Peasants across Africa are intensifying their struggles against land grabs and other harmful policies that promote industrial agriculture. At a recent international conference organized by the world’s largest peasants movement, Via Campesina, African peasants had opportunities to share their experiences of struggle and to learn.

Activists from anti-capitalist militant organizations in North Africa met in Tunis on 4^th and 5^th July 2017 to set up the North African Network for Food Sovereignty. The network is a unifying structure for struggles in the region and will be involved in local, continental and international mobilisation.

Instead of heeding the just calls for food, land, and food sovereignty being raised by the farmers and peoples of the world, the powers that be are responding with intensified repression.

UNCTAD 14 presents a free market driven neoliberal trade paradigm which stands in stark contrast to the food sovereignty paradigm where smallholder farmers are social, cultural, and historical actors that make decisions based on a diversity of personal, ethical, and cultural factors and not just based on profit, business and markets.

It behooves the Committee to produce an official report detailing the “consultations” they claim to have done for all to know why Parliament still refuses to heed the demands of Ghanaian civil society groups and faith-based organisations which who have formally petitioned them. The minimum courtesy one expects is a report detailing why their objections were not taken into consideration.