We already know how to invest in the kind of equitable and sustainable food systems that can build climate resilience. Yet while the hazards of industrial agriculture (and the opportunities offered by agroecological food systems) are equally well known, most money still bets on the status quo: increasing the use of imported fertilizers and pesticides and motorized irrigation, despite high costs and questionable returns. Ignoring potent natural fertilizers, crop mixes, and water management practices that are cost-effective ways to produce diverse crops, short-sighted thinking—accompanied by short-term investments—stymie creative solutions. By emphasizing a global food economy and export value chains that reinforce fossil-fuel dependence, local and publicly managed markets get overlooked. Meanwhile, the acceleration toward fewer foods in our diets, often grown in monocultures, hurts landscapes, cultures, and health, eclipsing a richness of diverse, localized food systems neglected by investors.
Read the full op-ed written by Jen Astone and Daniel Moss in Stanford Social Innovation Review here.
This article was written by Daniel Moss, Agroecology Fund Co-Director, for the September 2024 edition of FAO’s Agroecology Knowledge Hub – Germinate! column. You can find the original publication here.
Diverse, localized, farmer managed seed systems are the cornerstone of a biodiverse, climate-resilient, equitable food system—and essential to achieving zero hunger. However, somewhere along the way in the “modernization” of our food system, the trend is towards less rather than more seed diversity. That diversity has been eroded by corporate and governmental policies in support of seed homogenization and privatization, such as by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. We all pay the cost. The right to food sovereignty is undermined around the world, proprietary seeds leave farmers in debt and consumers are hurt when food supplies rely on fewer crops vulnerable to droughts, floods and pests.
Farmer managed seed systems (FMSS) are central to the everyday practices of the small-scale farmers who feed 70 percent of the world’s population. FMSS recognize the central role farmers play in selecting, growing, saving, and sharing seeds in community. Despite this, mainstream discourse continually refers to these systems as being “informal” or “anti-modern.” Additionally, over the last few decades, many governments have moved toward embracing Green Revolution “technologies”, including GMO’s, under the misguided perception that they will lead to greater production. In some instances, open seed exchange has even been criminalized. This devalues and undermines the essential climate resilient, nutritional and equitable qualities of FMSS.
Thankfully, there is an upsurge of community-led movements advocating for food sovereignty in the face of this corporate backed, restrictive approach to feeding the world. The Agroecology Fund invests in many of these grassroots movements. With their reach deep into communities, they advance food sovereignty, rights to land, territory and natural resources, climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. They are leading movements to protect seed sovereignty in their local communities by ensuring policies, laws, and practices affirm the role of small farmers and their right to FMSS.
In Defence of Seed Sovereignty: Grassroots-Led Movements for Change
In Kenya, Kenyan Peasants League, has been defending peasant farmers’ rights for many years. In October of 2022, a governmental ban on GMO’s, which had been in place for a decade, was lifted. The Kenyan Peasants League quickly organized a GMO taskforce to reinstate the ban, although not permanently. The Kenyan High Court will make a permanent decision in October 2024. The push for corporate-tilted seed laws across Africa, driven by protocols like the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), commodifies seeds, which threatens the biodiversity and resilience of African agriculture. KPL mobilizes Kenyan small holder farmers and consumers to push for agrarian reforms that help ensure food sovereignty and environmental conservation.
Photo Credit: Victoria Uwemedimo / Agroecology Fund
In the Philippines this year, the Southeast Asia Regional Initiatives for Community Empowerment (SEARICE) celebrated the decision of the Philippines Court of Appeals, upholding the lower court’s decision to stop the distribution and commercial propagation of GM Golden Rice and Bt Eggplant after much grassroots campaigning. SEARICE warned against corporate takeover of farms and patented seeds that could replace existing local crop varieties. It is their perspective that Filipino farmers have sufficient local varieties to supply food and crop needs. All they need are appropriate laws, technical and post-harvest support. Therefore, SEARICE supports farmers’ needs, not unpredictable, privatized “solutions” that leave communities disempowered and vulnerable.
Across the Americas, there are many rich movements for food sovereignty rooted in seeds. In the United States, Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA) is developing a robust Indigenous Seed Keepers Network (ISKN) to design, facilitate and implement Seed Stewardship Mentorship training that is culturally appropriate. They propose a collaborative framework for ethical Indigenous seed stewardship so that tribal communities can protect their seeds from patenting and bio-piracy.
Photo Credit: Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance
Further south in Mexico, Indigenous communities are part of a fight against the US government, that seeks to impose the importation of GMOs that risk contamination of the nearly 60 native varieties of maize that are central to Mexico’s cultural heritage. The Mexican government has restricted the use of genetically modified white corn for human consumption and glyphosate as part of its broader program for food self-sufficiency and agroecology. Last August, the U.S. government launched a trade dispute, falsely asserting that these rules violate provisions in the U.S-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which incidentally recognizes nations’ authority over their cultural heritage. Civil society groups, supported by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy have submitted responses and the Mexican government has submitted important studies denouncing the changes by indicating the degree to which GMO corn will harm Mexicans, as corn accounts for the majority of calories and protein of daily diets. The case is slated to be decided by a council of judges by the end of the year.
Certainly, the biotech industry has the ear of many policy makers. Lobbyists (and sadly, the Gates Foundation) spend billions to adopt technical fixes that they describe as climate-smart. The truth is that climate-smart solutions emerge by working with, not against nature and those living closest to the impacts of climate change. The Agroecology Fund is honored to support remarkable community-led efforts to strengthen a truly climate-resilient food system and seeks to fortify these movements around the world by calling on private, public, and multilateral organizations to join us.
Written by Joyce Chimbi, a cohort three graduate of grantee partner ESAFF Uganda’s Agroecology School for Journalists & Communicators. Agroecology Fund supports this initiative with the aim of building the capacity of journalists and communicators to write and report on agroecology in their communities.
Scores of people from across Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces gathered at the annual National Good Seed and Food Festival at the Harare Botanical Gardens for activities spanning September 13-14, 2024. The festival started in 2013 and is organised by a loose network of agroecology-leaning organisations to showcase good and healthy food, revive indigenous seed diversity and traditional technology.
Overall, it is designed as a public service event to promote farmer-led seeds and knowledge systems, and boost production and consumption of healthy foods. The general public was treated to the best of Zimbabwe’s traditional delicacies, music and cooking demonstrations, in addition to food and seeds variety exhibitions.
“Due to poor documentation, very little is known about how resilient our local seed systems are even between local farming communities. This festival is about exhibiting the best of African seeds and foods, and farmer-led farming systems. Agroecological is much more than a farming approach, it is also about building resilient communities especially in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss to achieve seed, food and nutrition security,” said Chimwemwe Ndau from the Soils Food and Healthy Committees in Malawi.
Throughout the gathering, seed savers, farmers, organisations, businesses and individuals shared knowledge on how to farm and produce food in harmony with nature. They sold and exchanged seed varieties and explored topics such as resilient Indigenous and local crop varieties.
Amina Chiwocha is among the farmers who were exchanging and selling seeds at the festival. She farms on a two-acre piece of land in Chingwaru village, Mashonaland in northeastern Zimbabwe. The peasant farmer was showcasing nearly 30 varieties of big and small grains, and horticulture seeds at the festival.
She said that the exhibition gives farmers an opportunity to highlight the issue of markets for nutritious, healthy and sustainably produced foods. Stressing that connecting rural smallholder farmers with suppliers and buyers helps break the cycle of poverty and improves rural development and innovation.
“I am among the farmers who are bringing back Africa’s forgotten foods. Cherry tomatoes and gooseberries are really among Africa’s forest crops. We picked and ate them on the way to the river, collecting firewood but now, you can hardly find them. We had different varieties of vegetables that are like weed with no intervention from the farmer but have been pushed out by exotic crops. At the festival, we learn about seed restoration and embracing traditional systems as they are better suited to our climate and environment,” she added.
To salvage Africa’s crumbling food systems amid the climate and biodiversity crises, the festival serves to drive a shift to local, climate-adapted crops and crop varieties that helps smallholders diversify their production.
The push is yielding results and Zimbabwe is already showing a promising shift in food production and consumption.
Increasingly, a push by social movements such as PELUM Zimbabwe, an organizer of this annual festival, to ensure a more reliable, nutritious food supply at the household and national level, have been complimented by a growing movement of farmer groups and associations, community-based organisations, national and international NGOs and, philanthropic donors such as the Agroecology Fund.
Consequently, Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and the Food and Nutrition Council have resuscitated food and nutrition security committees which promote a multisectoral approach to improve community and household nutrition. For the first time in Zimbabwe’s history, an increasing range of traditional food and drink products are appearing on supermarket shelves and are sold in restaurants.
In the face of multiple challenges such as the ongoing climate and biodiversity loss crises, pollution and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic – more support is needed for small-scale food producers, connecting them with critical and livelihoods-transforming knowledge and financial services.
Between 2012 and 2023, the Agroecology Fund – a multi donor fund supporting agroecological practices and policies – supported grassroots organization’s work in agroecology across Africa, awarding a total of $6,589,613 through 137 grants. This year they launched new regional funds in Eastern and West Africa. Many of the Fund’s grantees from across the continent and beyond such as the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF) were at the festival and took the opportunity to underscore the critical role farmer-led seed systems play in fixing Africa’s broken food systems.
The following article was written by Marta Vidal and published in Yes Magazine in August 2024. You can read the original here.
Growing food under military occupation has become increasingly dangerous as settler violence and repression escalate. But these farmers persist.
Surrounded by a 26-foot-high separation wall, barbed wire, and a watchtower, a group of young Palestinians prepares a 3.5-acre piece of land for the growing season in spring. The noise of their hoes shaping the soil mixes with the humming of construction cranes from the nearby Israeli settlement of Modi’in Illit. Established in 1996 on land appropriated from Palestinian villages, the Israeli settlement is illegal under international law but continues to expand.
The Om Sleiman farm in the village of Bil’in is part of a growing agroecology movement in the occupied West Bank that is turning to sustainable farming as a way to resist the Israeli occupation and stay rooted to the land. Established in 2016, Om Sleiman—Arabic for “ladybug”—aims to connect Palestinians to the produce they consume and to promote food sovereignty.
“We share the yield of the farm with 20 to 30 members, depending on the season,” explains Loor Kamal, a member of Om Sleiman, as she prepares raised beds where eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, peppers, and beans will be sown. The farm operates on a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, model in which members pay for their share of the produce at the beginning of each season, sharing both the yield and the risks of production.
One day in April, Kamal shows us around the property, which is located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control. Here vegetables are grown alongside olive and fruit trees, but Kamal, who works at Om Sleiman with a team of five other women, mentions that a part of the land is inaccessible. “In March, we were walking around the farm, checking the carob trees inside our land, and suddenly soldiers started shooting at us,” she recalls.
Growing food under military occupation has become increasingly dangerous as settler violence and repression escalate. Even with the world’s attention focused on the war in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 563 Palestinians in the West Bank since October.
Despite the dangers, Om Sleiman’s team is determined to continue their work. “We have to go on, even when there is fear, because our presence here is important,” says Kamal as she picks eggplants, apples, and mulberries from the farm.
An aerial shot of Om Sleiman Farm. Photo Credit: Om Sleiman Farm
The land on which they grow organic produce has special significance. The concrete wall that cuts through the West Bank expropriated hundreds of acres of Bil’in’s agricultural land in 2005. After years of protest and legal action, residents managed to regain about half of the lost farmland, a victory that turned the village into a symbol of popular resistance.
A part of the reclaimed land was donated for the establishment of this agroecology farm. For members of Om Sleiman, growing food in defiance of the encroaching wall and settlements is a way of continuing the struggle for freedom.
A volunteer poses for a photo at Om Sleiman farm in Bili’in. Photo Credit: Om Sleiman Farm
Agroecology As a Tool for Liberation
“If we want to be free, we need to plant our own food,” says Angham Mansour, who is from Bili’in and joined Om Sleiman two years ago. The farm aims to promote independence from the occupier’s economy but also to reconnect Palestinians with the land. “Farming is part of our heritage. Going back to the land is going back to our roots, to our identity,” she says.
Palestine is part of the historical region of the Fertile Crescent, seen as the birthplace of agriculture, where people started cultivating grains and cereals as they transitioned from hunter-gatherer groups to agricultural societies.
