The Battle of Narratives and How It Shapes African Food Systems Today

Too often, the stories that dominate global agriculture and food systems are those of modernization, productivity, and external investment. These narratives claim to offer solutions, but in reality, they reinforce inequality, commodify food, and silence the voices of farmers, Indigenous peoples, and civil society. If we want sustainable transformation, we must interrogate who gets to tell the story and whose interests those stories serve.

In this week’s episode of The Battle for African Agriculture, I sit down with Professor Molly D. Anderson, a leading thinker, writer, and activist in the global food movement. She is a Professor Emerita of Food Studies at Middlebury College and a founding member of the IPES-Food. Molly has spent decades challenging dominant narratives and amplifying those too often excluded from decision-making. Her latest book, Transforming Food Systems: Narratives of Power, asks us to look beyond surface-level solutions and confront the deeper dynamics of justice, sovereignty, and agency.

Our conversation explores the clash between agroecology and industrial modernization, the framing of food as a commons versus a commodity, and the role of powerful institutions from the World Bank to philanthropic foundations in scripting the direction of food systems. She also speaks passionately about civil society movements like Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) as the true lever of change, and why agroecology must be understood not just as farming techniques, but as a fundamentally political project.