Extract of the interview of Cidi Otieno, by Maya Cohen, in October 2023 (Gallese, Italy)
“I’m called Cidi Otieno, David, I’m a smallholder food producer. And a member of the Kenyan Peasant Leage, a movement led and composed of smallholder food producers and consumers based in Kenya. The Kenyan Peasant League is a member of La Via Campesina. It’s a global movement of smallholder food producers globally with over 200 million members across the world.
To our movement, innovation is basically using local solutions to solve local problems and this innovation is as a result of constant life, life testing. Of problems that are affecting us on the farm. So, every day you find that our farmers, or our members, face a lot of problems. And in the problems that they are facing, they test solutions, in different ways. And they come up with solutions. So to us innovation is inbuilt. It’s about how we respond to the problems that affect us and the solutions that we come up with to solve those problems.
Innovation is basically, embedded in peasant agroecology, which is a way of life that considers the mother earth not as a commodity but as a resource that needs to be conserved, to be preserved. So for us to be innovative using peasant agroecology, first of all, we cannot equate the livelihoods or the resource we have to any money. Peasant agroecology to us is an inspiration to innovate and come up with solutions using the resources that we have at our disposals.
(…)
We are saying that in our own ways of producing our own seeds, of saving our own seeds, of developing our landraces on the farm – in itself it’s innovation. When farmers say that for us to deal with stiger wheat, for example, then we need to intercrop, perhaps our maize and beans with trees like sesbania. Or to deal with the pests, you have to grow maybe, or maybe to deal with the pests affecting vegetables you need to grow onions around it. That’s an innovation. And what we are saying, is that peasants globally have developed a lot of innovations which are working. But what is happening is that the governments, that have been captured by the global corporations, rubbish that and they say innovation must pass through labs. Through scientists. We are ourselves, we are scientists. Our farms are big laboratories. We conduct tests every day. And we are scientists, and nobody has the monopoly to say that, you aren’t scientist and I’m a scientist. We are scientists. We have lived all this long without government support, without corporation support. And yet we are still surviving. So that itself is innovation. How do you think people are living? Producing food without support of government and yet they’re surviving, they’re feeding their families, they’re feeding the world. Peasants feed the world.”