For many people, food sovereignty remains an abstract term. Therefore, Farming Matters believes the time has come to ‘unpack’ it. What does food sovereignty look like in practice? And how is it taking shape in Europe, specifically? How do efforts to gain food sovereignty in Europe influence the rest of the world?

Food sovereignty is about people’s right to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. In 1996 the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina, coined ‘food sovereignty’ as a policy framework that offers alternatives to the industrialised food and farming systems. In 2007, an alliance of social movements came together in a town called ‘Nyéléni’, located in Mali and formulated a vision on food sovereignty that has inspired farmers, academics, consumer groups, policy makers and activists around the world, including in Europe.

This process was a catalyst for European civil society. The second Nyéléni Europe Forum for Food Sovereignty will take place in Romania from 26-30 October, 2016, following the 2011 Forum in Austria. The event will bring together about 600 active citizens who are part of a growing food movement in Europe. They will share experiences and coordinate their strategies to reorganise food and farming for sovereignty.

Farming Matters will not only share the outcomes of this unique process, but also present ongoing initiatives in Europe in which people are claiming and building their own food sovereignty. This issue will showcase the strategies that food producers and (urban) citizens developed to create space for them selves in the context of the great economic power of large multinationals and supermarkets, low prices, high debts, a highly developed industrial production model, deserted rural areas, expensive land, financial crisis, and strict regulations that disfavour small producers.

What does food sovereignty mean to people in a European context? What are the groundbreaking experiences where consumers and producers create direct linkages and new markets? Where and how do new farming practices flourish? Why were these initiatives successful? What difficulties were encountered during these initiatives and how were they overcome? What is the role of youth? How has policy been helpful or not? What can be learnt from these experiences? What can be said about the role of movement-building?

Farming Matters aims to capture a range of initiatives related to food sovereignty from different parts of Europe, but also welcomes experiences that highlight the way that food sovereignty, or lack of it in Europe influences the rest of the world.

Articles for the March 2017 issue of Farming Matters should be submitted before 1 December 2016.

Guide for authors

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Pastoralist communities provide meat, hide, dairy, and manure fuel, supporting about 200 million households in places of the globe where rain-fed agriculture is not possible. For millenia, pastoralists have managed rangelands in the planet’s harshest environments: from the highlands of Asia and South America to the drylands of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. However, in spite of their importance as stewards of nature, ancient cultures and livestock-based production, pastoralists are often marginalised in policy and development practice.

As they rely on livestock mobility and communal land for their livelihoods, pastoralists become increasingly affected by mounting conflict and violence, which block their access to and use of natural resources. Moreover, increased commoditisation, the loss of grazing land due to climate change, and the expansion of farming into the best grazing areas, further jeopardise pastoral societies. To add insult to injury, social and political support for pastoralism is often weak in terms of capacity, policy and legislation, and at best inappropriate to the realities of pastoralist communities. It is not possible to generalise the needs of pastoralists, which differ not just from community to community, but even from household to household. However, in quite general terms we can safely say that the failure of past development efforts has stemmed from a poor understanding of pastoralism as a multiple land use system that is deeply rooted in a culture and that relies directly on nature. As a result, pastoralists have been excluded from local and national planning processes.

Produced through a collaboration between ILEIA, Oxfam and IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), this special issue of Farming Matters will explore different modes of action that are conducive to improved participation and representation of pastoralist communities in policy dialogues globally, and particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. This issue is part of these organisations’ joint work to place governance and rights at the centre of pastoralist development by empowering communities to make their voices heard at policy and decision-making levels. This is being carried out under the framework of the Food Security Governance of Bedouin Pastoralist Groups in the Mashreq project, funded by the European Union.

The purpose of this issue of Farming Matters will be to inform pastoralist communities, practitioners, researchers, civil society, policy makers and others about the practices and policies best fitted to strengthen pastoralist societies.  We welcome your experiences and perspectives. Please send your contribution before 1st of September.

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The September issue of Farming Matters will explore how to better prove the effectivenes of agroecology. Agriculture and the rural world perform important roles in addressing the multiple crises of today: hunger and malnutrition, poverty, climate change, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, water, gender inequity and health. The Sustainable Development Goals, recently endorsed by the United Nations, explicitly mention the need to transform our current input heavy food systems in order to make them more sustainable and contribute to solving these global challenges.

There is ample evidence that agroecology driven by family farmers can contribute to addressing these challenges in an integrated way. But why is it continuing to be difficult to ‘prove’ the effectiveness of agroecological practices?

One challenge is that farmers’ indicators or criteria to judge the effectiveness of agricultural practices differ from those of mainstream policy makers and scientists. The dominant agricultural paradigm sees the maximisation of yields of single crops as a key indicator of effective agriculture. But family farmers may use several additional criteria, in line with the multifunctionality of their farming system. Innovative farmers continuously assess the effectiveness of their farming practices, because they want to know the added value of new practices compared to what they were doing earlier, or to what others are doing. They carefully observe their crops and their animals to assess the resilience of their system. They may ‘read’ their farm’s resilience by observing changes in biodiversity, nutritional value, income and risk diversification, health, labour quality and general quality of life.

Because of this discrepancy in indicators it can be challenging to convince scientists, policymakers and other farmers about the effectiveness of agroecological practices. The September issue of Farming Matters seeks to bridge these differences and contribute to a new perspective on indicators for agroecology’s multifunctional contributions to society.

