Luanda, 28 oct (Prensa Latina) El presidente de Angola, João Lourenço, viajó hoy a Tanzania para realizar una visita de Estado en respuesta a una invitación de su homóloga en dicho país, Samia Suluhu Hassan.

The post Angola y Tanzania por estrechar relaciones y cooperación first appeared on Noticias Prensa Latina.

Some 850 smallholder farmers from across mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar met in Morogoro from September 29 to October 1 for the National Smallholder Farmers’ Conference and the 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM) of MVIWATA, the network of Tanzania’s smallholder farmers’ groups. The theme was “Towards Food Sovereignty: Land Security, Agroecology and Economic Justice for Smallholder Farmers” (“Kuelekea Uhuru wa Chakula: Uhakika wa Ardhi, Kilimo Ikolojia na Haki Uchumi kwa Wakulima Wadogo”).

The AGM is MVIWATA’s highest body. Founded by farmers in 1993, the organization interacted directly with 58,916 farmers last year, 57% of whom were women, according to its own count. Two days of conference debate precede the AGM, allowing members to debate policy before coming together to decide the way forward. For this year’s AGM, MVIWATA farmers took up the key issues of land, markets, seed and, for the first time, carbon trade.

Dr Bashiru Ally, Tanzania’s Minister of Livestock and Fisheries, opened the meeting, saying he had come to listen rather than lecture. He turned quickly to land: conflicts between peasants and pastoralists, he said, had killed at least fifteen people across five regions in September alone. He asked MVIWATA to help the government end the land conflicts.

Guests included the ambassadors of Cuba and Palestine, the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers’ Forum, the Tanzanian Socialist Forum, and Pan Africanism Today, which delivered a message of solidarity on behalf of more than seventy movements and organizations in Africa. MVIWATA also read its statement of solidarity with Palestine and Cuba.

Land discussions dominated the first day. Delegates said the courts were out of reach for most peasant farmers. MVIWATA’s chairperson, Apollo Chamwela, told those attending the AGM that in Magungu village in Kiteto, more than sixty farmers had lost their land when it was allocated for grazing. Subira from Msomero and Salum from Rudewa, both in Kilosa district, described village land taken by outsiders with the collusion of the local officials who should have prevented it. “How can the government take the side of the minority against the majority?” Subira asked. “Where should we run to cry?”

The second day of the AGM focused on markets: not markets in the abstract, but the system through which smallholders are made to sell their crops. Under Tanzania’s warehouse receipt system, farmers deliver produce to licensed warehouses, usually through cooperative unions, and it is sold by digital auction on a government-controlled exchange rather than at the farm gate. Delegates described a system in which farmers have little say over the floor price, and in which middlemen registered as farmers, “ghost farmers” in the words of MVIWATA Executive Director Stephen Ruvuga, sit where prices are set and gain at the real farmers’ expense.

Officials on the platform conceded that small producers outside the cooperative unions are “falling between the cracks.” The session on seeds addressed the regional seed law before the East African Legislative Assembly. The carbon session, the most heated of the three days, heard delegates from Dodoma, Katavi and Kagera describe companies counting trees and signing open-ended contracts with individual farmers who were given no opportunity to understand or scrutinize what they were signing.

On the final day, the conference resolutions were adopted by acclamation. MVIWATA will compile its members’ land grievances and submit them to the government through Dr Bashiru Ally, as he had offered. It will expand its legal aid and follow up on cases stalled with officials. It will document flaws in the crop-marketing system, present them to the authorities, build a seedbank dedicated to indigenous seeds, convene an inclusive forum on carbon trade, and track, analyze and critically engage carbon projects and their effects on farmers.

The AGM then turned to the organization’s future. Its strategic plan for 2027–2031 will put agroecology first, keep land access as a priority and make a farmers’ bank the next major task, starting with TZS 20 million raised from members themselves. Self-reliance ran through the proceedings: members debated doubling their own annual fee, and left energized to prioritize instruments through which farmers can continue to defend themselves. The meeting closed with the election of the board that will lead MVIWATA for the next three years.