For Saed Dagher, a farmer and agronomist who started working with agroecology in Palestine in 1996, sustainable farming is a crucial tool for liberation. “As a farmer I am free when I don’t depend on outside inputs, when I produce the food in my land the way I see fit, with my own seeds, and the inputs that are locally available. I am not dependent on seed and chemical companies. And I don’t depend on the occupation,” he says.
Dagher is one of the co-founders of the Palestinian Agroecology Forum, a volunteer group aiming to spread ecological farming in Palestine. In the past decade, he has noticed a growing interest in agroecology, an approach that tries to minimize the environmental impacts of farming by using local, renewable resources. This method reduces dependency on purchased inputs and prioritizes soil health and biodiversity.
According to Dagher, Palestinian farmers have practiced forms of agroecology long before the term was invented. “Traditionally, Palestinian farmers would plant olive trees with wheat, barley, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. In the same field, we would have fig trees, grapes, almonds. It was diverse,” he says. Palestinian farmers used to rely mostly on local resources and rain-fed agriculture, helping preserve local varieties in the fields, orchards, and terraced hills.
The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—through a violent process that entailed the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians—meant farmers lost most of their lands and livelihoods.
Since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, the remaining Palestinian territory became a captive market for Israeli products. The local food system was transformed from a food-producing to a food-buying one, deepening Palestinian dependence on the occupying forces.
In the decades since then, Palestine’s diverse agricultural heritage has been in decline, as Palestinian growing traditions have been increasingly displaced by monocultures and industrial agriculture, which are reliant on agrochemicals and genetically modified seeds, particularly after the Oslo Accords signed in 1993.
“Israel wants to destroy Palestinian agriculture, so [Palestinians] become dependent on them and on humanitarian assistance,” says Moayyad Bsharat, project coordinator at the Union for Agricultural Work Committees, or UAWC, an organization supporting Palestinian farmers. “If Palestinians are food secure and don’t depend on Israeli products and Israeli markets, they will dream of freedom, and Israel doesn’t want it. It wants Palestinians as slaves working for them.”
The importance of food sovereignty has been highlighted by the catastrophic situation in Gaza over the past 10 months. According to human rights reports, Israel has been using starvation as a weapon of war by deliberately blocking the delivery of food and by destroying farmlands.
As dependence on Israeli produce and agribusiness grows under occupation, so does the land grabbing. This year, Israel has declared a record 2,743 acres of land in the occupied West Bank to be state-owned—a move that paves the way for continued settlement construction.
“The occupation keeps trying to take the land from us, to restrict our access to it, and prevent farmers from reaching it,” Mansour says. “The goal is to make our lives here impossible, to make us leave. They want to uproot us.”
The systematic appropriation of land and water resources by expanding Israeli settlements, the separation wall, and the military have all alienated Palestinians from the land and caused the loss of native seeds and traditional practices.
But despite farmers’ continuous dispossession and the widespread destruction of agricultural land, Bsharat says farmers haven’t been defeated. “We will rebuild again. We will support farmers with local seeds and continue our projects to build food sovereignty. We will use all our efforts to dismantle the colonial project by sowing local seeds, taking care of the land, and teaching our children not to forget.”
The Union for Agricultural Work Committees is collecting and distributing 60 varieties of heirloom seeds and is working on the rehabilitation of agricultural land in Gaza and the West Bank. In recent years, it has helped establish agroecology projects and training in some of the villages most affected by settler violence.
“We are still present in the land, despite the restrictions imposed on us and the violence of the settlers,” says Ghassan Najjar, who manages an agroecology cooperative in Burin, a village surrounded by extremist Israeli settlers who regularly attack Palestinian farmers, burning orchards and uprooting olive trees.
Photo Credit: Om Sleiman Farm
“Agriculture is resistance,” says Najjar, standing in a greenhouse where members of the cooperative grow cucumbers and tomatoes using agroecology techniques.
Despite the growing settler violence and repression, Dagher says he is motivated to “do more and more.” He considers the fact that many Palestinian workers have lost their Israeli jobs since last October to be “an opportunity to encourage more people to work in agriculture.”
The farmers at Om Sleiman will keep sowing the land, spring after spring. “These days when the situation is so difficult, we feel this project is even more important. We feel we have to continue, we have to be present,” Mansour says.
“Every day we come and we work the land because we have hope,” adds Kamal. “Because we believe that we will be free.”
A successful agroecological transition is not simply about sustainable food production. Guaranteeing the right to healthy foods through a just food supply system is likewise a foundational agroecology principle.
Farmer and fishers’ markets, food basket delivery services, and online stores are some of the ways that agroecology movements sell directly to consumers at fair prices. But their reach only goes so far. To scale up agroecology, commercialization networks must be strengthened.
School lunch programs, “earth markets” that link to the global Slow Food movement, and food sovereignty corridors are among the many innovative ways that civil society organizations and farmer groups are doing this, as speakers described in a recent Agroecology Fund webinar.
The third in our Agroecology Economies webinar series, this conversation with grantee partners and allies was held on July 17th, 2024, and focused on the topic of commercialization networks as a necessity for guaranteeing healthy foods. You can access a full recording of the webinar here.
Schools as a Hub
School lunch programs can create a market for agroecologically produced food while securing healthy, nutritious food for children.
Marut Jatiket, with Thailand’s The Field Alliance (TFA), said the group launched a program after studying school lunches and discovering that 90 percent of the vegetables were contaminated with organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides.
“Most farming in Thailand, commercially done, uses quite a bit of chemical pesticide [and] schools buy their ingredients in the local or distribution market where organic food isn’t available,” he said.
The Field Alliance’s program links agroecological farmers to safe, organic school lunches via an online platform that allows schools to directly contact farmers. In the countryside, where the internet is not accessible, they promote connections between farmers and rural schools to build healthy food supply arrangements. The group’s farmer schools offer training in agroecology, often in collaboration with government extension agencies and community learning centers. Farmers learn to use mobile phones to link to a database of farmers selling agroecologically produced vegetables.
In just one year, with funding from Agroecology Fund, TFA expanded the number of farmer schools it works with from five to 23.
The group is challenged by Thailand’s limited national budget for school lunches, strict regulations that discourage schools from purchasing directly from farmers, and Thai farmers’ limited organic production, yet Jatiket is unfazed. “The solution for us is to expand agroecological training to the college level in Thailand and prepare the young generation for sustainable farming practice,” he said.
Tapping into the Global Slow Food Movement
Forming partnerships with the global Slow Food movement, which shares agroecological values, can be fruitful. Slow Food’s “Earth Markets” give local producers the opportunity to sell directly to consumers and allow consumers to access locally produced healthy food. They likewise encourage exchange among consumers, farmers, cooks, and other actors in the food chain through food and taste education workshops, cooking lessons, and teaching consumers where their food comes from.
“We believe healthy and culturally appropriate food should be a fundamental right of every global citizen,” John Kariuki, a gastronomist with Slow Food Kenya, said. “We also believe in resilient food systems through agriculture and biodiversity conservation, and that our food should be free from chemicals.”
The Slow Food collaborative supported by the Agroecology Fund in Eastern Africa created 15 Earth Markets in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The markets are run by members of Slow Food communities, and ensure that small-scale farmers get fair compensation for the hard work they do.
Prices at these markets are very competitive with the prices at conventional markets, Kariuki added, because “we are dealing with very short supply chains, and the value chains are not complicated”.
Food Sovereignty Corridors
Food sovereignty corridors are an approach applied to assert territory rights as a place of living, culture and identity and promote exchange between small-scale farmer communities in remote regions.
In Colombia’s northern Cauca region, for instance, Grupo Semillas supports Afro-Colombian communities to establish Afro-food sovereignty and cultural heritage with a corridor that spans a 1200-hectare region inhabited by Black communities in seven municipalities.
“We’re looking to promote healthy foods because of the conflicts that we’re facing,” said Afro-Colombian Anyela Leon Gonzales of Grupo Semillas Colombia, naming mining and GMO maize production in particular.“ The management of the land has changed, and it has affected the whole environment. Twenty-eight varieties of local species have been completely lost, and 43 species are endangered, while children suffer from malnutrition and diseases,” she said.
Grupo Semillas has supported the development of seed houses, an agro-biodiversity refuge, a Farmer School, a university agricultural program, and a school lunch program operating in three schools. The Afro-Colombia Food Sovereignty Corridor includes a network of seed guardians on 18 farms and Afro-food markets that sell local agroecological products at a fair price.
“We want to keep the land in the hands of the farmers. We’re recovering the territory so that people can become more aware of the importance of the local traditions and practices,” Gonzales said.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, the Unión de Trabajadores de la Tierra (UTT) developed a sovereignty food supply corridor to link its more than 20,000 farmer families to each other and to markets and to guarantee its members and consumers a healthy product at the fairest price.
Argentina’s vast expanse stretches 5,500 kilometers from the tropical north to its cool southern tip. UTT’s members in the south, where the growing season lasts just 45 days, are especially isolated. Half the food consumed there comes from outside the region and is very costly.
“It is a huge challenge to transport food around the country without intermediaries or speculators who add high logistical costs,” Josefina Galan and Agustin Mavar of UTT said. “We’ve been working to strengthen commercialization networks and to give farmers direct channels to sell and commercialize their products.”
Agustin Mavar, a small-scale cattle producer in Patagonia and member of UTT, said they began developing the corridor seven years ago by “just jumping on a truck” and mapping out the routes. Eventually UTT bought a vehicle that enables them to carry products to the furthest reaches of the country, but they must still often rent private vehicles that can be costly.
UTT and their new truck
“It’s a huge change, because it allows farmers to be able to plan,” Mavar said. The UTT can now facilitate access for a producer to bring 50 crates of apples to market 100 km away from the main routes, which they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access without their own transportation. “It has allowed us to think and develop other models, such as focusing on value-added products,” he added. UTT also created five storage areas and points of sale for families.
Currently, the Sovereign Corridor stretches across six provinces, with additional corridors being planned.
Enabling Public Policies
Strengthening commercialization networks requires enabling policies; Brazil’s Food Procurement Program, or PAA, offers an excellent model. The PAA was created in 2003 to boost family producers’ income and food security for vulnerable populations.
“We’re trying to encourage family farming, promote access to food for people with food insecurity, stimulate cooperativism … and strengthen local and regional commercial circuits,” said Silvio Porto, a professor who works with Companhia Nacional deAbastecimento (CONAB), a Brazilian food supply company which manages the PAA.
From 2019-2022, the past government reduced the PAA budgets drastically. Since 2023, the new government has been working to revive the program and is also implementing innovations to improve it. An important achievement so far is the better outreach to the Amazon region, reaching Indigenous Communities and Afro-Brazilian communities (Quilombolas, in Portuguese), as well as food insecure families in the Northeast of Brazil.
The Brazilian Government has also allocated a budget to school food programs, which reaches 47 millions students daily. Since 2009, the law requires that at least 30 percent of school food be sourced from family farmers. In 2022, 45% of the resources for food purchases of the National School Feeding Programme (PNAE) were allocated to family farmers. Priority is given to Indigenous peoples, local and traditional communities, land reform beneficiaries, and youth groups. Also, at least 50 percent of the food purchased for PNAE must come from women farmers.
In 2023, the PAA funded 2,280 projects in more than 1,000 municipalities, spending 12 million real ($2.13 million) to purchase and distribute 94,000 tons of food. Eighty percent of the 380 types of food it distributed was fresh fruit and vegetables. All of PAA’s distribution programs are managed autonomously by civil society organizations.
“It shows the value we give to our food culture and the public markets to traditional foods, regional foods,” Porto said.
The revival of the program by the current government has been accompanied by important innovations. Since 2023, government purchases support solidarity community kitchens, which are “almost the only public program that can reach unhoused people living in the streets, a major issue for most Brazilian big cities” said Porto.
The webinar demonstrated that strengthened and equitable commercialization networks are fundamental to producers’ organizations to scale up agroecology and to ensure the right to healthy food for all people. It also demonstrates the role that public policies and programs must play in reshaping food systems. These initiatives, most with support from Agroecology Fund, show their power to weave a social fabric and strengthen territorial identity, generating creative solutions for resilient supply chains and healthy food.
Learn more about Agroecology Fund grantee partners who participated in this conversation at the links below:
Time seems to stand still as current levels of undernourishment compare to those in 2008-2009. Against this backdrop, participants of a global World Rural Forum webinar titled ‘Climate Finance Mechanisms for Family Farmers’Organizations’ held on July 30, 2024, delved into available climate finance mechanisms for small-holder farmers.
