The conversation builds on work Uwumukiza has already brought into the regional parliament of the East African Community (EAC). She personally moved a motion in July 2025 urging the EAC Council of Ministers and Partner States to promote agroecology as a way to strengthen food sovereignty and food security, following a resolution she signed a year earlier committing EALA’s agriculture committee to recognise agroecology as a regional priority. She said at the time the goal was to “create a sustainable future that values ecological integrity and the welfare of our people.”

As then chairperson of EALA’s Committee on Agriculture, Tourism and Natural Resources, a post she held until mid 2025, she also led a 2024 mission assessing policies on genetically modified organisms across Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan.

In the episode, Uwumukiza traces her interest in farm policy to watching her mother work the land and argues that farming is too often dismissed as unpaid or informal labour despite sustaining families and communities. She points to a gap between farmers and the governments, legislatures and companies that set the rules under which they operate, and says regional laws and markets have not kept pace with the climate pressures already hitting smallholders.

She presents agroecology as a corrective to industrial farming models, calling for legal protection of farmers’ rights, local seed systems and organic, farmer managed production. She also questions whether current rules on commercialisation and seed regulation reflect the realities of small farmers, women traders and rural communities.

Uwumukiza raises concern over ultra processed foods, hazardous agricultural chemicals, corporate influence on policymaking and growing external control of African data and food systems. She has linked these failures to Africa’s colonial history before, telling a gathering of African chefs last year that decades of export oriented farm policy left local food production starved of investment.

AFSA, a continental coalition of more than 30 member networks active in roughly 50 African countries with a combined reach of about 200 million people, launched the podcast in August 2025 to challenge what Belay has called the colonial mindset still shaping African food systems. New episodes air every Friday on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and RSS, with funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

AFSA has already worked directly with EALA’s full membership, running an agroecology training for the assembly in October and hosting a separate session in November. It remains unclear whether that collaboration will extend into joint legislative drafting.