In its 33rd year, MVIWATA left Morogoro with a sharper agenda: a dossier of land grievances to present to the government, a seed bank and a farmers’ bank to build with members’ own resources, and a public position on carbon trade. The new leadership’s first test will be whether the government acts on the dossier, and whether members fund what they voted for.

Jonis Ghedi-Alasow is the Coordinator of the Pan Africanism Today Secretariat. 

On the opening day of its National Smallholder Farmers’ Conference and 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM), held from September 29 to October 1, MVIWATA, Tanzania’s national network of smallholder farmers’ groups, set aside time during a program on land, seed, and markets to state solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and Cuba, with the ambassadors of both countries present in the hall.

“We, the members of MVIWATA, who have convened in Morogoro for our 31st Annual General Meeting, wish to give a brief statement in support of the people of Palestine and the Cuban people,” read Theodora Pius, MVIWATA’s head of program, opening the statement. The organization said it was “extremely angered by the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people” and “frustrated to see an open silence on war crimes that happen every day against the people of Palestine by the State of Israel and its allies.” It said its solidarity was with all of Palestine, “not only in the Gaza Strip.”

The statement then turned to Cuba, denouncing more than 60 years of US-imposed blockade, it said, imposed because Cubans exercised their freedom to choose their own political system, and went on to articulate what the blockade now means: “no electricity, no fuel, no medicines, no food.” Despite this, the statement said that the Cuban people have continued to send their expertise (doctors above all) to support life in other countries.

The Cuban Ambassador, Yordenis Despaigne Vera, thanked the smallholder farmers and described the current stage of the blockade as an energy war. United Nations agencies reinforce this characterization. By May, the Cuban people were living with daily blackouts of up to twenty hours, and more than 100,000 patients, including 11,000 children, were waiting for operations delayed by power cuts and shortages. Cuba’s own health ministry recorded infant mortality rising from 7.1 to 9.9 deaths per thousand live births between 2024 and 2025. The ambassador called the United States program “a silent genocide” and said Tanzania’s government and people had stood with Cuba throughout. A week earlier, at the UN General Assembly, Tanzania’s Vice-President had reaffirmed the country’s “unwavering solidarity with Cuba” against unilateral sanctions. Last October, the Assembly voted 165 to 7, with 12 abstentions, to demand an end to the blockade; Tanzania voted in favor.

The Palestinian ambassador, Salam Abu Sharar, addressed the room of farmers. Land, he said, is close to the hearts of the Palestinian people and of MVIWATA alike, and the question of Palestine “is not about religion; it is about land.” In a hall where the first working session opened with the words “land is life, land is not a commodity,” he spoke the delegates’ own language: the struggle of Tanzania’s peasants and the national liberation of Palestine are one struggle.

MVIWATA has been here before. Its AGM in Njombe in December 2023 condemned Israel’s genocide in Palestine. In July 2025, it hosted the youth of La Via Campesina in Morogoro, whose declaration ended with “Free Palestine!” Within days of that meeting’s close, Israeli forces bulldozed the seed multiplication unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, the Palestinian farmers’ organization in Hebron, destroying more than seventy local varieties. The same year, MVIWATA and the International Association for Popular Cooperation ran an Africa Bioinputs School in Tanzania, with participants from thirteen countries, including Palestine, learning how farmers make their own fertilizers and pest controls.

On the conference’s final day, the Tanzanian farmers resolved to build their own bank of indigenous seed. In Hebron and in Morogoro, the seed is where the struggle over who feeds whom begins. MVIWATA Chairperson Apollo Chamwela told the ambassadors that the organization stood ready to do for Cuba what it had tried to do for Palestine: collect food if mechanisms for transporting it can be arranged.

MVIWATA is a membership organization of smallholder farmers, founded in 1993 and organized across mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar. It was a meeting with a government minister as its guest of honor. Its statement on Palestine and Cuba came in the same breath as its demands for land, seed, and dignified prices for its members’ produce at home. For these farmers, sovereignty over food and sovereignty over territory are one question, whether the territory is a village in Kilosa or a hillside in Hebron.

The hall closed the statement with a call and response. “Long live Palestine! Long live!” “Viva Fidel! Viva!” “Viva the resistance of the people of Palestine! Viva!”

Jonis Ghedi-Alasow is the Coordinator of the Pan Africanism Today Secretariat.