To Faith Leaders and faith organisation representatives
Greetings from SAFCEI, the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute. We share with you a letter about African food security and resilience in the time of Covid-19 and beyond.
We write with a request that you consider endorsing the following letter about food security. We also ask that you share this appeal as widely as possible amongst other faith based institutions and initiatives that are concerned about establishing a just and nutritious food system for people that also restores the good Earth.
Open letter to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from SAFCEI and Faith community representatives from the African continent.
We, faith leaders from Africa, are experiencing first-hand how the Covid-19 pandemic is making visible failing food systems and fuelling hunger and poverty in Africa. Alongside our responsibility to be custodians of the Earth, faith networks are entrusted to ensure the just distribution and sharing of resources for all in need.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation expresses a commitment to overcoming food insecurity, but we are gravely concerned that their support for intensive industrial scale agriculture is deepening the humanitarian crisis. We believe that our people are not being sustained by the high input – high output approach of industrial monoculture farming and food processing that the Gates Foundation promotes. We are also aware that aggressive frontier expansion of farmable land breaches human-nature barriers, enhancing the opportunistic transmission of pathogens from reservoirs in wild animal populations to humans.
In the light of evidence that community-based agroecological approaches with minimal inputs will strengthen local and informal food network systems and bring about greater ecological integrity and social and gender justice, we appeal to the Gates Foundation to reconsider how it promotes “food security”. Locally-defined, holistic approaches, that are based on regenerative farming methods, will enable an agroecological transition to sustainable food systems in Africa.
This is a vision the faith traditions of the continent long for as we strive to ensure the just distribution and sharing of resources for all in need. It can only happen if we restore our relationship with the Earth and the community of life upon which we depend.
Please join us to raise your voice by signing on to the letter to the Gates Foundation. Please endorse this letter by 30th September.
Download the open letter here:
https://safcei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Gates-Foundation-appeal-from-SAFCEI-African-faith-Leaders-September-2020.docx.pdf
In solidarity and faith,
The SAFCEI team
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