What (additional) indicators are family farmers using to assess the effectiveness of agroecology at the farm, landscape and community level? And which indicators are emerging at the aggregate level to assess the multifunctional benefits for agroecology to society at large? How can we show the contributions of agroecology to the Sustainable Development Goals? What are the challenges when demonstrating the impact of agroecology, and how are these challenges overcome? How can we demonstrate in a convincing way the crucial role agroecology can play in responding to the crises of our time? What can we learn from existing practices?
We invite you, our readers, to share your experiences. Articles for the September issue of Farming Matters should be submitted before 1 June 2016.

Read our guide for authors

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Knowledge building and sharing are central to agroecology and family farming. It is a dynamic process and knowledge increases by sharing and learning; both practice and theory are important. Each farm and each community is unique. Given the great diversity of agroecosystems the world over, there is a need to continuously build situation-specific knowledge that, moreover, allows farmers to develop under unpredictable and changing circumstances.

Knowledge co-creation between farmers, scientists and others is key in agroecology. This type of knowledge co-creation, based on practical experience in agriculture and the latest scientific insights, is fundamentally different from mainstream ‘lab to land’ agricultural science. The latter produces standardised prescriptions, while the former supports farmers to take their own decisions, connects the local situation with the global context (e.g. mitigating and adapting to climate change), and draws from the many different ways of knowing.

The March 2016 issue of Farming Matters will explore how knowledge is co-created and shared by and between farmers, scientists, educators, communicators, input suppliers, citizens, politicians, and others; especially women and youth. And how this helps to spread and scale up agroecological approaches. We invite you to share your concrete experiences with co-creation and sharing of agroecological knowledge. The possibilities are infinite: farmer to farmer knowledge exchange continues developing itself, joint learning processes between farmers and scientists become more common, and online communication technology provides new possibilities for knowledge co-creation. What ‘new’ knowledge was created and shared? How effective was this? How did it influence the lives of the people involved? What is the greater socio-political relevance of your experience?

Articles for the March 2016 issue of Farming Matters should be submitted before 1 December 2015.

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Women are strong drivers of agroecological change in farming and consumer communities. One example is the women’s movement for agrobiodiverse, pesticide-free crop production in India. In other places, women experiment with intercropping, vegetable box schemes and seed exchanges. What motivates them? And what role does agroecology play in improving the lives of women?

There are 500 million small scale farm families around the world, and 70% of the agricultural work on these farms is done by women. According to FAO, women could increase their productivity by up to 30% if they had the same access as men to productive resources. Closing the gender gap, as was called for by so many during the 2014 International Year of Family Farming, could reduce the number of the world’s undernourished people by 12-17% (www.fao.org/sofa/gender/home).

We have long known that women hold important agriculture and food knowledge, and that they are a force pushing for agroecological changes that lead to resilient farming. Where men tend to focus more on economic gains, women’s ultimate concerns tend to food sovereignty and nutrition, social stability and peace, and the conservation of biodiversity and natural resources.

We want to have a closer look at what motivates women to inspire progress in farming. How do agroecological practices impact their workload, family nutrition and their quality of life? And what role do women and their organisations play in building a better future for their families and themselves?

We invite you to share your experiences, looking especially for practical stories of women as farmers, farm workers, cooks, mothers, educators, and community representatives, of women in policy, women in positions of power, women as role models, or stories of those working directly with these women.

Articles for the December 2015 issue of Farming Matters should be sent to the editors before 1 September 2015. E-mail: info@farmingmatters.org

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Agriculture uses 70 percent of this, and much more water is required if we are to increase production. Population growth, deforestation, urbanisation, industrialisation, and certainly climate change, all point to a worsening situation. How are small-scale farmers, and the institutions that support them, getting ready to tackle this situation?

Can we be more efficient?

At least 60 percent of the world’s food is produced under rainfed conditions. For the millions of farmers who do not have access to irrigation, an uneven distribution of water means much lower yields, and therefore less production. Providing irrigation water is expensive, and irrigated areas also face difficulties. The overexploitation of groundwater has dramatically reduced its availability, while many canal-irrigated fields have become salinised – with the Aral Sea, in the old Soviet Union, as the best example of a manmade disaster.

If water is an increasingly scarce resource, how do we ensure its availability for agriculture, and also for sanitation and all our other needs? What steps are being taken in order to diminish uncertainty, or in order to make the best decisions? What rights, and what possibilities, do small-scale farmers have in order to increase yields, and improve their livelihoods? In this coming issue of Farming Matters we want to explore how groups of farmers, communities, or various stakeholders are working together, look at the co-ordinated steps which are needed at a watershed level, and at the possibilities for improving our overall efficiency.

Send us an e-mail!

The AgriCultures Network welcomes your contributions for our September issues. Featuring practical experiences from the field, our regional editions will look at micro-irrigation techniques, storing water, or at local level co-ordination approaches. Our global edition, Farming Matters, will complement the regional editions, addressing water management from a broader perspective. How can policies support small-scale farmers in improving their access to water? How can good governance ensure a more prudent, less wasteful use of water, and promote the production and consumption of water efficient crops? How can urban planners create space for urban agriculture that uses recycled wastewater? And finally, how can we, as a global movement for sustainable family farming, argue the case for low carbon agriculture as it implies better water management and greater resilience against drought and floods?

Send us your suggestions for articles, the articles themselves, photographs, names of people you feel we should talk to, ideas for topics you feel we must definitely address, your opinion, or just information about the issues mentioned above. As we are a global network, your contribution is bound to be useful to one of the editions.

You can send your ideas to Jorge Chavez-Tafur, editor, at j.chavez-tafur@ileia.org before May 15^th, 2010. For more information on the AgriCultures Network, see www.agriculturesnetwork.org.

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