The latest episode of The Battle for African Agriculture podcast features Molly Anderson, professor emerita of food studies at Middlebury College and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES Food), in a wide-ranging conversation about the power relations that drive global food policy and why civil society remains the most dependable engine of real change.
Speaking with host Dr. Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Anderson draws on her personal trajectory from early encounters with racism in the United States through academic work in natural resource management and systems analysis. The experience shaped a conviction she returns to throughout the conversation: food is not primarily a technical problem but a matter of justice, and many of the solutions already exist. What is missing, she argues, is the political will to act on them, particularly when those most affected by food system failures have the least voice in determining the decisions made about them.
The discussion moves through several interconnected threads. Anderson examines her book, Transforming Food Systems: Narratives of Power, in which she argues that dominant stories about food, especially those centred on technological innovation and productivity, retain enormous influence over policy even when the evidence behind them is weak. She challenges what she describes as the continued arrogance of powerful countries and institutions that position themselves as knowing what is best for others while systematically ignoring the knowledge, priorities, and lived realities of civil society, Indigenous peoples, and communities on the margins of global decision-making.
On philanthropy, debt, global governance, and corporate influence, Anderson is pointed. Many interventions presented as solutions to food insecurity, she argues, continue older colonial patterns under updated language such as modernisation, green transition, and innovation. The terminology changes but the underlying logic of extraction and control does not. Agroecology, she contends, is not simply an agricultural method but a fundamentally political proposition because it requires shifting power toward the people who actually hold knowledge and sustain food systems at ground level.
Anderson closes with a clear-eyed assessment of where transformation will come from. Real change, she says, will not arrive through the voluntary surrender of privilege by the powerful but through organised movements that insist on justice, reclaim food as a commons, and build systems grounded in dignity, territory, and democratic control.
Episode 25 is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and RSS feeds, as well as across AFSA’s social media platforms. New episodes of The Battle for African Agriculture release every Friday. The series is supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
