Inspiring Community-Led Concepts Advance to Semi-Finals in Food System Vision Prize

“A bottle of soda costs the equivalent of 30 cents, while fruits and vegetables cost $1.30 or $1.50. It’s cheaper to give your children soda,” he says. “I have seen families go for months without a single source of protein. I have witnessed children develop malnutrition and nutrient deficiency, which often leads them to underperform in schools.”

But adjusting the cost of nutritious food requires that farmers be given more efficient tools, and here Agunbiade also has personal insight, having worked on his grandfather’s farm as a child. “My grandfather slaved all his life as a low-income farmer,” he recalls. “I thought several times that the income didn’t justify the labor.”

He and his team, the Food Innovation Nervecenter, have identified six key food challenges for their region, from food waste to aging agrarians, and developed a multi-faceted plan to meet those challenges that he believes could transform life for both farmers and consumers along with his region’s relationship to food.

“The rights of the Indigenous people who lived here were completely disregarded. They were confined on reserves and their treaty rights were not respected,” Hanley continues.. “The agricultural system was set up to export virtually all the products from the land to Europe and other markets. This extractive economy is unsustainable and also unjust.”

Restoring the land closer to its natural patterns is part of his team’s plan, and it envisions that 40 percent of the land would be conserved or restored to native prairie and parkland, which can also be accessed to support Indigenous food sovereignty. On the remaining land, regenerative agricultural practices would focus on supplying local and regional markets. Exports would be reduced to levels that prevent land degradation.

Casillas’s team proposes drone-enabled food transport. Currently, farmers must walk many miles to sell their crops. Nearly 80 percent of the homes are led by women, so many carry a child as well on their food delivery runs. Under the plan developed by Casillas’ team, drones would pick up the produce, take it down the mountains to vendors to sell, and the farmers would receive automatic cash transfers.

One million Ugandans would benefit initially and the targeted population eventually would expand to another 4 to 5 million from the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. It would also focus on education so families learn the difference between feeling full and eating a balanced meal, as well as techniques that could improve farming output. Worldwide, 22 percent of children under age five are stunted, or show slowed growth due to malnutrition or repeated infection.[1] In the Kasese region, that figure is close to 50 percent, and must be reversed, Casillas says.

A key concern for the group is the imbalance in food imports, says Camille Collazo, the team leader and Executive Director of VisitRico, a non-profit dedicated to strengthening Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy through agritourism experiences to achieve food sovereignty.

“In Puerto Rico, we import 85-90 percent of our food, and we are eating food that is killing us and making us sick. We cannot continue to take in venom,” Collazo says. Their goal is to support farmers and communities in order to address the imbalance. “We want to use technology to collect data from farmers and give them a voice. And then we want to shrink the space between the farmers and the people.”

Like many of the Semi-Finalists, The Foundation’s Sara Farley finds hope in this uncertain moment. “It is impossible to ignore what this shared human experience of global pandemic is teaching us all about systems,” Farley says. “We are deeply interconnected—whether or not we like it, or even understand it. This whole argument that we need to transform our food system? People might just get it now.”