This film is produced by MELCA, Ethiopia, in collaboration with the Development Fund Norway, African Biodiversity Network, the Gaia Foundation

A movement is growing. While agroecology has been practiced for millennia in diverse places around the world, today we are witnessing the mobilisation of transnational social movements to build, defend and strengthen agroecology as the pathway towards a most just, sustainable and viable food and agriculture system. This video explores the meaning, practice and politics of agroecology from a social movement perspective. Two versions of the video are available – one short and one full length.

This video was created as part of a research project to better understand the contested meanings and practices of agroecology at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University in collaboration with members of La Via Campesina and the International Planning Committee For Food Sovereignty

Created by:
Colin Anderson, Csilla Kiss and Michel Pimbert

Edited by:
Colin Anderson & Ben Cook

Footage Contributed by: Anne Berson; CYRK Productions, Denmark; Isabelle Delforge

Music by: Balafon Dembélé

This methodological toolkit aims to aid farmers and technicians in better understanding the principles and mechanisms that underlie the resiliency (or lack of) of farming systems and how agroecological management can enhance the adaptive capacity of farmers to unpredictable and sever climatic variability.

The tool can be used for:

• Conducting a rapid agroecological assessment of farms and their level of vulnerability
• Initiating of a process of agroecological conversion to enhance the response capacity of farmers and thus improve the resiliency of their farming systems
• Monitoring the trajectory of the farms under agroecological converstion after climatic events such as hurricanes, rain storms and drought.

Authors:

• Miguel A. Altieri
• Clara I. Nicholls-Estrada
• Alejandro Henao-Salazar
• Ana C. Galvis-Martinez

Conferencia AGRICULTURA del FUTURO por Miguel Altieri. La AGROECOLOGIA es la única alternativa para afrontar la crisis alimentaria actual a nivel mundial. Existe un choque entre la agricultura industrial y la agricultura campesina. Debemos optar por la agricultura campesina porque es la que actualmente produce el 70% de los alimentos que consumimos, porque es sustentable, resiliente y permitirá mitigar el cambio climático.

Pablo Tittonell is professor ‘Farming Systems Ecology’ at Wageningen University and one of the worlds most famous experts in the field of agriculture and ecology. He advocates intensification of agriculture by making optimal use of natural processes and the landscape to meet the worlds growing demand for food.

Watch the video below.

Academics, activists, farmers, and more gathered for the conference “Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue” – held twice: on 14-15 September 2013 in Yale University, USA, and on 24 January 2014 at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague. It brought together the world’s leading scholars and activists, both sympathetic and supportive of the idea of food sovereignty, as well as those highly skeptical of the concept. They fostered a critical dialogue on the issue examining its various meanings, interpretations, and political implications. You will find below a selection of the presentations (30 video clips!) held during the conferences at Yale University in September 2013 and at ISS in January 2014.

As one of the organizers of both events the Transnational Institute presented the video on their website at http://www.tni.org/article/videos-food-sovereignty-colloquium-2013

EL MERCADO DEL BUEN VIVIR … Los colores, los sabores, las texturas y la diversidad de productos sanos del mercado campesino del Barrio La Joya recobrarán una vida artística en plastilina. Este mercado surge del proceso de diálogo campo-ciudad; es decir, el enlace de relaciones solidarias entre pobladores del campo Santandereano con habitantes de la ciudad de Bucaramanga.

Esta iniciativa de impulsar los mercados locales, inició con el Festival de Expresiones Rurales y Urbanas en el año 2010, y ha logrado desde allí mantener un mercado cada quincena, cuando campesinos y campesinas bajan de sus veredas con alimentos frescos, e intercambian con habitantes de esta tradicional Barrio de La Joya.

Con la presencia de talleristas en animación de la talla nacional e internacional, como son: Edgar Álvarez, Aura Estela Mora y Camilo Herrera, se moldearon un video-clip de animación con técnicas de trabajo en plastilina y stop-motion que recoge las vivencias de los pobladores urbanos y rurales con relación a los mercados campesinos.

Los jóvenes rurales quienes son productores de alimentos sanos relatan sus historias en animación que permita valorar la interrelación entre el arte y la vida rural y especialmente la importancia de las economías locales y campesinas.

