Connecting Smallholders to Markets

‘Connecting Smallholders to Markets’ is the title of policy recommendations negotiated on 8- 9 June 2016 in the Committee on World Food Security, the foremost inclusive international and intergovernmental platform deliberating on is- sues of food security and nutrition.
This analytical guide examines how small- scale food producers’ organisations and allied civil society can use the recommendations in their national and international advocacy and how they can work together with their governments to apply them in the context of national and regional policies and programmes.

More info on the work of CSM on this issue here

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Right to Food and Nutrition Watch

The Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2016—“Keeping Seeds in Peoples’ Hands”— explores the articulation of seeds, land and other natural resources with the human right to adequate food and nutrition. It assesses the role played by access to and control over natural resources in the realization of the right to food and nutrition across the world. Over the last few decades, the privatization and commoditization of nature has resulted in a multiplication of local struggles using human rights against the appropriation of agricultural biodiversity, land and water resources by corporations and states. How are peasant movements, indigenous peoples, and other local communities resisting—and what are the alternatives they present?

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People’s Manual on the Guidelines of Governance of Land, Fisheries and Water

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security are a new international tool that can be used by peasant, fishing and pastoralist organisations, indigenous peoples, the landless, women, youth, and civil society to assert their rights. This People’s Manual is a didactic guide, which aims to make it easier to understand and use the Guidelines at the best. It is the result of collective and participatory work undertaken by the Land and Territory Working Group of the IPC (International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty)

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Access and benefit sharing in participatory plant breeding in Southwest China

This contribution discusses access and benefit sharing within the context of participatory plant breeding. It presents how Chinese farmers and breeders interact in relation to crop improvement and on-farm maintenance of plant genetic resources. Based on more than a decade of action research, a number of institutional changes were accomplished as a result of the interactions between national and provincial breeding institutes, rural development researchers and local maize farmers. Although the respective legislation in China is not yet adequately formulated, access and benefit sharing can still be addressed in contracts and by labelling products of a particular geographic origin.

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Rescuing our maize: Building a network

A network of communities in West-Central Mexico has rescued its traditional landraces of maize. This experience shows that the benefits of defending an ancestral good is not only limited to regaining cultural identity and agrobiodiversity. The defence of native maize has become a space where old and new knowledge redefined
agriculture and where people achieved food sovereignty, technical autonomy, and a new sense of community.

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Evolutionary populations: Living gene banks in farmers’ fields in Iran

Efforts to rapidly increase on-farm biodiversity are a matter of urgency in an era of climate change. To do so, family farmers need better access to the genetic material of research stations and gene banks. Collaboration with scientists who are willing and able to work together with farmers is crucial. The Evolutionary Plant Breeding programme in Iran is one example of how this can be done.

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Seed banks and national policy in Brazil

Increasingly, seeds are the domain of professional breeders, agribusiness and policy makers. They decide what makes for a good variety and they develop legislation that excludes other varieties. Despite this,family farmer organisations and social movements in Paraíba,Brazil, have managed to strengthen decentralised farmerdriven seed selection and distribution systems and public seed policies. They may well be opening the way for another seed regime in the country, with its own access and benefit sharing mechanisms.

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Looking outside the box. Access and benefit sharing for family farmers in Zimbabwe

What is successful access and benefit sharing’ for
smallholder family farmers? This contribution argues it is not about legal contracts or mechanisms that regulate the international transfer of plant genetic resources. It is about farmers’ access to seed diversity and the ability to share in the benefits of the continuing cycles of seed conservation and development. The Community Technology Development Trust in Zimbabwe supports mechanisms that, in practice, do result in substantial access to and benefit sharing of local and modern varieties.

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Potato breeding in the Netherlands: successful collaboration between farmers and commercial breeders

The Dutch potato breeding model, which involves a partnership between family farmers and commercial breeding companies in a modern, Western context, is unique. While there are other examples of collaborative relationships between farmers and breeders in Europe, the Dutch potato breeding model stands out in terms of its long track record, the involvement of the private sector, and the institutional integration of the relationship which up to today facilitates access to genetic materials and financial benefit sharing.

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Conclusions: Learning from farmer-led access and benefit sharing

This special issue of Farming Matters magazine has explored the ways in which access and benefit sharing of plant genetic resources can work for family farmers. On one hand it presents cases that demonstrate the limited extent to which family farmers have been able to benefit from the ‘formal’ ABS process: the rather complex arrangements between international agreements and national authorities, institutions and communities. On the other hand, this publication uncovers some of the effective principles and mechanisms for access and benefit sharing that are part and parcel of farmers’ everyday practices, even when formal ABS regulations have not yet been designed or implemented. What can we conclude?

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