This is a first of a series of global webinars organized by the World Rural Forum in preparation for COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, where key elements of climate finance will be decided. Global climate finance architecture is complex and evolving, necessitating family farmers’ organizations’ active participation in shaping its future.
There appears to be a growing consensus on the inextricable nature of food and climate. Few argue that we can solve the climate crisis with our present form of high input industrial agriculture. Agroecology is emerging as the most effective form of climate resilient agriculture; and farmer organizations, as landscape stewards and food producers, are increasingly perceived as essential to scale agroecology up and out. Through peer to peer learning, they work with their constituencies to shift farmer practice while holding governments accountable to climate-friendly food systems. And yet, in a troubling trend, when it comes to climate finance, they are woefully underfunded.
Agroecology Fund advisor Jyoti Fernandes, coordinator of the Policy, Lobbying and Campaigning work of the Landworkers Alliance, a small farmers union in the UK and a member of Agroecology Fund long-term partner La Via Campesina, represented the Agroecology Fund in this webinar with a presentation about climate finance mechanisms, opportunities, challenges and proposals for change from a grassroots perspective. Other presenters included representatives from Global Environmental Fund and the Green Climate Fund.
“The Agroecology Fund pushes funds directly to organizations which represent small farmers practicing agroecology worldwide and, the networks which represent those farmers and Indigenous people working with the landscapes around them to produce food for themselves and their local communities,” Jyoti Fernandes, Agroecology Fund Advisor said.
“Our support is multifaceted—it could be through seeds and seed networks, knowledge sharing on soil, soil health, water management and agroforestry, through the agroecology training networks and peer-to-peer learning models, or towards increasing food and nutrition security. It has also been proven, all over the world, that agroecology is an effective and sustainable approach to promote climate resilience,” she said.
Fernandes, who is also a family farmer, stressed that nearly all farmers are facing difficulties financially due to an international financial system which largely does not serve or protect smallholder farmers. However, there are three ways through which funds can be received for climate resilience – adaptation, mitigation and Loss and Damage.
She emphasized the need to develop stronger models to illustrate that grassroots actors can and should be financed to build climate resilience. She noted that “business as usual” means that industrialized food systems – often selling false solutions – remain ahead of the queue to receive available funds, taking the lion’s share.
In all, Fernandes highlighted how amidst an unprecedented climate onslaught, family farmers already significantly invest in climate adaptation to ensure global food security. Stressing that their contribution to ensuring agrifood systems are more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable are not in doubt, she noted that they received only 0.3 percent of international climate finance in 2021.
“Indigenous peoples, peasants, and smallholder farmers in general are taking on the biggest share of restoration and biodiversity regeneration efforts while still receiving less than two percent of the financing available. It is time to push for more funding through the Agroecology Fund to support ongoing activities at the community and grassroots level, and more so the work that family farms undertake on a day-to-day basis,” she emphasized.
Part of the solution, Fernandes said, is to explore participatory mechanisms as a way to involve grassroots farmers and networks and to highlight their contribution to climate adaptation and, in turn, expose existing funding gaps. Grants or government programs – for example, credit to cooperatives – are needed to meet the specific needs of family farmers.
Ms. Fernandes brought into sharp focus the urgent need for family farmers’ organizations to define and benefit from the future of climate financing and national climate plans, as the size and diversity of the world’s food basket depends largely on these farmers’ successful approach to ongoing multiple, complex and pressing global challenges.
The following article was published in Inside Philanthropy in July 2024. You can read the original here.
For an example of how climate philanthropy’s newest billionaire donors can supercharge veteran organizations with just a couple of checks, consider the Agroecology Fund.
Founded in 2012, the Boston-based regrantor awarded a total of $10.5 million during its first decade — an average of just $1 million a year. Growth picked up in 2022, with a fundraising campaign, new regional initiatives and organic growth helping the fund to nearly double its all-time grantmaking over the following two years.
The Agroecology Fund is now on track to give out about as much money in the next several years as it did in the last dozen — a sign that philanthropic interest in this space has spiked as the climate crisis pushes more funders, and particularly billionaire donors, to put money toward food system transformation.
These new backers are a boon for agroecology, a term with many definitions that most broadly refers to agricultural approaches seeking sustainable coexistence of people and planet. Advocates and practitioners of agroecology — which has its roots in Indigenous food systems — have seen a funding swell over the last few years as donors look for equitable ways to decarbonize our food system, which by some measures accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
The Agroecology Fund not only serves as a barometer of this new interest; it embodies many of the major trends in climate philanthropy: funders’ wide range of focus areas, billionaire donors’ preference for regrantors, burgeoning support for localized grantmaking, nonprofit interest in government funding, and uncertainty about the future of the current billionaire funding boom.
“More donor understanding of the importance of food systems”
The surging support for agroecology reflects a long-building swell of funder interest in movements within the food and agriculture space, largely driven by climate-focused funders, with increased resources flowing to related if distinct topics like regenerative agriculture — an area with a fast-growing new affinity group — and food system transformation. It adds up to an increasingly varied landscape of what we at IP sometimes call sustainable agriculture funders.
“You’re seeing more donors understanding of the importance of food systems to solve the climate crisis,” said Daniel Moss, who has been with the fund since its second year and now serves as codirector, sharing leadership with Angela Cordeiro.
Other billionaire philanthropies backing agroecology include the Walton Family Foundation and Lukas Walton’s Builders Initiative. Eric and Wendy Schmidt have also supported such work through their foundation and its 11th Hour Project (which is a fund member), and Wendy Schmidt wrote a 2022 op-ed for IP arguing that “philanthropy can seed agroecology.” Legacy foundations, like Rockefeller and McKnight (another fund member), have also been agroecology backers.
For the Waverley Street Foundation, the Agroecology Fund’s attention not just to land and ecosystems, but to people, was a key draw, said Kai Carter, head of international programs.
“To achieve lasting climate solutions, we must adopt multifaceted strategies that prioritize both people and the planet, ensuring that equity is at the core of our efforts,” Carter said in a statement.
Waverley’s grant will support research and advocacy by farmers, scientists, consumer groups and policymakers. The aim is to develop policies and public support to “scale up” agroecology as a climate solution. The fund is expected to secure another $6 million in matching funds.
Many reasons to fund agroecology, and climate generally
The Agroecology Fund traces its origins to 2012, when four colleagues from four foundations — the Christensen Fund, Swift Foundation, V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and New Field Foundation — came together to form a collaborative grantmaking vehicle at a time when such outfits were less common. (Today, the fund remains a fiscally sponsored project of Global Greengrants.)
Those founding members’ various focuses foreshadowed the fund’s appeal to a broad swath of philanthropy, and also mirrors the wide-ranging reasons that can pull foundations into climate philanthropy. Those focus areas spanned Indigenous communities, women’s empowerment, movement building and human rights — topics that are forefront in today’s climate conversation.
“That’s part of the beauty of agroecology,” Moss said. “There aren’t that many funders that are what you might describe as dyed-in-the-wool agroecology funders, but they see the intersectionality.”
The fund now has more than 50 donors, and they’re a diverse bunch. Members span foundations in the U.S. and abroad, multibillion-dollar institutions and unendowed regrantors, legacy funders and billionaire-backed operations. Some family foundation members make $20,000 grants to the fund, while a few big backers award millions of dollars, like Waverley and Ballmer.
The Agroecology Fund’s billionaire patrons — Powell Jobs and the Ballmers — have also taken this well-traveled path, including in their food and agriculture funding.
Waverley Street Foundation chose several such groups in its initial grantmaking, and it took the same approach in backing the Farm Bill, sending dollars to grantmaking intermediaries like the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation, as well as the new Platform for Agriculture and Climate Transformation and Farm Bill Grassroots Capacity Fund.
Intermediaries are also playing a starring role in Ballmer’s climate portfolio. Awards include a $118 million grant to the Climate and Land Use Alliance, which works in similar regions and shares at least one grantee with the Agroecology Fund. Ballmer also made a four-year, $45 million grant to the One Acre Fund, which, while not exactly a regrantor, supports farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to address poverty and climate change.
Whether it’s the Agroecology Fund or other intermediaries, there are many reasons why billionaires are cutting substantial checks to such operations. Some of these new megadonors are still scaling up their operations and lack the capacity to make lots of grants; others want to get significant funding out the door quickly. They might also choose to fund through regrantors while building their strategy, or appreciate the trust-based practices and network impact of regrantors.
Another big reason that billionaires favor regrantors? It allows them to get funding to small groups in communities around the world. Few funders, particularly newcomers, have the relationships to build their own grantee portfolios far from offices typically located in the U.S.
The Agroecology Fund is a prime example of this: It started its first regional fund, Fondo Agroecológico para la Península de Yucatán, in 2020 with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Next came the Bharat Agroecology Fund in India, which attracted support from the IKEA Foundation.
Now, the fund is setting up regional funds in Eastern and Western Africa through a partnership with TrustAfrica that also allows donors to send grant dollars directly to the continent.
“There’s been a really important trend in philanthropy… toward more localized, decentralized, trust-based philanthropy — and these regional funds made a lot of sense to” grantmakers, Moss said. While the fund had always accepted restricted funding, these regional funds also helped it attract support from grantmakers with particular geographic interests.
The Agroecology Fund’s fiscal sponsor, Global Greengrants, was one of the first and most widely regarded intermediaries to develop a network of grantees around the globe, including several branches that have since spun off into independent entities, such as Fundo Casa Socioambiental.
“Philanthropy is a bit player”
Funding from billionaires has reshaped the environmental funding landscape in recent years, but many nonprofits see the larger prize as securing government dollars.
For some, that means applying for a slice of the hundreds of billions of dollars in funding flowing from the Inflation Reduction Act, while others are targeting financing from bilateral organizations like the Green Climate Fund. The Agroecology Fund is no exception.
“Philanthropy often forgets it’s really a bit player,” Moss said. “The biggest single donor for agroecology in the world should be and is governments.”
While the fund does not advocate with governments, its grantees do. The fund is also part of the Agroecology Coalition, a group composed of dozens of governments, nonprofits, research institutions, philanthropies and multilateral institutions like the United Nations Development Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development.
In June, the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development joined as the Agroecology Fund’s first bilateral development agency donor, with a four-year $1.5 million grant to support the new regional funds in West and Eastern Africa, as well as to explore the feasibility of an additional fund in Southeast Asia.
Like most regrantors, Moss sees plenty of potential to put more dollars to good use. “It’s not like there’s all this money chasing very few opportunities,” he said. “We are overwhelmed with many more fantastic opportunities.”
But will it all last?
Back in 2016, Moss was worried the fund’s growth was over. “We’ve hit the ceiling,” he kept thinking. He needn’t have worried: The organization has since more than tripled its budget.
Yet like a lot of environmental organizations that have grown rapidly as billionaires jump into the field with massive commitments, Moss and the fund’s team are concerned about whether the good times will last.
Moss said the fund has tried to both be “totally bullish” — its public mission, after all, is to “move massive amounts of money” into agroecology — but realistic, including making financial plans for both growth and retraction.
“A lot of times, following boom periods is a bust period, and it would be irresponsible if we grew too much without thinking ahead,” he said.
Read more about Agroecology Fund’s plea to climate philanthropists to invest in grassroots agroecology movements in our op-ed for Alliance Magazine.
Written by Agroecology Fund Advisor Milka Chepkorir All photo credits: Milka Chepkorir
On June 21, 2024, the Agroecology Fund was invited to a school agroecology learning field day at Ugolwe Primary School in Siaya County, Kenya. The event was organised by Agroecology Fund grantee partner the Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE) Kenya, who are a beneficiary of the Agroecology Fund through the regional umbrella body, ReSCOPE. Milka Chepkorir, Advisory Board member of the Agroecology Fund, attended the event and shared her experience.
Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE) Kenya is a national capacity-building and networking organisation founded in 2014. The organisation works with schools’ communities, to promote practical ecological land use and management practices, through agroecology approaches, to address the challenges of food & nutrition insecurity, increasing poverty levels, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss in Kenya. Currently, SCOPE Kenya network has a membership of 16 civil society organisations (CSOs), working with 133 schools’ communities in 13 counties in Kenya.
The types of garden designs in the school compound include a rabbit system, fruit forest, key-hold gardens, sack gardens, a food plant circle, and much more.
Food plant circlesMixed vegetable garden
The gardens are set in front of the school classes and offices. This structure and design choice primarily give life to the school environment. This provides things to look at and admire as parents and visitors wait to be served at the school offices.
