alfredo cà
the challenge of food sovereignty
Just switch between the crowded streets of the port of Bissau, any day of July. Dozens, hundreds of containers parked and queued, in step man, ready to be shipped on huge cargo ships. Within them, cashews. From only commercial hub of the small African country do not start other goods. Nothing other than cashews. This is perhaps the most vivid symbol of how a whole - and unstable - economy rests on the cultivation and trade of a single plant.
Outside, cashews. Inside, everything else. Yet, there is those who try to free themselves from this “tyranny”. Starting from the domestic market and one of the most common consumption, the chicken meat. We move so from the coast, towards the inside the city. Bairro Antula, one of the most populous of the capital. Here, for almost 10 years, it is active the NGO “Asas de Socorro”.
“To become independent from the nutritional point of view means to become free. For this reason we want to work for the self-production and food sovereignty, which is today one of the most important priorities for our country”, says Alfredo Cà, the head of the Association.
Thanks to their determination and the engagement on the territory, Alfredo and 5 young people of “Asas de Socorro” are coordinating in recent months, a project dedicated to the breeding and sale of chickens, with the participation of other international NGOs as LVIA, Manitese, Procivicus and SolSoc.
The new structures that will allow to expand poultry production are under construction and will be ready this winter. “The idea is to develop the local poultry market. The country imports on average 12 000 tons of eggs annually. But we want to work to minimize this mechanism, which binds us too to imports. Our center, with time, will allow us to engage in a single chain all domestic manufacturers, and we get to produce 500 chickens a week. The number of people trained in the first phase of the project will be about fifty. But the center will also develop a series of related activities, such as the cultivation of millet, an important raw material for the breeding chickens”.
“Cultural diversity is a treasure”: an idea of Guinendadi completely “collective”, that of Alfredo.