Biowatch South Africa

As a country and as a world, we face multiple food, energy and climate change crises. Within this context, and with a clear commitment to securing, developing and protecting smallholder farmers’ rights, Biowatch South Africa challenges industrial agriculture and demonstrates agroecology as a means of ensuring biodiversity while attaining food and seed sovereignty and social justice.

Biowatch is an environmental justice NGO established in 1999. We work with smallholder farmers, other civil society organisations and government to ensure that people have control over their food, agricultural processes and resources, and other natural resources, within a biodiverse, agroecological and sustainable system.

  • Biowatch supports smallholder farmers to make informed choices; have control over their agricultural resources (including land, water, seed, infrastructure); and secure their farmers’ rights.
  • Biowatch contributes to building platforms for civil society to develop joint understanding of and action towards securing biodiversity, food sovereignty and social justice.
  • Biowatch challenges and supports government to implement policy and practices that promote, facilitate, and actively encourage agroecology, and that safeguard people and land.
  • Biowatch resists corporate appropriation of natural resources. Much of our own work, and our work with others, is focused on changing the discourse around, and the disconnect between, the destructive industrialised food system and the devastating impact this is having on our planet and the life we share it with.