Gardens set in front of school administration buildings
At an early age, students are taught to be environmentally responsible by not using plastics either in the general school environment or in the gardens. This is a behaviour they have taken back to their homes to influence their villages. By working in the gardens together, the students learn to be tender and care for the plants in front of their classes and the school environment.
Grade 1-3 projects in front of their classes
Contribution to the current school curriculum
The youngest students, in grades 1-3, have been offered opportunities to put into practice the skills they learn from the Carrier-Based Curriculum (CBC)–a new Kenyan school curriculum in which students are guided to set up vegetable gardens at the front of their classes and encouraged to take care of them, water them and learn through doing.
Working with the larger community
In the spirit of inclusion and spread of agroecological practices into the larger community, the SCOPE project has invited parents to participate. As a result, a group of mothers are now a part of the project. They take up the role of nurturing the gardens when the students are on holiday, and work together on community workdays at the school garden. The group expressed how the project has informed their decisions to set up gardens and practice agroecology at their homes, thanks to their children’s influence and knowledge from school. The women’s group has also started agroecological enterprises resulting from their involvement in this project, including selling of organic foods and fruits even at the school field day event.
Women’s group displaying their enterprises
Performance and art
Different schools in attendance skillfully prepared and presented skits, songs, narratives, and poems (in Swahili, English, and Dholu, the local language). A group of three judges awarded scores to the performing groups and individuals. The best-performing groups had prizes presented to their schools.
Some of the performance pieces included:
A young boy from Sega Township Primary School presented a poem entitled Agroecology. In his poem, he pointed out the principles of agroecology and permaculture which included farming without chemicals, without altering or destroying the soil structure, and taking care of micro and macro-organisms like earthworms.
The host, Ugolwe Primary School presented a piece on agroecological activities, encouraging people to practice them and emphasised the benefits of Indigenous foods to human health. Some of the benefits of Indigenous foods highlighted by the presenters included good immune systems to support the body away from lifestyle diseases, and physical strength needed by community members to perform activities in their farms and community.
Lolwe Primary School presented a piece on Agroecology from an African perspective. The main points from the piece highlighted the fact that agroecological knowledge has been passed down through generations from the ancestors. They emphasized the need for the preservation of such knowledge. The piece was delivered with great African proverbs and phrases such as, “Listen to the whispers of cassava leaves on the secrets of the soil.”
There was also a narrative shared by a boy and a girl comparing two types of head teachers in their school. One of the headteachers proposed and pushed for the setting up of a school garden on agroecological principles while the other pushed for chemical farming in the same farm. They named the pro-agroecology teacher Mr. Mapinduzi, translated as Mr. Revolution. The narrative went further to describe how the school ended up dividing the land into two and the teachers piloted their preferred systems. The agroecological farm had higher yields and attracted attention from the students and other school stakeholders.
“It was impressive to see the interest of school administrations and boards of management to be part of these kinds of projects and to be eager to involve their extended school communities. The involvement of students, as key players in the project, draws such positive promise for the future of agroecology as this aligns their choices and actions around food production to the right and the most effective methods that take care of the planet. The knowledge mastered and shared by young boys and girls through the different arts; songs, poems, narratives, dances, drama, was a clear indication that agroecology and especially the consumption of African Indigenous foods is key in the general health of humans and the planet. SCOPE Kenya’s role in reaching out to schools in the country to engage more students in learning and spread knowledge and skills, contributes largely to the need for change that the world needs at this critical moment. While many agroecology actors are focusing on change of policy and strategies on paper, it is encouraging to see actors like SCOPE Kenya working with schools and their communities in the practical implementation and support of agroecological activities with youth, the next generation of change-makers.” – Milka
About Milka Chepkorir
Milka Chepkorir is a young Indigenous woman from the Sengwer peoples in Cherang’any Hills, Kenya. For the last six years she has been working with her community to address land tenure issues in their ancestral lands, the Embobut and Kabolet forests. Due to lack of recognition of her community land rights, the community has faced human rights violations through evictions by the government of Kenya, all in the name of forest conservation. Milka has a special interest in gender issues and has been working with women and elders in her community to ensure women are included in the community land rights struggles. Together with the women in Embobut forest, she helped develop a cultural centre where the community hopes to carry out indigenous education classes to educate the youth and children about the Sengwer indigenous knowledge and systems, most of which have been lost or are diminishing. She is currently completing her Masters in Gender and Development Studies at the University of Nairobi. Her specific focus is on gender relations in community forest conservation among Indigenous Peoples. Milka coordinates the “Defending Territories of Life” stream of work at the ICCA Consortium. She was previously the Coordinator of Community Land Action NOW! (CLAN), a Kenyan movement of communities working to register their lands as community lands under the Community Land Act 2016.
The following article was published in Infobae in July 2024. You can read the original in Spanish here.
Although the Court of Environmental Crimes of Ucayali ordered a halt to logging in the Shipibo-Konibo community of Caimito, in the Masisea district of Ucayali, deforestation persists. Mennonite settlers continue with agricultural activities, they report.
According to an investigation by journalist Ronald Suárez Maynas, published in the Servindi portal, the responsibility falls on Mennonite settlers who, despite court orders, continue their agricultural activities, negatively impacting indigenous lands.
Among such orders is the decision of the Transitory Investigation Court for Environmental Crimes of the Superior Court of Justice of Ucayali, which issued a precautionary measure in December of last year ordering the Mennonites to stop their logging activities.
Nevertheless, deforestation persists, affecting both the environment and the livelihoods of approximately 500 inhabitants of Caimito.
Shipibo Indigenous Guard of Caimito. Photo Credit: Ronald Suárez
Why do the Mennonite farming practices impact the land?
A report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) revealed that 929 hectares of deforestation was documented in the Masisea settlement, mostly occurring between 2017 and 2019, with a slight decrease in recent years.
According to MAAP specialists and others, the Mennonites’ intensive agricultural practices, which include the use of agrochemicals and heavy machinery, are not suited to the Amazonian ecosystem, resulting in soil degradation.
This is confirmed by Marc Dourojeanni, professor emeritus of the National Agrarian University (UNA), who, in addition to criticizing the passivity of the Public Ministry in the face of the actions of the religious organization of Swiss origin, has affirmed that their practices, although profitable in a short time, are carried out at the expense of the long-term sustainability of the land.
Since 2017, Mennonites have deforested more than 7,000 hectares of native forest, according to a report. Credit MAAP/Composition Infobae
Meanwhile, Abner Ancón Rodríguez, head of the native community of Caimito, told Servindi that in October 2023, the Shipibo Indigenous Guard of Caimito managed to stop attempts by the Mennonites to initiate their production, including soybean and rice crops in their territory.
“The Shipibo Indigenous Guard of Caimito [a group that emerged within the community to protect their ancestral territory against deforestation] managed to remove the machinery and the foundations of the houses they intended to build,” stated Ancón.
However, in parallel to the tensions, the Caimito community recognizes that the presence of the Mennonites has generated a notable commercial exchange among the population in comparison to the high costs of Pucallpa’s traditional markets. The settlers have developed an efficient trade that supplies the local and regional market. According to the indigenous community, the dairy and agricultural products offered by the Mennonites are valued for their quality and competitive prices.
“They are selling us quite cheap, that’s why we buy from them. Not only do they come here, but they also go to Masisea,” says Ruth Vásquez Santos, from the adjacent community of San Pedro in Masisea.
Although, Abner Ancón Rodríguez, head of the native community of Caimito, states that this commercial flow is unidirectional; that is, there is no reciprocal and fair exchange between the Mennonites and the Shipibos, which causes only one party to be favored.
Deforestation in Ucayali and Loreto, the regions most affected by this type of deforestation. Composition: Infobae
Who are the Mennonites?
A report by the Latin American SciDev.Net portal indicates that, since 2017, the religious group has deforested more than 7,000 hectares in Ucayali and Loreto, violating forestry laws and indigenous territories.
Likewise, the Amazon Conservation Association (ACCA) reports that five Mennonite colonies in Peru, Vanderland, Osterreich, Providencia, Chipiar and Masisea, deforested 2,426 hectares between January 2022 and August 2023.
Faced with this situation, the Masisea Indigenous District Organization (ORDIM) declared their territories in a state of emergency, using collective security mechanisms to protect themselves.
They also denounced problems such as illegal logging, coca leaf cultivation and resource exploitation by external companies that threaten the Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation in the Amazon region.
The following article was published in Alliance Magazine in July 2024. You can read the original here.
Constructing climate-friendly, healthy food systems that are good for the planet and people remains one of humanity’s great challenges.
The ‘modern’ food systems put in place over the past century – with many technologies and trade rules imposed in colonial fashion – have taken a toll on ecosystems, nutrition, income, and rights protections of smallholder farmers and Indigenous peoples. Peer-reviewed research assigns approximately 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions to industrial agriculture, meaning that, without a radical reshaping of food systems, we are unlikely to stabilize the Earth’s climate.
Currently, less than two percent of global philanthropic giving goes toward climate mitigation, and only three percent of all climate finance is allocated to food systems, an even smaller fraction to farmer, fisher, or Indigenous-led organizations. Robust scientific and case studies show how agroecology-based food systems contribute to climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
Multiple lines of evidence converge and demonstrate that success factors for increased resilience are not only the reliance on ecological principles but, importantly, on the social aspects, particularly on the co-creation and sharing of knowledge and traditions that lead to improved climate change adaptive capacity.
A Call for Increased Climate and Food Systems Transformation Funding
As the world faces a polycrisis – increased hunger, loss of biodiversity, and climate-related disasters – it’s imperative that we see a massive increase in financial investments in climate and food systems transformation. A global transition to regenerative and agroecological approaches can support a cascade of positive outcomes from stable yields, crop resilience and higher incomes for farmers, fishers, and food producers to improved nutrition and food security and enhanced biodiversity.
However, it is not enough to shift financial flows; supporting participatory, democratic, local governance of funding and financing are critical to ensuring current and historic uneven power dynamics aren’t replicated.
Those closest to the impacts of the climate crisis have the solutions that are right for their communities and demonstrate how to move agroecological food systems forward. That’s why in addition to a global fund, the Agroecology Fund is incubating four regional funds. A territorial approach to change is required for true global transformation to occur, and that’s not possible without deeper funding of grassroots movements.
The Agroecology Fund works to strengthen relationships among a diverse pool of funders – now over 50 – to respond to the creativity and needs of grassroots agroecology movements. With increased interest from funders in supporting participatory models of grantmaking to invest in climate solutions at local levels, the fund has been able to significantly expand their network of support for collaboratives around the world.
But it can’t just be about mobilizing philanthropic funding – it will never be enough and it cannot be held publicly accountable. That is why we collaborate with bilateral and multilateral agencies as well as governments and private investors through mechanisms like the Agroecology Coalition. We aim to constantly remind donors and investors that their funding ought to be deployed for climate solutions at the grassroots and territorial levels.
Deepening Grassroots Movements
In late 2023, Waverley Street Foundation and Agroecology Fund partnered to support collaborative research and advocacy among agroecology and climate justice networks and, through them, among farmers, scientists (biophysical and social), consumer groups, and policymakers, to explore how to strengthen an enabling policy environment to scale up agroecology as a climate solution. This $16M investment shifts major funding into grassroots and climate advocacy collaboratives.
This partnership builds on learnings and momentum from an eight country Latin American and Caribbean participatory action research initiative supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre. The resources provided by the Waverley Street Foundation initiative deepen the Agroecology Fund’s capacity for decentralized, trust-based grantmaking and extends the participatory action research methodology to Agroecology Fund partners in Asia (India and Indonesia), Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa), Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and USA) and Europe (France), building on successes and momentum.
Certainly, a burning question we all ask ourselves in these times of crises is how do we design and implement public policies for truly climate resilient food systems? This initiative is unprecedented in its size, scope and methodology. The iterated process of participatory action research and advocacy will also contribute to strengthening the agency of civil society in food systems governance and can catalyze transformative shifts in public budgets.
A Call for Support
The Agroecology Fund continues to strengthen relationships among a diverse pool of funders to respond to the creativity and needs of agroecology movements. The recent spike in interest and investment from major philanthropies is immensely hopeful, as is the deepening collaboration with other public and private investors.
The world sits in a precarious place, and deepening investments in grassroots movements that build truly just and sustainable food systems is essential. We call on the greater climate philanthropy community to seize this moment and dramatically increase funding of grassroots movements whose work is rooted in research and learning processes that result in effective solutions for local contexts. Without funding frontline communities, we fear that our efforts to build climate-resilient food systems will be thwarted.