Mayor información:

FUNDAEXPRESION / [email protected]
SE LO EXPLICO CON PLASTILINA / www.facebook.com/seloexplicoconplastilin­a

A presentation written by Miguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, with the participation of Angela Hilmi. You can choose to download the short or the long version; both of them are in Power Point format and available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

by Aksel Naerstad
International co-coordinator of the More and Better Network

Small scale food producers produce 70% of the total global food production according to United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP)[1] and the well acknowledged international organization ETC-group There are, however, no exact figures of how much food which is produced by different kind of food producers. Neither is there a clear definition of who are the small scale food producers or a distinct definition of industrial food production. There are for instance four different definition of family agriculture in Brazil, based on regional differences. A farm of 50 ha in Argentina is considered small, and a farm of 5 ha is considered a large farm in many countries in Asia.[2] In many reports small farms are categorized as farms with less than 2 hectares of land, but some propose to categorize all farms of less than 10 hectares as small.

Some figures
In the report Who will feed us? [3] ETC-group estimates, based on different sources, that small scale farmers / peasants produce 50% of the global food production; small scale food producers in the cities produce 7,5%; hunting, fishing and other forms of gathering and harvesting from nature counts for about 12,5%; and that the industrial food production produce about 30% of the total global food production.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Global Report,[4] gives also an estimate of how much of the food is being produced by small scale food producers. The figures in the report are based on FAO data from 525 million farms all over the world. 90% of these farms are small farms, defined as farms with less than 2 hectares of land, and they contribute substantially to the global food production. The IAASTD-report highlights that in Africa 90% of the agricultural production comes from these small farms.

FAO (2010) 2000 World Census of Agriculture has statistics from 84 countries with a total of 436 million farms, which is 83% on all farms in the world, based on the figures in IAASTD. 85% of the farms in the census are small farms – calculated on the basis of farms less than 2 hectares for all countries and territories, except for Uruguay, USA and New Zealand where the statics are on less than 5 hectares.
FAO has estimated that about 15% of the annual consumption of food by peasants and their families in rural areas in developing countries come from areas which are not cultivated,[5] and that 75-90% of all staple food is produced and consumed locally.[6]

Food First published in 2008 an article from M. Altieri[7] with the following figures:
“At present, small farms (2 hectares and less) produce the majority of staple crops for urban and rural inhabitants across the world – in Latin America 17 million peasant farms produce 51 percent of the maize, 77 percent of the beans, and 61 percent of the potatoes consumed domestically; 33 million small (mostly female– run) farms in Africa, representing 80 per­cent of the farms, produce a ‘significant amount of basic food crops with virtually no or little use of fertilizers and improved seed;’ and in Asia most of the rice consumed is produced by more than 200 million small farmers”.

Worldwatch Institute estimates that urban agriculture produce 15-20% of all food in the world.4 Other institutes use similar figures, but the studies do not cover the whole world. FAO estimate that urban agriculture provides the food for about 700 million people. [8]

In an article by 16 scientists in the well acknowledged magazine Science in 2010 [9] they state that two third of the global population is linked to a kind of mixt crop-livestock systems, mainly small farms with less than 2 hectare of land;
“According to the CGIAR analysis, the world’s one billion poor people (those living on less than $1 a day) are fed primarily by hundreds of millions of small-holder farmers (most with less than 2 ha of land, several crops, and perhaps a cow or two) and herders (most with fewer than five large animals) in Africa and Asia (3). Furthermore, mixed crop-livestock systems could be the key to future food security; two-thirds of the global population already live in these systems, and much of the future population growth will occur there. Already, mixed systems produce close to 50% of the world’s cereals and most of the staples consumed by poor people: 41% of maize, 86% of rice, 66% of sorghum, and 74% of millet production (3). They also generate the bulk of livestock products in the developing world, that is, 75% of the milk and 60% of the meat, and employ many millions of people in farms, formal and informal markets, processing plants, and other parts of long value chains (3).”[10]

The Norwegian government states in the budget proposal for 2012 that small-scale farmers produce 80% of the food in developing countries.[11] This means that peasants in developing countries produce the food for 65% of the population in the world, if we keep export and import out of the picture. Even if import of food is important for many countries, also for developing countries, is the share of the food which crosses borders only about 10% of the total food production.[12]

The President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is also using the same figure; that small scale farmers in developing countries produce 80% of the food in developing countries.[13]

I would like to underline that none of the figures above are accurate. There is a need for better statistics, but there are many more sources than used in this article which have similar figures. Some people have challenged the figures above, and said that industrial food produce most of the food in the world. I have not been able to find any sources or references which tell that.
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