📷 Photo: Rosie Damou, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
The Seychelles Farmers’ Association (SeyFa) has elected a dedicated subcommittee to monitor national delivery on agricultural commitments made under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), the continental framework that has guided African agricultural policy since 2003.
The subcommittee was formed at SeyFa’s annual general meeting, at which long-serving chairman Andre Sopha was re-elected to lead the association for another term. Members of the new committee will track progress against national agricultural investment plans, with the first report due to be submitted to the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF) next week.
Sopha told members that the decision to establish the monitoring body was driven by concerns over the slow pace of delivery on agricultural infrastructure projects, several of which had been launched with significant public investment but stalled before completion. He cited the Cap Samy abattoir on Mahé as a concrete example of a project that had fallen short of its original objectives.
“We have watched too many projects start with fanfare and never reach the farmers they were designed to serve. The Cap Samy abattoir is the clearest example. The committee’s job is to make sure commitments translate into action, and that farmers see the results,” Sopha said.
The new subcommittee brings together smallholder representatives and sector specialists. Its remit includes reviewing budget allocations to agriculture, monitoring implementation of national agricultural investment plans, and reporting on delivery gaps to both SeyFa’s membership and to ESAFF at the regional level. Seychelles, through SeyFa, has been an active member of ESAFF, the regional smallholder forum that coordinates farmer-led policy monitoring across eastern and southern Africa.
CAADP was launched in 2003 by African Union heads of state under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development to drive agricultural transformation across the continent. The programme was reaffirmed through the 2014 Malabo Declaration, which committed African governments to allocate at least 10 per cent of national budgets to agriculture and to achieve six percent annual agricultural growth.
In 2025, the African Union Commission adopted the CAADP Kampala Declaration and the CAADP Action Plan 2026 to 2035, setting a continental agenda for the next decade under the theme Building Resilient Agri-Food Systems in Africa. The new framework places strong emphasis on smallholder participation, climate resilience and food sovereignty, themes that align closely with the Seychelles Farmers’ Association’s domestic agenda.
Seychelles formally engaged with the CAADP process in 2011, when the country signed its CAADP compact, aligning its national agricultural strategy with continental targets. The country’s food and nutrition security framework has been anchored in the blue economy strategy and in efforts to strengthen local production, reduce import dependence and safeguard food security in a small island context.
ESAFF has consistently argued that smallholder farmers must be central to the design and monitoring of agricultural policies. The forum’s most recent position paper on the post-Malabo agenda called for food sovereignty and agroecology to be mainstreamed across the next decade of CAADP implementation, with rural communities positioned as the lead actors in transforming African food systems. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a continental platform, has documented the breadth of the smallholder constituency across the continent.
Sopha said the SeyFa subcommittee will publish its findings annually and present them to the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Assembly’s committee on agriculture, and the regional ESAFF secretariat. The work, he added, will be guided by the principle that monitoring is most credible when it is led by the farmers themselves.
“We are not waiting for someone else to tell our story. Our members live the realities of agriculture in Seychelles every day. This committee exists to make sure those realities shape national policy,” he said.
The election of the monitoring committee comes as Seychelles prepares to mark World Food Day in October and to engage with regional CAADP review processes scheduled for early 2027. SeyFa said it will invite international observers and partner organisations to attend the committee’s first public hearing.
Sources cited: 1. Wayback Machine archive, “Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF)”,
