In 2016, ILEIA conducted a workshop in Amman, Jordan, with the support of the European Union, Oxfam and IUCN-ROWA. This article describes some of the lessons from the workshop, where all participants, ranging from project staff to herders and Bedouins, engaged in a documentation and systematisation process and produced an article that will soon be … Read more

Meenakshi Singh – Having grown up and studied in the enormous city of Mumbai, India, Meenakshi Singh and Umesh Chandrasekhar were looking for an alternative way of life. After spending eight years farming organically in the district of Dharmapuri, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, they decided to work with local farmers to … Read more

Medius Bihunirwa is the head of the Farmer Enterprise Development Unit at Kabarole Research and Resource Centre (KRC), Uganda, where she works with smallholder farmers, enhancing the quality of their produce and improving their access to markets. In her role as member and researcher of the Hivos/IIED Knowledge Network, she has delved deeper into the … Read more

The World Bank Institute (WBI) developed the multimedia toolkit “Achieving more with less: A new way of rice cultivation” to illustrate knowledge and techniques on SRI. The toolkit was developed from an experience with SRI in the Philippines in 2007, where farmers piloted the approach within their specific socio-environmental conditions, with very encouraging results in … Read more

Many different local strategies are being employed to combat and prevent desertification and degradation. By linking these with scientific insights relevant to the local context, the DESIRE project has identified, evaluated and tried out a set of locally appropriate land management strategies. These strategies are now being shared with a range of stakeholders, from farmers … Read more

Elisabeth Atangana – As a farmer, the newly appointed FAO Special Ambassador for Co-operatives, Elisabeth Atangana, is familiar with farmer organisations at many different levels. She is president of the National Dialogue of Peasant Organisations (CNOP-CAM), in her native country, Cameroon, of the Subregional Platform of Peasant Organisations of Central Africa (PROPAC) and of the … Read more

Julio, Ednea and their children from the Padre Jesus community, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Near the town of Espera Feliz, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, a group of farmer families has jointly bought land to grow their own crops and established the Padre Jesus community. By organising themselves as a co-operative, they were able to access the … Read more

Rio+20 has sparked international attention to sustainable agricultural development, but this has been a point of attention for many people for years. Agricultural sociologist, Ann Waters‑Bayer was for a long time involved in the production of the ILEIA Newsletter and the LEISA Magazine. She is now part of Prolinnova, a “Global Partnership Programme” under the … Read more

Jean Marc von der Weid – Twenty years after Rio de Janeiro was the stage for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the world’s gaze returns to Brazil for the Rio+20 Conference in June this year. The sequel to this first international meeting on sustainable development may well have important implications for the … Read more

Twenty years ago, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Many of the recommendations made in 1992 are still valid today. In June 2012 government delegations and numerous others will go to Rio again, to take stock of what has been achieved over the past twenty … Read more