Mahila Jagat Lihaaz Samiti (MAJLIS) with tribal families. Madhya Pradesh, India. Photo Credit: Sayali Dongare
Agroecology Fund grantees, staff, and allies recently participated in an inspiring agroecology gathering in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. This “Cultivating Change” conference, co-organized by Global Alliance for the Future of Food, Biovision Foundation, and the Agroecology Coalition, featured East Africa governments and civil society organizations (CSOs) presenting their emerging agroecology plans, with aspirations to muster public and private financing to support implementation. CSOs and researchers spoke to the urgency and possibility of transitioning food systems damaged by Green Revolution agricultural practices and policies. Colleagues from India – some representing the renowned Andhra Pradesh state program on Community-Managed Natural Farming and others affiliated with the Bharat Agroecology Fund – shared the powerful Indian experience with advancing agroecology.
Key takeaways from the gathering:
Planning in partnership is essential. Public leadership is essential for a sustainable food systems transition. Governments should be applauded for crafting national agroecology plans in partnership with NGOs and CSOs. However, professional NGOs may be different from community-based CSOs, and therefore, extra effort may be needed to ensure deep partnerships with civil society organizations, especially farmer organizations. At the end of the day, the plans must be meaningful to their farms, their diets, their livelihoods, and their rights. Fraught with power imbalances and political realities, it is not easy to get all actors in a room to imagine and plan for a more just and sustainable food future. The Tanzanian gathering demonstrated the possibilities for inclusive planning, but there is still much to learn about how governments and CSOs can work hand in hand to include all perspectives – youth, Indigenous People, women, and more. National agroecology planning is an opportunity for farmer organizations to advocate and hold local and national governments accountable.
National agroecology plans need implementation and accountability mechanisms. Plan implementation responsibilities must be shared among CSOs and governments. Within plan frameworks, farmer organizations must be perceived as critical implementation partners – and receive public funding for their critical work. At the same time, an agroecology plan must be dynamic and transparent, adjusting to community aspirations and methods. There must exist ongoing consultation spaces in which civil society can engage with governments to evaluate how plans are progressing and suggest course corrections. Agricultural budgets must be transparent, including the budgets for perverse subsidies that can undermine agroecology plans. Strengthening the international community for agroecology may be a helpful complement to ensure national transparency and accountability. Tanzania and Uganda are both members of the Agroecology Coalition. Through the Agroecology Coalition’s tracking finance tool, countries can assess their agroecology programs and make transparent their agroecology investments.
Financing agroecological transitions requires new funds and repurposing existing subsidies. At the conference, we didn’t get a full picture of how much each government currently allocates to subsidies for Green Revolution approaches. The sum and impact are substantial. It is essential to look at the overall agricultural budget to discover where funds that are currently misallocated towards unsustainable practices can be repurposed for agroecology. If these subsidies are not redirected, they will render agroecology plans symbolic, never maturing beyond pilot programs. The donors currently underwriting Green Revolution subsidies, especially the development banks, must be encouraged to repurpose their investments. Governments may respond positively when development banks shift their incentives.
Effective allocation of agroecology monies requires flows to governments and CSOs. Unlike Green Revolution approaches, which centralize research and extension in an Agricultural Ministry and within the private sector for sales of fertilizers, seeds, and pesticides, agroecology uses a very different approach. The core requirement to scale agroecology is horizontal, through representative farmer associations and networks. Co-creation with farmers sits at the center. Since most bilateral and multilateral funds flow through governments, it is essential that they build strong partnerships with farmer associations, organizations, and networks to implement priorities. Farmer organizations require funding to conduct their participatory research on appropriate bio-inputs, to develop small enterprises to process local foods, and to carry out farmer-to-farmer extension grounded in cultural norms. Therefore, governments must perceive donors’ direct support to these civil society organizations as a critical component of financing a national agroecology plan.
Agroecology planning must take place at national, municipal and regional governments to be effective. A national agroecology framework is essential. But since agroecology is at its core about territoriality and the ecological and cultural diversity within, implementation of programs and spending priorities must be centered in local governments. Importantly, it is with these local governments that civil society organizations have the most day-to-day contact and with whom they can have the most advocacy influence. As Kenya is demonstrating, agroecology plans shouldn’t only be national but municipal and regional as well.
A human rights frame must inform agroecology planning. Agroecology is not only a set of agricultural practices but a holistic approach to a sustainable and equitable food system. Safeguarding rights to natural resources, such as land and water, is an essential part of agroecology and advances national food sovereignty, community rights, and stewardship. Agroecology plans must include rights dimensions for all, particularly for youth, women, and Indigenous Peoples.
Track agroecology progress through appropriate metrics. With climate financing emerging as a possibility to underwrite an agroecological transition, metrics require evidence of carbon capture. It is necessary to inquire: Evidence by whom, for whom? It has been amply demonstrated that healthy soils capture carbon. Likewise, research shows that soils are healthier with polycultures rather than monocultures. Rather than agroecology plans requiring that farmers produce hard-to-obtain data on carbon capture gathered by third-party consulting firms, farmers’ own proxies can provide sufficient evidence. These must be accepted data points to track progress on agroecology plans. Nations can also show carbon capture through soil rejuvenation in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC – United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and as part of Nature Based Solutions (NBS) strategies.
Donors are essential and must respond to community-led solutions. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food’s Report, Cultivating Change, “estimates annual transition costs (to agroecology and regenerative approaches) to be USD 250 to 430 billion, which is notably less than current agricultural subsidies”. In the face of this considerable financing gap, contributions from donors and investors are critical complements to tax revenues and other national mechanisms to finance the agroecological transition. Donors were warmly welcomed at the Arusha gathering to gain a better understanding of where their funds are most needed. At the same time, we know that donor-driven initiatives are not sustainable in the long term. Donors’ most important job is to listen and respond generously to community-led solutions.
The Cultivating Change conference was a landmark event to accelerate agroecology planning and implementation while backing it up with finance. Governments, NGOs, CSOs, and donors of various stripes came together to explore how to advance an agroecological transformation. It was an excellent learning lab for how to support a very challenging process. Let’s continue to reflect on the lessons from this illuminating gathering to deepen support for inclusive agroecology planning across the globe.
Nancy Mugimba, National Coordinator of grantee partner Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers’ Forum Uganda (ESAFF Uganda). Photo Credit: Benson Eliamani
Spin the globe to find a biocultural diversity hotspot where public policies for agroecology are accelerating, where social movements are powerful actors, where cooperatives drive an agroecology economy, and which is ground zero for global climate deliberations. You know where you are – Brazil!
In February 2024, Agroecology Fund and a small group of donor partners headed to Brazil in the days leading up to Carnaval. We feasted on the diversity (three distinct biomes over the course of two weeks!), grassroots innovation, and an infectious sense of hope even as vast stretches of eucalyptus, cattle pastures, and coffee monocultures reminded us of the dimensions of needed change. Please read on to get a taste of the work of our partners as well as our proposed actions to deepen support for food systems transformation in Brazil.
Key Takeaways from the trip
Brazil’s powerful civil society networks for climate justice, biodiversity protection, Indigenous land rights and agroecology, are transforming food systems.
National cooperative networks of farmers, such as COOPCERRADO, are strengthening a solidarity economy.
Biodiverse, forest-based economies that regenerate instead of deforest, are not only possible, but are thriving and demonstrating that Brazil’s agricultural economy can be sustainable, with viable alternatives to soy beans and cattle.
The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST from Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) is spearheading not only a massive agroecological and agroforestry economy but innovating to finance these endeavors and connect urban consumers with healthy food (while fighting land inequalities, racism, hunger and illiteracy!).
Creative blending of diverse financing that matches the business cycles of the cooperatives increases business success.
Agroecology rests on constant experimentation – Brazil’s agroecology schools demonstrate how co-creation can happen. Farmers are generating solutions based on local knowledge of ecosystems and practices, with a helping hand from technical experts and researchers.
COP 30 in Belem looks to be a watershed moment to link food systems and climate, with grassroots movements coalescing around a Peoples’ COP feeding thousands with agroecologically-grown food.
Brazil’s agroecology movement, grounded in sophisticated cooperatives, is worthy of our support!
Read on to be transported to the diverse and abundant landscapes of Brazil and to be introduced to many Agroecology Fund grantee partners and the inspiring work they do to create a just, climate-resilient, and sustainable world.
Floating Up the Rio Negro
The immersion into Brazil began along the Rio Negro in Manaus. We took part in a gathering organized by the Agroecology Fund’s dear friend, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, which took 65 donors upriver on a deep dive into Amazonian culture, ecosystems and politics. We were quickly introduced to the vastness of the waterscape, where we found ourselves scratching our heads about how the river could possibly reach the high water mark on trees four meters above the level at which we floated. Two Indigenous communities welcomed us (Mura Tukumã and Comunidade Três Unidos, home of the Kambeba people), narrating their stories of reclaiming language and culture – including ancestral agroecological practices – after having been colonized, displaced and dispersed. Surprisingly, 75% of the Amazon’s population (spread across 9 states) now lives in cities. Manaus, where we spent some days with the Global Alliance, has been expanding since the late 19th century rubber boom, which included the construction of a replica of a European-style opera house. In 1967, it became home to a free trade zone, which attracts migrating workers to search for employment and from where manufactured motorcycles and electronics are exported.
Visit to Mura Tukumã Indigenous CommunityManaus Opera House
A speaker from the Podaali Fund, the grantmaking arm of the Indigenous Amazonian network, Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), described how their inclusive and participatory fund supports frontline communities across the Amazon in their defense of territory, biodiversity and culture. The bioeconomy they seed regenerates rather than extracts – an essential alternative to the deforestation trap of Brazilian cattle and soy exports. We learned how a network of Brazilian foundations – Ibirapitanga, Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), and their international ally, Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), are supporting Brazilian civil society organizations organizing towards a people-centered Climate Conference of Parties (COP 30), to be held in the city of Belém in November 2025. Brazil’s powerful civil society networks for climate justice, biodiversity protection, Indigenous land rights and agroecology aspire to make the Belém deliberations a very different, democratic space than the restricted exclusivity that has characterized the recent COPs in Egypt and the UAE. If logistical hurdles can be overcome – and the barges exporting soy from a deforested Amazon can be redeployed to carry healthy, climate-friendly food – a network of allies may even be able to serve up agroecology-produced food for tens to thousands of COP participants. Imagine a food system that restores rather than degrades the Amazon!
The Mother of South America’s Water – The Cerrado (Savanna)
To the Amazon’s south stretches thousands of kilometers of Cerrado, another critical Brazilian ecosystem with immense biodiversity and hydrological treasures, experiencing levels of deforestation even higher than the Amazon. While the world’s eyes are fixed on stopping the deforestation of the Amazon, the Cerrado continues to be pillaged for cattle, mining, and monocultures.
The Cerrado, Angela Cordeiro, Agroecology Fund Co-Director, said, “is understood as the “mother” or birthplace of many South American major rivers, and inextricably linked to the health of the Amazon forest. They feed one another.“
In Brasilia, the country’s modern capital in the Cerrado’s heartland, we visited the offices of União Nacional das Cooperativas de Agricultura Familiar e Economia Solidária [National Federation of Family Farming and Solidarity Economy Cooperatives] (UNICAFES). UNICAFES is a national network of 462 cooperatives composed of 255,000 farmers from 20 states, united in strengthening a solidarity economy. The farmers are taking back a cooperative model hijacked by corporate farmers who commandeer most of the government subsidies. UNICAFES is focused on local governance, solidarity, women’s leadership, and ethnic diversity. They work with varied supply chains – oils, meat, fruit, flowers – through: 1) school lunch programs, 2) local markets, and 3) federal government food purchase programs. About 70% of the foods they source are grown on farms transitioning to agroecology.
Jen Astone, Agroecology Fund Consultant on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, observed, “the size, depth and commitment of the organization to the solidarity economy and cooperatives is exceptional. UNICAFES works with grants, guarantee funds, and low cost credit. They are able to build a national credit model based on pilot grant funding.”
