Corporate interests have skewed the entire development agenda for agriculture in Africa, writes Ian Fitzpatrick. Instead of investing in sustainable, small scale farming along agroecological principles that raise production and support rural communities, governments – including the UK's – are backing destructive industrial farming and land grabs.

There is plenty of evidence that the livelihoods of farmers and communities can be improved, and that agroecology can deliver a huge range of other benefits.

At the beginning of March, the Guardian ran a chilling editorial warning of a looming global food crisis, saying that an "enduring lesson of history is that drought and famine feed conflict, and conflict breeds more privation, and despair."

The good news is that there's a whole host of ways going forward to address the challenge of sustainable food production. The bad news is that donors, development agencies and multilateral financial initiatives seem to want to move in the opposite direction.

There is now extremely good evidence that small-scale sustainable farming, or agroecology, can deliver as much if not more food than large-scale corporate-controlled agriculture.

For example, research by the UN showed that switching to agroecological farming methods has increased yields across Africa by 116% and by 128% in East Africa compared to conventional farming.

There is also plenty of evidence that the livelihoods of farmers and communities can be improved, and that agroecology can deliver a huge range of other benefits, including reducing the gender gap, creating jobs, improving people's health, increasing biodiversity, and increasing the resilience of food systems to cope with climate change.

The malign influence of agri-corporations

So why are governments, development agencies, policy makers and funders so focused on large-scale, high-input solutions which marginalise poor and small-scale farmers, have a negative impact on our environment, and do little to increase the resilience of our food system as a whole?

The short answer is corporate power. A longer answer is that there is a significant economic and political bias in favour of large-scale industrial agriculture. This bias is created through an economic system which privileges industrial farming, large-scale land owners and monopolistic corporations, leading to political support for these vested interests.

A change in the ideological support for industrial agriculture towards agroecology and sustainable small-scale agriculture will require the political establishment and development agencies to design policies based on scientific evidence and the long-term viability of our global food system.