This week, IATP is in Nairobi hosting a two-day workshop (August 5-6) for the East Africa region on the Agreement on Agriculture Reimagined. This is part of a three-year project to address urgently needed changes to international trade systems to meet the mounting challenges in global food distribution. The event is being held in collaboration with the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (BIBA Kenya) and the African Biodiversity Network (ABN).
The world is in urgent need of a trading system that supports sustainable food systems and equitable outcomes. There is near universal agreement that the global food system and the priorities and positions of the member countries themselves have significantly shifted since the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) was adopted in the 1990s. The agreement is now outdated and ill-suited to the realities of today’s world. In trade policy circles, there is now an appetite to learn, test, and apply new ideas about how to improve agriculture trade and trade-related rules to enable sustainable food production processes and just systems that promote nutritional and healthy diets and improve livelihoods for farmers. The workshop brings together trade experts, farmers and policymakers from the East Africa region.
IATP, together with the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), has been working with a team of research partners from around the world on a reset of multilateral trade and agriculture rules, drafting a model treaty of a reimagined WTO Agreement of Agriculture Trade for Sustainable Development (AoA TSD). Beyond traditional issues of market access and domestic support (subsidies), a reimagined AoA addresses emerging priorities in global agriculture and the evolving interests of various stakeholders and country groups to ensure that international trade works in support of sustainable and equitable food systems worldwide.
To start the week, IATP and colleagues from the BIBA Kenya, IISD, and the Shamba Centre for Food and Climate visited the Grow Biointensive Agriculture Center of Kenya (G-BiACK) in Thika, Kenya, to better understand and learn from their experiences in training young and small-scale farmers in Kenya on biointensive agriculture methods that promote skills in successful agroecology, seed and food sovereignty, environmental and soil health, and economic resilience. It is an approach that we welcome and support for replication by other small-holder agriculture communities as a means of sustainable and profitable agriculture. Special thanks to Samuel Nderitu from G-BiACK for hosting our team.