Immersed in absorbing conversations, we looked up at the clock and hurried to the bus terminal to reach Goiania, about 4 hours south. There, we met with Cooperativa Mista de Agricultores Familiares, Extrativistas, Pescadores, Vazanteiros, Assentados e Guias Turísticos do Cerrado [Cooperative of Family Farmers, Collectors, Fishermen, Riverine, land reform settlers and Tourist Guides of the Cerrado] (COOPCERRADO) and its technical arm Centro de Desenvolvimento Agroecológico do Cerrado [Center for Agroecological Development of the Cerrado] (CEDAC). Donning masks and booties, we toured their processing facility and observed where the baru nut is sorted, roasted, and packaged. Baru is a neglected and nutritious wild-harvested nut quickly gaining markets. Outside the small factory sat 15 brand new still-wrapped micro-tractors soon to be distributed to Indigenous communities to reduce the labor burden of the nut harvest.
COOPCERRADO Processing Facility
The Cerrado represents 36% of Brazil’s land, home to 80 Indigenous groups, 44 Quilombola communities (Afro-Brazilian settlements), and 25 million people. CEDAC describes their work as advancing “agrosociobiodiversity.” COOPCERRADO members work with a mind-boggling 273 species – of which 73 are native forest species – produced across a diversity of communities. COOPCERRADO itself sells 108 products to local, regional, and international markets. Their work contributes evidence that extractive agriculture is not inevitable; Brazil can increase its GDP by supporting a forest-based economy, leaving forests intact and rehabilitating degraded land.
Creative and Inclusive Markets
Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) – a peer-managed process that replaces onerous and exclusive 3rd party certification schemes and is recognized by the Brazilian government – is essential to cooperatives’ success. “Sociobio” is one of the new certification seals launched by Coopcerrado’s women farmers. Agroecology Fund’s grant to COOPCERRADO was partially used to capitalize a guarantee fund. The cooperative has recently received a loan from Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDS) to further their growth. The Pequi fruit plant (Caryocar brasiliense), a superfood, is quickly becoming an important product line.
“COOPCERRADO is not only focused on profitability, we are focused on paying farmers well and getting food to vulnerable populations.”
Alessandra Silva, CEDAC
As we closed a long day together, Jen Astone appreciated our hosts, “You support a powerful and sustainable forest economy based on seeds, pigments, medicines and other value-added products. It builds on and reinforces the biodiversity of the Cerrado.”
Rewilding with CEDAC and COOPCERRADO
The Canaan Settlement, a few hours drive from COOPCERRADO’s processing facility, grows a mosaic of green banana, manioc, hibiscus, maize and vegetables, where a eucalyptus plantation had stood. For many years, over 700 families camped here, occupying this land to claim rights through a process to force compliance with the Brazilian Agrarian Reform legislation and the Constitution. The post-dictatorship Constitution recognizes those who occupy unproductive land as rightful owners. With the support of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST from Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), the government agreed to settle 64 families, each now working 9-hectare plots. “We suffered a lot for a better future for our children and ourselves,” Andrea, from one of the families, told us. “We are survivors.”
Intercropped and mulched, Andrea’s nine hectares included a food forest (part of the MST’s national tree planting program described in the next section) devoted to natural regeneration, a government requirement for all farms. Practicing agroforestry with chickens and pigs, she produces enough in her fields to cover most of what her family needs. She sells surplus to a community-supported agriculture program in nearby Brasilia and markets organic certified sesame and hibiscus through Coopcerrado. With her sales, she has built and furnished an eco-house.
“I feel rich in nature,” Andrea said, noting that snakes, and birds have returned. “Go ahead,” she says to banana-stealing monkeys, “We all need to eat.” Bird droppings have spread local Cerrado tree species across the regenerating landscape. From eucalyptus to diversity in five years! “The forest grows faster with agroecology,” Andrea observed.
100 Million Trees, Cooperatives and the Landless Workers Movement (MST)
Returning from Goiania with CEDAC and COOPCERRADO, we visited the national offices of MST in Brasilia to meet with the MST’s tree planting program and FINAPOP teams. FINAPOP is the MST’s financing mechanism and is an acronym for (Financiamento Popular) Peoples Financing for Healthy Foods. The MST is unapologetically anti-patriarchal, anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ, evident in the number of female leaders in the room (all) and rainbow flags.
In 2020, the MST launched the National Program “Planting Trees, Producing Healthy Food” with a 100 million tree goal by 2030. Since then, 25 million trees have been planted and 15,000 hectares restored.
Tree nurseries and seed collection systems bring biodiversity and income to farmers. Satellite imagery shows evidence of land restoration of lands before and after the land reform settlements, where the tree cultivation occurs. Agroforestry led by youth is their secret sauce.
“We don’t do reforestation, we do biodiversity.” Reforestation in Brazilian Portuguese is too often associated with monoculture tree plantations. “Our program is slower and follows the rhythms of nature,” a member of the community said.
The 100 Million Trees program was launched during the pandemic and combines healthy food production and natural resource restoration to protect soil, water, biodiversity and contribute to a better climate. The program stood out to us for three reasons: 1) a commitment to community-based approaches to agroforestry focused on local species for food and income, 2) an emphasis on going slow in order to go deep and thoughtfully, and 3) an accumulating evidence base that demonstrates impact.
Resources are a challenge; Brazil’s non-Amazonian biomes are too often overlooked in forest ecosystem restoration, just as donors also often overlook social movements like MST as implementers, and instead fund NGOs for narrower reforestation projects.
Crowd-funding Finance for Agroecological Cooperatives – FINAPOP
MST has multiple programs that finance farmers transitioning to agroecology. FINAPOP finances cooperatives in land reform areas in Brazil. It was created in 2021 in response to worsening food security brought on by the pandemic. FINAPOP has loaned $11.5 million USD to 25,000 families. MST has raised $4M in loan guarantees and $2 million for working capital to deal with the fact that commercial interest rates can be as high as 12-13% per month. They helped form 160 cooperatives among settled families in 24 of 26 Brazilian states. Cooperative development has been a key element of MST strategy since its creation. FINAPOP was formed to support them. Through a crowd-funding campaign, thousands of Brazilians are now shareholders in FINAPOP, investing their savings in a citizens’ groundswell for agroecology.
Meeting with FINAPOP
“We address the fact that of a $4 espresso in Chicago, the family that grows the coffee beans earns .05 cents from that cup. But we need direct loans with a minimum of $100,000 with 2% return, grace period of 2 years, repayment in 5 years. Our commitment is to return to investors 100% of capital.” Plans are underway to work with the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDS) to secure loans, guarantees and credit lines.
We drew inspiration from FINAPOP due to its sophisticated approach to providing appropriate capital to cooperatives in the MST network and the ability to underwrite costs of their loan team through their operations. The focus on strengthening MST communities’ ability to collectively organize agroecological production, processing and manage marketing risks was impressive. The creative blending of diverse financing for seed capital, working capital, and infrastructure investments matches the business cycles of the cooperatives and increases business success. The cooperatives – primarily rural – are urban facing as well. MST-operated stores sell agricultural products grown by the cooperatives as well as movement swag. It was inspiring to get a glimpse of a relatively rare phenomenon – an urban middle class supporting and investing in the growth of an agroecology movement.
Listening to details about coffee intercropping at MST’s Egidio Brunetto Agroecology School
An Agroecology School – 8000 visitors!
We flew east to Bahia on the southern coast of the Atlantic Rainforest. It was the first point of contact for the Portuguese colonizers and from which they mercilessly stripped the area of all the wood. Centuries later, local biodiversity is only slowly recovering within a landscape dominated by eucalyptus and coffee monocultures.
A central question MST cooperatives face is: How do we rebuild productive food systems with so few native trees still standing? “We used agroecology to answer this question. We managed the soil to reduce its acidity and planted more than 10,000 trees to guarantee food sovereignty and generate income,” said a member of the community.
Agroecology School Landscape
At the Egidio Brunetto Agroecology School, which is well networked with La Via Campesina’s agroecology schools worldwide, we visited test plots of local varieties of coffee interspersed with native fruit trees. As a research site, the Brunetto school collaborates with universities on research and teaching activities. The land where the school sits had been degraded for decades by a small number of agro companies. The restoration has been slow and steady since the MST forced the government to repurpose the land for social use.
“We are overcoming farmers’ desire to clear the land of native trees by encouraging the idea of intercropping with vegetables, coffee and other edible plants,” shared a school coordinator.
Next to a commercial milking operation, pastures are divided for sustainable cattle grazing. The school is affiliated with the MST’s national 100 Million Tree Campaign. Land reform cooperatives form the foundation of the school, through which producers conduct experiments on crop varieties and management practices.
Local Coffee Variety
The school serves a commercial purpose as well, jointly branding products with barcodes, cooperative identity, and an official state stamp signifying family farm production excluded from state taxes. School children learn about agrotoxins and agroecology from a textbook on agroecology. Every local school in this region has visited this center since the Landless Movement settled here. 8,000 people overall, including many government officials. “We don’t say this is the MST school; this is the school of the people,” said a community member.
It’s important to situate the school and its ecological efforts in the context of gaining land for agrarian use for displaced and landless workers, some with and some without a background in food and farming. The MST’s power as a social movement is reflected in the way in which the school is a center of political education and with a target of combating illiteracy using popular education methodology adapted from Cuba. In everything they do, they uplift local capacities, apply peer-to-peer training techniques, and build leadership.
A Giant Pao Tree, Ecotourism & Agroecology
A slender crooked crag – described as a “neck” – climbed high above the cooperative settlement we visited just outside of Itamaraju. The peak pierced a low mist. We were invited by the 51 families living there for a breakfast of coffee and teeming plates of steamed root crops. Besides a few broken window panes, the abandoned plantation house of the previous single owner is still intact and now occupied by a bat colony. The farm had produced cacao until disease ravaged the crop. After a lengthy land struggle, the territory– a vast swath of jungle, rocky clearings, and streams – has passed into the hands of the cooperative.
In community near Itamaraju, home of the giant Pau tree
The community is united by a commitment to live in harmony with nature and derive their livelihoods from agroecology – in this case forest-based – and ecotourism. A treasure hidden deep in the jungle is a first growth Pau Brasil tree (Paubrasilia echinata) the iconic tree from which the country derives its name, over 600 years old. “We want to live from the forest and create a farm hotel for ecotourism,” said a community member. While not yet on Tripadvisor, we committed to share their need with potential investors to help find accessible investment for what appears to be a promising rural enterprise.
Abundant Coffee, Pepper and Sorbet at the Milton Santos Settlement
In an open-air hangar wrapped in a cloth wall billowing in the wind, a cooperative of farmers – part of the MST’s base – shared a “mistica” with us, a cultural ritual of welcome. At our feet was a giant sand drawing. Paths marked with seeds, fruits, branches and nuts, twisted across what was a sort of map and told the story of their persistent advocacy for the land. With 138 families, a million coffee plants and a rich diversity of complementary crops, the area is known for its robust food production. In our opinion, it should also be known for its extraordinary cuisine; the dessert served to us in a school classroom was a creamy sorbet made from native fruits thawing and melting on the tongue.
Milton Santos Settlement, Coffee Farmer Family and Neighbors
We toured several affiliated farms. A handful of enterprising families own tractors. A coffee grower spoke to us about his transition to agroecology to lower input costs and avoid the pesticides that made him sick. With wood stakes expensive and a contributor to deforestation, a pepper grower used the gliricidia tree (Gliricidia sepium) to train his climbing pepper vines. His family eats about 50% of their diversified production, although labor shortages make harvests a challenge. He and his neighbors have found accessible territorial markets for their produce, including direct sales to the government’s school feeding program. Under a shade structure protecting an above-ground recirculating water tank, we learned about a tilapia fish farm project financed by the Bahia state government. The team that manages it is trying to figure out how to overcome high feeding costs and disease; they’ve suffered a massive fish die-off. Generally speaking, except for the technical and organizational challenges of the government-initiated fish tank, we noted much agency and entrepreneurship among the farmers operating farm-based businesses.
Milton Santos Farmer with Pepper Plant
In fact, we were struck by the way that entire families work and play together, from the teenagers who created the “mistica”, to inter-generational coffee production to the way that the kids joined us for the farm tour. Certainly MST cooperatives suffer from the overall trend of rural to urban outmigration, but here we could witness that rural life held allure for at least some young people.
The Opposite of Technology Transfer – NGO Cooperation with Indigenous Communities
Agroecology rests on constant experimentation – in a process known as co-creation, farmers generate solutions based on local knowledge of ecosystems and practices, with a helping hand from technical experts and researchers. Green Revolution solutions have a different logic and method – hooking farmers on proprietary off-the-shelf agro-inputs. The term “agricultural extension” is often conflated with technology transfer, solutions transferred from the north to the south, from the west to the east. So it was refreshing to meet a technical assistance NGO that subscribes to a popular education technical assistance methodology with farmers at the center. And contracted by the Bahia state government for its services no less! Imagine if extensionists responded to community interests rather than peddled chemicals.
