Globally connected: News from the AgriCultures Network

By
22 December 2015

Members of the AgriCultures Network are working together to advance family farming and agroecology. Here is our latest update.

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Senegal: Africa-wide symposium on agroecology

FAO’s regional symposium on agroecology for the Sub-Saharan Africa region took place in Senegal (Dakar) Nov. 5 & 6, preceded by civil society meetings on November 3 and 4. Representatives of the AgriCultures Network from Ethiopia (MELCA) and Senegal (IED Afrique)were central actors in the local and regional planning processes for these seminars. They also worked together with the IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty and with AFSA, the African Alliance for Food Sovereignty.

Around 40 social movements’ and other CSO delegates participated in the symposium, with a good gender balance and representation from around 20 African countries. Other participants represented governments and research institutes. Civil society left the symposium on a positive note. All though the practice of agroecology has a long history in Africa, the movement is much less developed and agroecology has so far enjoyed little support from governments. At the end of the symposium, 23 recommendations were developed to move agroecology forward in the region. While the recommendations remain very general and it is not clear if and how progress will be monitored, they do provide a basis from which to move things forward.

A selection of recommendations:

• Ensuring producers’ (especially women, youth and indigenous peoples) access to natural resources, including land, water and biodiversity by setting up user-friendly procedures for land acquisition, registering and security. In this context, application of the voluntary guidelines for responsible governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests.

• Creating platforms to collect and exchange agroecological experiences and innovations;

• Setting up tools which facilitate the transformation systems of agricultural subsidies, research, trade and investment in support of agroecology;

• Setting up pilot projects at territorial level such as agroecological territories;

• Developing and implementing public procurement policies in support of local and agroecological products;

• Defending the diversity of local peasants seeds against any external negative influence;

• Developing agroecology independently of climate smart agriculture and proposing at COP 21 that an international protocol for agroecology is set up and adopted by national governments.

The last regional symposium (for Asia) took place at the end of November in Bangkok. The AgriCultures Network is following the process and documenting the outcomes of each regional symposium. They will be synthesised in a publication to come out at the start of 2016.