Family Farming: the “Third Way” Out Moussa Para Diallo, president of the Fouta-Djalon Peasants’ Federation and of the Peasant Organizations of Guinea   Where we live, in the mountainous Fouta-Djalon region of northern Guinea —known as West Africa’s “water tower”—the peasants have only very small plots, just a few hundred square metres each. During the rainy season, they harvest rice and maize for their own consumption, and tomatoes, potatoes and onions to sell. In good times and bad, they earn between $200 and $270 a year, which they somehow make do with. Everything is far away. To get a simple bolt for a machine, we sometimes have to go all the way to the capital, Conakry. We don’t have legal title to our land, which means that we can’t stand up to individuals or the government when they want to claim it. We don’t have enough labour. The young are all leaving, especially the men, and often for abroad. We’re very short of money to modernize our farms. We have to pay about 30 percent interest if we take out loans from government-controlled credit agencies and private banks. Yet despite all this, we’re managing to produce crops that are competitive on the domestic market, not just compared with other national products but also foreign ones, since the market was totally opened up a decade ago. When we decide on something, we carry it through to the end. We do what we say we’ll do. We don’t lie to people. We show them results. That’s why we’re successful. The Fouta-Djalon Peasants’ Federation, founded in 1992, today has 12,500 members, two-thirds of them women, who share farm work equally with men. It buys seeds and fertilizer cheaply to sell to the members. It builds barns, roads and bridges and runs literacy courses. Its 18 experts help the peasants to improve their farming methods, but there aren’t enough people like them. The federation also gives classes in basic accounting and how to sell products to merchants. Foreign aid organizations and NGOs help us in various ways, which works out at roughly $40 per member each year. It took us time because we’re dealing with long-term development. Donors often want quick results, but we know that if we go too fast, we’ll fall flat on our face. The result is there for all to see. Our potato yields are now 3,000 kilos per hectare. From 1992 to 1998, we managed to get the government to block foreign potato imports at harvest time. We don’t need that protection any more. Agro-industry costs the country and the consumer a lot of money. It has also failed because peasants are not just part of the economy, they’re also part of society, local culture and the environment. So developing countries have to take another path—a “third way”—the path of family farming, but an improved version of it. Guinea is still not self-sufficient and imports rice from southeast Asia. But can we keep on appealing to foreign countries to feed us when that’s our job?