Corporate Agenda a Cause for Alarm to African- Rural life!
When we talk of development in Africa, rural life is the key and that’s why we in civil society we are saying that it should not be commercialized .More than 75 percent of the hungry and malnourished live in rural area, half of them are marginalized small holder farmers; more than two thirds are youth. They are hardly able to survive under the present circumstances. Some youths after studies are unemployed and have remain unemployed until their retirement age .These and many others are partly a result of structured adjustment policies (SAPs) the policies of 80’s and early 90’s dictated by the international financial institutions i.e. IMF &WORLD BANK.

The policies includes privatization of government para-statals, liberalisation and many others, but one common thing that we are experiencing across Africa is the collapse of village small scale processing industries and some rural towns are dieing ; at a national level we have seen deindustrialization.

Other factors noted for cause of current crisis in Africa includes:
Poor agricultural policies pursued by our governments where by cheap imports out compete local farmers. E.g rice from Asia has over floods Uganda markets hence have left farmers that have depended on rice unprotected. Privatization of rural resources such as the land, water, genetic resources and minerals and concentration of ownership in those who can afford these resources.
The current collapse of rural communities is also due to international development agencies that treats land exclusively as an economic factor in the broader defence of neo-liberalism such as free trade, land privatization, formalization of inequality yet Africans treat land as a territory which includes seeds water, forests, oceans, minerals, fauna. Market-led agrarian reforms have failed to deliver pro- poor reform, land markets and rental markets can only benefit the rich and criminalize land struggle in extreme form as we have society hatching each other.

Promoting high markets concentrations in agri-business, free trade agreements such as Cotonou (EPAs) spell destruction for small scale family farmers in Africa. The EPAs that is economic partnership agreements between ACP countries and EU, in current form are worse than WTO agreement.

The current mainstream agenda on rural development is dominated by commercial private interests in that agricultural research in Africa has been allowed to be taken over by the private sector with its priorities of profits and intellectual property right; which is against the interest of small scale farmers and the GMO which are cornerstone of this research agenda are threat to biodiversity, the environment and health. All which threaten the survival of the rural people.

There is also climate change and global warming which our poor farmers down in the village have not heard of, yet the effects are already affecting them. What can be the solutions to the current rural development challenges? There is need to have a comprehensive vision for rural development in that rural development policies need to be socially and environmentally sustainable ,we need the systems that keeps soils fertile, respect available quantity of water and accept local varieties of seed.

Rural development policies should aim at fostering the creation of non agricultural jobs by supporting the local processing of raw materials
The governments must also guarantee access to effective judicial or extrajudicial remedies so that people should not be forcefully evicted to make space for mining sites, large scale plantations, dams, protected area, and conversion of land for high capital intensive agriculture and so on.
Agricultural research that is built on local knowledge with participatory methods and whose results are available and accessible to local producer has to foster. Amon Bagarukayo