food baskets.

In a turbulent world shaped by climate change, unhealthy diets and conflicts, it has become essential for farming communities to possess in-depth knowledge of their food systems, biodiversity and medicinal plants.

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Through grounded dialogue, communities can better understand how many of their crops and livestock varieties are threatened with extinction and which ones are proving resilient to climate variability.

Key missing voices

While a few farmers are sometimes consulted, particularly at the beginning of projects, traders — who are among the most important actors in food systems — are often completely overlooked. Yet traders who source commodities from diverse production areas can provide valuable insights that are critical for effective programming.

For instance, traders understand the seasonality of different production areas, available volumes and the logistical challenges involved in transporting commodities from certain locations.

Without such intelligence, governments, contract companies or development organisations may introduce projects whose products struggle to find a market or are easily out-competed by commodities coming from other regions. This illustrates how costly it can be to bypass traders in food system planning.

In some cases, communities also have their own expectations shaped by their understanding of the local food system.

For instance, communities may prefer a project to cover the entire district so it can capture different microclimates that produce foods not found in some villages.

By examining each food category together, communities and traders can identify simple foods, dishes and beverages, and assess how easy or difficult certain foods are to trade depending on whether their complementary products are available.

For example, cauliflower is easier to sell when accompanied by broccoli.

Traders also understand the full range of marketing costs, including fuel, packaging, bags, strings, loading and off-loading, security, as well as losses from theft and shrinkage. All these details are critical for designing effective climate change and food systems interventions.

Challenges identified through community consultations

Humble conversations with communities can reveal the limited production of indigenous foods and the lack of adequate documentation on indigenous food systems.

In such cases, there may be greater value in projects that begin by building a body of food knowledge through collaboration with communities, many of whom possess rich and often undocumented expertise. Key trends can then be captured through a 12-month longitudinal study, allowing for meaningful comparative analysis over time.

In areas with two agricultural seasons, some commodities harvested during the rainy season are preserved for consumption in the dry season. This raises important questions, such as how much consumers would eat nyevhe if it were available fresh throughout the year.

A longitudinal study can create space for comparative analysis that helps to answer such questions.

One major challenge with most indigenous foods is their very short shelf life during the harvest season. However, by mapping the quantities of food produced across different districts, mass markets can reveal opportunities for value addition and food preservation within those areas.

 The role of culture and rituals 

Much of Africa’s indigenous food is closely linked to cultural rites, myths and rituals. Certain foods are used during traditional ceremonies, marriage customs and other social practices.

These traditions form part of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), which development organisations often fail to recognise as valuable resources. When governments and development agencies speak of resources, they usually refer to raw materials used to build dams, irrigation schemes, bridges, roads and warehouses.

The knowledge, practices and positive attitudes embedded in IKS brought by local communities — essential for using and sustaining resources — are often not recognised as important resources in their own right.

On the other hand, some churches have contributed to the stigmatisation of indigenous foods in ways that discourage their production and consumption. Fortunately, territorial mass markets are helping to prevent the extinction of certain indigenous foods by sustaining consistent demand.

These markets also create space for the continued use of traditional tools, such as those used for threshing and roasting small grains.

Indigenous food as a foundation for future industries

Development interventions should also recognise that indigenous fruits such as matohwe, masawu and mawuyu, as well as vegetables like nyevhe, are potential foundations of future food industries.

Instead of continuing to prioritise exotic fruit plantations, African governments should place greater emphasis on the cultivation and development of indigenous foods. These conversations should begin by engaging communities to understand how they themselves define food as indigenous or exotic, based on their lived experiences and knowledge systems.

Local elders may describe exotic foods as those introduced by missionaries during the colonial period. Communities can also collectively map their food systems, including how foods are produced and the trends shaping their food baskets. For instance, they may ask whether the food basket is expanding or shrinking over time.

By demonstrating demand and consumption patterns, mass markets can help to reveal whether particular food baskets are growing or declining.

Communities can also help to reveal the extent to which the production of indigenous foods matches consumption or whether inconsistencies in production are shaping demand patterns.

Such conversations provide communities with an opportunity to enrich interventions by partially analysing information themselves and articulating their own perspectives and consensus.

With appropriate facilitation, dialogue sessions can become a practical and meaningful way of analysing data. Communities can share emerging trends, as well as internal and external factors affecting local food systems, and the types of support needed to adapt to climate change.