At the offices of Terra Viva, one of the oldest NGOs promoting agroforestry in Brazil, we met Pedro, an elder farmer of the organization and one of its co-founders. The organization, he described, was founded in resistance to agribusinesses expanding across the landscape, specifically the eucalyptus plantations for cellulose harvest. “We are survivors of agribusiness,” he said. He and the team were moved by our willingness to travel so far to learn about their work.
Visit to Terra Viva Offices with farmer leader Pedro in foreground
Terra Viva is a farmer-led and run organization (codified in their governance guidelines) with more than 1080 participating families in eight cities. Terra Viva has supported communities—Indigenous (Pataxó people), smallholders and Quilombola communities—to use natural bio-inputs and to sell harvests to local schools, which are required to source a portion of their food from local agroecological producers. The state contract with which they work also requires that they hire at least 30% women – although in their case they were already committed to mixed, representative leadership and overcoming what they called “sexist patriarchy.”
The Terra Viva team took us to two Pataxó communities bordering a large national park. The Park, Monte Pascoal, was created in 1961 and overlaps with Pataxó territory. When the park was declared, it did not take into account that the Indigenous peoples had been there for hundreds of years. So, while once traditional Pataxó territory at one time, layers of rules now restrict the Pataxó’s access to the natural resources on which they depend. Advocacy for land rights is dangerous; a Pataxó female leader had been assassinated two weeks before our visit 172 km north, in another location where the Pataxó people are fighting to defend their territory from land grabs.
The water crisis in the second Pataxó community we visited was acute. Droughts have hit the area hard. The communities’ autonomy is eroded by needing water trucks to supply them, a perverse solution after having their rich territory taken from them.
Pataxó Community Members
Under a round ceremonial community meeting space, we were honored to attend a community meeting between Tierra Viva and the Pataxó community.
In ceremonial regalia, a leader shared, “they are killing us with land grabs…but they can’t kill everyone. We want autonomy. We need to start cultivating and protect our water so our community can grow.”
He described how they were expelled in 1944 and returned in 1999 with 64 families. A Pataxó woman shared a powerful testimony and concluded, “We have been here insisting and resisting for more than 500 years, and we will continue to do so.”
The group with members of the Pataxó community
Terra Viva staff was seeking to enroll Pataxó food producers in a state program that they manage with state resources. We could feel both the community’s skepticism about the public farm extension program as well as the honest relationship between Terra Viva and the community. “Our biggest challenge,” a community member shared, “is to get recognition for our territory. We eat poisoned food. They want to destroy us.” They described their need for a tractor to the Terra Viva technical staff, “We need help to break the ground. To plant and to eat good fried manioc.”
They then took us to their community-owned and operated manioc mill, which they seek to scale up to increase both food and revenue. Manioc is a staple food in Brazil and cassava flour is critical to the Indigenous peoples’ diet and economy. Next to the grinding mill, community members roasted and dried the flour. Billowing smoke tumbled to the edges of the rustic shelter’s roof and dissipated towards the clouds. Each of us took turns pushing a long wooden rake to spread the manioc over a giant flat skillet suspended over licking flames. They expressed gratitude for our visit and solidarity, “Be ready to shout for us,” a community member entreated before we hugged and climbed into our air-conditioned van.
Manioc Mill, Pataxó communityManioc Mill, Pataxó community
Future Actions For Ongoing Support and Solidarity
Where do we go from here? Brazil, as mentioned, is at the center of innovation in the bioeconomy – a term now gaining traction in the donor community, although we learned is eyed skeptically by social movements – perceived as a slippery ingredient of greenwashing.
Brazilian social movements offer so many rich and timely opportunities to strengthen truly localized and climate-friendly food systems that protect vital ecosystems and the rights of smallholders and Indigenous Peoples. Our partners were bold; they inquired: Are you able to help us muster the necessary resources to drive this work forward? We feel both inspired and obligated to follow up and want to extend an invitation to you to join us.
Here are some actions we will pursue in the short and medium term
Continue to provide grant support to leading cooperatives and cooperative federations that strengthen Brazil’s agroecology bioeconomy, with an eye towards funding initiatives across Brazil’s critical biomes and across key constituencies – Indigenous, Afro-descendents and Smallholders.
Connect cooperatives with impact investors, including philanthropic foundations that make impact investments, to mobilize blended finance for the bioeconomy.
Continue to support learning exchanges among Brazil’s civil society movements, committed public officials and their counterparts across the globe so that experiences and lessons can be shared.
Support Brazil’s social movements’ advocacy plans for COP 30 before, during and after the 2025 meeting– in coordination with the broader global agroecology movement.
Celebrate!
We can’t close this note without a few words about Brazil’s world-renowned Carnaval, which was just getting underway as we prepared to leave. What a remarkable – and fun – capstone to our trip. It is a celebration of reckless abandon despite so much that is wrong in the world, despite family worries, despite the pall of climate change and hunger. With samba and sparkling mascara, anything is possible. The agroecology movement in Brazil is exactly this in microcosm – a celebration of an accelerating and hopeful alternative despite scars across landscapes, injustices and long odds.
MST hat spotted in the crowd at CarnavalAgroecology Fund Co-Director Daniel Moss with our interpreter, Henrique Campos Monnerat at Carnaval
Thank you for reading! Questions, comments and suggestions are most welcome at daniel.moss@agroecologyfund.org. Stay tuned for an upcoming webinar with our Brazilian partners.
This report was written by Daniel Moss, Agroecology Fund Co-Director and highlights the perspectives and stories of our partners in Brazil. Thank you to all who contributed their time and shared their perspectives.
Sri Lanka’s civil war lasted a quarter century and left the island nation in ruins. Tens of thousands were killed or displaced, vital infrastructure was destroyed, and social movements, once strong, faced enormous challenges.
In this context, how can an agroecology transition, rooted in community initiatives, be financed? Civil society organizations across the world, working in challenging contexts, are asking this same question.
An inspiring example of a way forward is the work of the Northern Cooperative Development Bank, or NCDB. In 2019, NCDB, was established with a federation of 1200 rural cooperatives that is modeled on a development bank. The need to rebuild rural livelihoods and revitalize social institutions was dire. Movement leadership was essential to lead an agroecology transition.
NCDB is fully owned by the cooperatives. The development bank arm provides “all the support necessary, whether it’s technology, marketing, or research to grow the movement,” said Dr. Ahilan Kadirgamar, sociology senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna, who helped create the bank and chairs its international advisory board. Kardirgamar spoke on a recent Agroecology Fund webinar about how to finance the agroecology transition.
This webinar, the second in the Agroecology Economies series, was attended by 399 people from 76 countries. We heard from 4 grantee partners and two allies about experiments with new credit models and innovative financial mechanisms for an inclusive economy fit for a large-scale agroecological transition while grounded in the particularities of territories.
NCDB created a revolving loan fund, and in 2023 lent $1.3M of its $1.68M fund to members of cooperatives, which range in size from dozens to thousands of farmers and fishers. NCDB also engages in joint ventures with cooperatives, such as for coconut oil milling or rice production, to minimize the risks of small industries undertaking value-added activities. NCDB leveraged state funds to purchase $720,000 of rice directly from farmers and provided financing to mill and market, repair and redeploy 13 farm vehicles, as well as to refurbish a fish meal plant.
Worldwide, smallholder farmers and cooperatives face similar challenges accessing the credit they need to improve production, develop value-added processing facilities and access markets for their products—regardless of how they farm. Often, the only credit they can access has extremely high interest rates, is tied to conventional production methods, or requires unreasonable collateral. Though NCDB’s credit system isn’t directed 100% towards farmers transitioning to agroecology, it offers an illuminating model.
Speakers from Cameroon, Benin, and Brazil also shared their approaches to providing affordable credit to farmers transitioning to agroecological production—or, as Dr. Rajeswari Raina, professor at Siv Nadar University, wisely remarked, “agroecology transition(s), because every landscape, culture, and food production system is different.”
In Cameroon, Madame Elisabeth Antagana, President of Concertation Nationale des Organisations Paysannes au Cameroun (CNOP-CAM), described a revolving loan fund to support its members. In this case, the fund operates out of one farmer cooperative and provides low-interest loans to its individual members.
CNOP-CAM
CNOP-CAM partners with the government and other NGOs on rural development, and, in 2021, began partnering with Agroecology Fund to focus on women and young farmers practicing agroecology. With a second grant in 2023, they created a revolving fund to facilitate access to credit for women farmers.
“We would like to contribute to growing [agricultural] production, building technical capacity for women and youth, and also train them on the commercialization of agroecological products,” said Elisabeth Antagana, CNOP-CAM President.
Meanwhile, the Research and Action Group for Well-Being in Benin, GRABE Benin, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainable and ecological development, helped rural women set up a self-managed savings system, or “Caisses Communautaires,” which empowers women to help one another.
GRABE-Bénin
“Rural women have a lot of challenges contributing to household expenses and usually it comes down to the lack of livelihood and challenges in accessing financing,” said Géraldine Viwaylde, of GRABE Benin.“To get a loan or a credit from microfinance institutions, you have to jump through hoops and [get] huge interest rates, and that’s very difficult for women to pay back.”
Women participating in the community fund meet weekly. They pool their resources and issue low-interest loans to one or more women who want to implement a small enterprise project, farm, or buy farming equipment.
“It allows them to farm crops that have been used for ages in the local areas and that are cheaper to produce,” noted Viwaylde.
The fund is run by a committee of seven members from different organizations. Three manage the loans and negotiate partnerships with financial institutions.
Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, or MST, has multiple programs that finance farmers transitioning to agroecology. FINAPOP finances cooperatives in land reform areas in Brazil. It was created in 2021 in response to worsening food security brought on by the pandemic. FINAPOP makes it possible for any Brazilian citizen to invest his/her savings in farmers cooperatives moving towards an agroecology transition. The aim is not just profit but, above all, to provide healthy food on a scale that is accessible to all citizens, especially those who are socially vulnerable.
“FINAPOP is the main instrument under land reform to fund organic production and strengthen the agroecology transition,” said Luis Carlos Costa, FINAPOP.
FINAPOP offers three lines of credit: capital expenditure for buying machinery or for longer-term investments to develop local industries, working capital loans for well-established cooperatives, and seed capital for cooperatives that are in their early stages.
Since its inception, FINAPOP has carried out 85 financings, totaling 59.2 million reais (~US$12 million), distributed to 53 cooperatives and associations and agrarian reform settlements, reaching 25,000 people across the country.
The Agrarian Reform Association of Parana State, ACAP-PR, another MST affiliate, joined other civil society organizations to educate elected Deputies to promote agroecology. In June 2023, the State Assembly of Deputies created the Parliamentary Coalition for Agroecology and Solidarity Economy. This group has approved 30 million reais (~6 million dollars) to the 2024 State Budget to support an agroecology transition.
Paraná laws require school lunch programs to procure food grown by family farmers using agroecological production methods. By 2030, 100% of the food provided by 2,000 municipal and state-run schools must use agroecological food, preferentially from family farmers. Despite that mandate, many school lunch programs in Paraná, and especially those in smaller municipalities, are not able to procure agroecologically-produced food.
ACAP-PR
“Production is still conventional,” in the smaller municipalities, explained Marcos Pereira, of ACAP-PR. “We have to do awareness building with the rank-and-file farmers, capacity building, and training to scale agroecological production. It is a long process.”
Other speakers discussed challenges they’ve faced and how they’re overcoming them. Several spoke about climate change.
“We have losses of crops because of climate change,” said Costa from FINAPOP. “In Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil, there is a serious crisis with flooding in the entire state, and many cooperatives have lost their areas and their structures. We need a fund that can cover these moments of crisis and losses.”
In Cameroon, “The demand is very high. There’s a need to mobilize more resources to scale the project,” said Antagana. CNOP-CAM also wants to expand its financial training so that more women can negotiate with financial institutions.
Governance is a critical concern. “It’s essential to have transparency and accountability regarding the investments from fundraising, from investors and linking them to the final product,” noted Costa.
Each program has tailored its own approach to loan monitoring and risk mitigation. Kardirgamar, for example, said that due to NCDB’s ability to restructure loans, “non-performing loans are near zero.”
