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.

Brazil launches the Agroecology Plan and Organic Production. It was announced by the President Dilma Rousseff the 17 October, during the Second National  Conference on Sustainable Rural Development, in Brasilia.  The Plan aims to coordinate policies and actions for an environmental-friendly agriculture and the organic food production, with an initial investment of 8.8 billion allocated to 125 initiatives all over the country.

This is the result of an intense  dialogue  between the government and civil society representatives gathered in the national committee that was established by presidential decree in 2012 in order to develop the Plan.

Just one day prior to the announcement, the Ministry of Agriculture, in Brasilia was occupied by  the protest of the Brazilian farmers demanding “global action on food sovereignty” as part of World Food Day celebrations.
Although civil society proposals have not been fully included in the final version of the document,  there is a general consensus on the fact that the Plan marks an historic moment, an important step foward in the direction of a more sustainable peasant agriculture, especially in a country such as Brazil where the agribusiness model still keeps on maintining a great influence on government policies, due to its economic importance.

 See also:

• http://aspta.org.br/2013/10/dilma-lanca-plano-nacional-de-agroecologia-e-producao-organica/
  (article in Portuguese)
• The Agroecology Plan: Brasil Agroecológico Plano Nacional de Agroecologia e Produção Orgânica
  (PDF in Portuguese)
• The official presentation (PDF in Portuguese)

Brasil Agroecológico. A video produced by the Brazilian governemnt for the launching of the Plan.

To mark World Food Sovereignty Day, 16 October,  the CBD Alliance at CBD/SBSTTA 17 has published a special issue of ECO with a focus on agricultural biodiversity, seeds, Farmers’ Rights. This issue has articles contributed by authors from Europe, Iran and North and South America, covering a wide spectrum of aspects concerning the conservation, use and abuse of agricultural biodiversity. You are welcome to share with your networks.
ECO@SBSTTA17-WorldFoodSovereigntyDay

For more on the CBD Alliance and to find other issues of ECO goto www.cbdalliance.org . For more on SBSTTA17 goto ENB – www.iisd.ca/biodiv/sbstta17/

About 200 business people, representatives of governments, development agencies, NGO’s and three (!?) representatives of farmers’ organizations were gathered in Maputo, Mozambique September 4-6th, for the African Green Revolution Forum 2013 The overall theme was scaling up and financing inclusive agribusiness through transformative public-private partnerships. Read more

The High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition has officially presented its 2013 Reports in front of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) stakeholders, in June 2013. The two reports Investing in Smallholder Agriculture and Biofuels and Food Security are now available here.

La Via Campesina, the international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world, closed its 6th International Conference (Jakarta, 6-13 June, 2013) with a strong call for food sovereignity. Read more

We are pleased to share Important elements for consideration: Food Security and Nutrition, and Sustainable Agriculture, an excellent brief prepared by Third World Network as contribution to the setting up of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), one of the major agreed actions from the June 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Read more

ANA (Articulação Nacional de Agroecologia) has made available online videos of the interventions of several key speakers at the International workshop “Time to Act for Radical Changes” held in Rio de Janeiro, in June 2012, in connection with the Rio+20 Conference. We provide below links to a selection of the available videos; to see the full list, please click here
Pat Mooney – primeira fala from AGROECOLOGIA on Vimeo.

Shirley Varghese, International Agriculture and Trade Policies

Nori Ignacio, SEARICE

Hans Herren, Biovision

Miguel Altieri, Part I

Fred Congo, La Via Campesina

Jean Marc Von Der Weid, ANA

Aksel Naerstad, The More and Better Network