Habib Ayeb 3

Food Sovereignty Forum: envisioning an alternative model of agriculture in Tunisia

“The most important thing is to remain loyal to the concept,” explains geographer Habib Ayeb who recently launched preparations for the Food Sovereignty Forum which will take place in 2017. “Without this loyalty, we cannot gain anything, we cannot make any progress. We cannot organize a forum on food sovereignty and demand financial support from Monsanto; Monsanto is a target for the Forum—Monsanto must be broken. Also we won’t work with USAID or AFD or GIZ—these are governmental organizations that try to impose their models on the Global South, and they are also targets of the Forum.”

Forum tunisien pour la souveraineté alimentaire : un modèle agricole alternatif

« Sans la fidélité au concept basé sur le droit, on ne peut rien réussir. Je ne peux pas organiser un Forum sur la souveraineté alimentaire et demander un soutien financier à Monsanto alors que l’une des cibles du Forum c’est Monsanto— il faut casser Monsanto. Egalement je ne peux pas travailler avec l’USAID, ni l’AFD, ni la GIZ : ce sont des organisations gouvernementales qui essaient d’imposer leurs modèles dans les pays du sud et ils sont aussi les cibles de ce Forum », précise le géographe Habib Ayeb, initiateur du Forum pour la souveraineté alimentaire, prévu pour 2017.

Tunisia and the Wall: government solidifies its vision of “national unity”… through exclusion

…Everyone, it seemed, was talking about the wall, a trench-lined sand barricade that is to stretch some 200 kilometers along Tunisia’s border with Libya. In the capital, a world away from the country’s borders, conversations are based on hear-say, rumors, and speculation. Approbation, uncertainty, suspicion…the sentiments provoked are varied, though many remain simply baffled at the belated unveiling and precipitous construction of the government’s latest counterterrorism mechanism, a wall between Tunisia and its neighbor to the south-east.