However, building a “culture of cooperativism” presents challenges, said Costa. Kardirgamar agreed, noting that cooperative rebuilding and reconstruction take precedence in Sri Lanka. “When we’re thinking about this agroecological transition, you have to first stabilize the farmers. Otherwise, it’s very unfair to ask them to take more risks.”
Ultimately, “strong and committed policy reform and high levels of public budgets [for] agroecological transitions” are necessary. That, and a redefining of finance and capital,” Dr. Raina said. “It’s not about ‘getting returns on investment’ but about ‘sharing and caring for natural and social systems.” She also highlighted the importance of testing and practicing decentralized systems and the need to combine scales, from the micro to medium to macro level.
Inisiatif Rizab Benih Komuniti (IRBK), which translates to “Community Seed Reserve Initiative”, is a seed-saving project of the Malaysian Food Security and Sovereignty Forum (FKMM), a discussion and action platform to strengthen food security and food sovereignty in Malaysia that is partially funded with support from Agroecology Fund. The primary goals of this seed initiative are to raise the visibility of farmers’ seed systems, to encourage the spirit and practice of saving, processing, sharing and exchanging seeds between farmers, to jointly care for and conserve agrobiodiversity, especially heritage or local seeds, and to jointly strengthen farmers rights.
In addition to our annual global and regional grantmaking programs, Agroecology Fund is honored to provide support for participatory action and learning to leading organizations and networks in their territories. While shifting funding toward agroecology is our primary mission, creating space for learning, facilitating research and collaborating across geographies is also central to our work. When presented with the opportunity to support multiple grantee partners to attend FKMM’s Agroecology Conference on Community Seed Systems 2024 (AECoSS24) in Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia, we were happy to contribute resources to enable further connection and collaboration within the network. The conference is part of the IRBK work that Agroecology Fund already supports.
We followed up with both FKMM and grantee partners CREATE Trust and Seed Savers Network to learn more about their experiences at the conference—what they learned and what messages they want to amplify about the importance of community seed systems. Read each of their responses in the following Q&As to learn more about these initiatives and the important work they’re doing within their respective communities to create sustainable, just, climate-resilient food systems and the value of gathering in person to collaborate, learn, and connect.
(The following answers have been edited for brevity and clarity)
Q & A with NurFitri Amir Muhammad, project leader of IRBK, FKMM
Please share a brief introduction about your collaborative work on seed systems.
Inisiatif Rizab Benih Komuniti (IRBK), which translates to “Community Seed Reserve Initiative”, is a seed-saving project of the Food Security and Sovereignty Forum (FKMM), a discussion and action platform to strengthen food security and food sovereignty in Malaysia. FKMM was established in 2018 to advocate for farmers’ rights and policy changes toward agrobiodiversity through natural farming, permaculture, and organic agriculture. FKMM conducts theoretical and practical workshops on farmers’ rights, community seed systems, and GMOs.
IRBK was launched in 2020 with the support of the Agroecology Fund to help create a seed inventory with rural seed guardians and offer an alternative to the formal (commercial) seed system. The formal seed system supports seed patents, which ultimately work against farmers and undermine agrobiodiversity. Our work to develop and maintain a seed reserve strengthens farmers’ rights and supports a more biodiverse, climate-resilient food system.
Why did FKMM decide to organize this Conference? What were some of the highlights that stood out?
On April 26, Inisiatif Rizab Benih Komuniti and FKMM co-organized an Agroecology Conference on Community Seed Systems 2024 (AECoSS24) in Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia, in conjunction with the annual International Seed Day. This event was created to be a platform where farmers from all over the world could convene to discuss strategic action focusing on food security and sovereignty, farmers’ rights, and seed rights. FKMM invited farmers and organizers from across Malaysia, many of whom are Agroecology Fund partners, including Serikat Petani Indonesia (Indonesia), Consumer Research Education Awareness Training and Empowerment (India), Seed Savers Network (Kenya), Nous Somme la Solution (Senegal), Rural Women Farmers Association of Ghana (Ghana, member of NSS), and MASIPAG (Philippines). A total of 200 individuals with more than 20 speakers representing 15 countries from Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America gathered for the event. The primary goal of the gathering was to bring together people from around the world to begin to illustrate the significance their practices hold for local and small-scale farming, the critical role they play in contributing to seed security for resource-constrained households, and for supporting biodiversity. The conference intends to build on its initial success to continue to raise awareness of the importance of community seed systems with an eye toward influencing government policies.
What were the key learnings you received from the gathering? How are you thinking about them in the context of your work?
Key Learnings:
Community and farmer seed systems promote partnerships and fairness through the co-creation of knowledge, citizen science, connectivity, and social and cultural values.
Community seed systems promote genetic conservation and create opportunities for economic diversification.
Gathering in person promotes learning and facilitates connections that empower communities.
These key learnings mirror what FKMM considers to be a crucial embodiment of agroecology and are essential for advancing a just transition toward a resilient food system—community, connection, and co-creation. We see the value of holding these types of conferences to bolster the strength and power of farmer collectives.
What message do you want to share about community seed systems and the role they play in food sovereignty?
FKMM believes that recognizing the interaction and complementarity between formal commercial seed systems and community seed systems can lead to a more inclusive and sustainable system. So we urge all stakeholders to recognize and protect farmers’ rights to seeds, which include the protection of traditional knowledge, equitable benefit sharing, and participation in decision-making. These socio-cultural components need to be recognized and protected by international agreements like the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP). FKMM is committed to promoting the community system and advocating for farmers’ rights because we believe this is crucial for sustainable agriculture and food security.
Additional stories about FKMM’s work can be read here and here.
Please share a brief introduction about your collaborative work on seed systems.
CREATE Trust is working on the revival of traditional rice paddy varieties in Tamil Nadu and at the national level. The work focuses on three primary areas in building seed systems: mapping of native paddy seeds in different agroecological regions, conservation and experimentation, and exchange of seeds with farmers. We organize training and capacity-building programs on quality seed production to help maintain genetic purity. We strengthen the community seed system by organizing annual seed festivals and seed fairs to create awareness and showcase diversity. As of now, we have revived and conserved more than 200 traditional paddy varieties, and they are conserved at the community level by farmers at seed banks. These varieties are experimented with by farmers under diverse climate conditions and climate variations.
What were your primary reasons for wanting to attend the seed systems conference? What were some of the highlights from your time in Malaysia?
CREATE Trust was interested in attending the conference to begin to understand the global context of how community seed systems are working across the world. We learned about so many aspects of seed systems from this gathering, including new approaches and strategies for wider outreach, challenges and opportunities farmers face, civil society collaborative actions, contributions of other stakeholders, and what strengthening farmer capacities to become self-reliant looks like globally.
What were the key learnings you received from the gathering? How are you thinking about them in the context of your work?
From the presentations and interactions with participants, panelists, and the organizers, it quickly became clear that there are many similarities in the approach to building alternate seed systems with community participation. While CREATE Trust focuses only on paddy, many others who shared their stories at the gathering are building diverse crop seed systems. It was very useful to be connected to and learn from many seed savers with great experience and knowledge. A major highlight was meeting a university professor from Malaysia with whom I could exchange information about traditional paddy varieties. We’ve already started planning to widen our focus beyond paddy thanks to the influence and information from this gathering. In the coming years, we will focus on native millet and vegetables in our working area.
What message do you want to share about community seed systems and the role they play in food sovereignty?
Farmers across the globe never consider seed as a commodity. They consider seeds to be a community resource, and to nurture that tradition, they have historically had many cultural and ritual practices. Many of these practices have been neglected with the advent of the Green Revolution. In the context of genetically engineered seeds with patent laws and its threat to genetic pollution and negative effects on agrobiodiversity, it is important that the community seed systems need to be strengthened across the world. We can’t achieve food sovereignty without seed sovereignty. Beyond community, it is essential that we establish community seed savers and system networks at National and Regional levels.
Additional stories about CREATE Trust can be read here.
Please share a brief introduction about your collaborative work on seed systems.
Our work started 14 years ago as a response to restrictive seed sector laws in Kenya that prohibited farmers from sharing, exchanging, and selling seeds. Policies pushing farmers to adopt hybrid seeds and use chemical fertilizers and pesticides have increased food insecurity and pushed small-scale farmers deeper into poverty.
In response to this, SSN has forged both local and international partnerships creating a network of more than 3 900 farmers organizations in Kenya and attracted technical and financial support from international partners like Agroecology Fund. Our grassroots activities are aimed to achieve food and seed sovereignty.
What were your primary reasons for wanting to attend the seed systems conference? What were some of the highlights from your time in Malaysia?
I wanted to attend the seed systems conference in Malaysia because I knew there were possibilities of learning actionable models or techniques that could be useful in advancing the SSN agenda back in Kenya. The conference offered a platform to gain insights into successful seed systems from around the world, network with other advocates, and share our experiences. The level of diversity of the participants and topics for discussion also caught my attention. I took home implementation ideas shared by people, from farmers, researchers, and the private sector. That combination of diversity is rare in Kenya because most of the research is funded by the people who want to promote green revolution technologies. This conference created a unique learning opportunity rarely available.
What were the key learnings you received from the gathering? How are you thinking about them in the context of your work?
One of the key learnings I brought back from the conference was the use of microbial treatments for seed dressing. This technique offers a sustainable alternative to chemical treatments, enhancing seed health and reducing environmental impact. Another valuable method I learned was using paper and postcards for seed sharing, which can facilitate easier and more effective seed exchange among farmers. We are now considering how these techniques can be integrated into our existing practices to improve our seed systems. There is also a regulatory requirement to treat seeds with seed dressing chemicals for protection against pest insects and diseases. We have started conducting research on the practical implementation of microorganisms for seed dressing.
What message do you want to share about community seed systems and the role they play in food sovereignty?
Community seed systems play a crucial role in achieving food sovereignty. They empower farmers to maintain control over their seeds, preserve biodiversity, and ensure the resilience of local food systems. By supporting community-based seed systems, we can enhance food security, protect the environment, and promote sustainable agricultural practices. These systems enable farmers to save, share, and exchange seeds, fostering a sense of community and resilience against external pressures such as fluctuations in seed prices and climate change. Supporting these grassroots initiatives is essential for building a sustainable and equitable food system.
The following article was published in The Star in February of 2024. You can read the original here.
In Malaysia, farmers and communities across generations have engaged in the age-old practice of preserving seeds as a means of protecting traditional agricultural heritage.
However, the practice of seed saving has slowly been fading in Malaysia over the years.
For one, intellectual property protection regulations from trade agreements may pose more constraints on traditional seed-saving practices.
The prevalence of commercial seeds, combined with a lack of awareness among farmers about the benefits of seed saving, compounds the issue. Furthermore, a dependence on imported or foreign vegetable varieties has diverted attention from preserving and utilizing locally adapted varieties.
A networking session with Kongsi Co-op, Pesawah, Idris Association, TWN and other NGOs, in conjunction with International Seed Day. Photos: Inisiatif Rizab Benih Komuniti
Addressing these challenges is pivotal in fostering agricultural resilience, preserving biodiversity and ensuring food security. It is within this context that a transformative movement is taking root in the heart of Malaysia.
Inisiatif Rizab Benih Komuniti (IRBK), which translates to “Community Seed Reserve Initiative”, is a seed-saving project under the Food Security and Sovereignty Forum (FKMM), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that works to promote seed heritage, seed sovereignty, farmers’ education and community development.
As a response to the challenges faced by traditional seed-saving practices, IRBK is actively sowing the seeds of positive change within the Malaysian agricultural landscape.
Seed-saving is important to protect traditional agricultural heritage.
In our discussion with two key members, NurFitri Amir Muhammad, 39, and Izzeady Amir, 34, we explore the grassroots initiatives of IRBK and its impact on Malaysian agriculture.
As the project leader of IRBK and a microbiology graduate, NurFitri focuses on the preservation of heritage seeds in Malaysia. His comprehensive report, “The Potential Impact of International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) 1991 on the Malaysian Seed Sector, Farmers, and Their Practices”, published in June 2023, sheds light on the farming practices impacted by intellectual property protection of seeds in Malaysia.
Izzeady acts as the field manager, advocating for climate solutions in rural landscapes. With a background in environmental science, specifically in biodiversity and conservation, Izzeady offers insights into how IRBK champions and empowers individuals to safeguard traditional seeds through formalising the informal seed system.
Q: What is IRBK and what does your organisation do?
Izzeady: Rizab Benih is a platform we started in 2021 to document our informal seed system in Malaysia. We identify and visit seed guardians and do an inventory of seeds that they keep, and we teach them how to use the online form on our website to record their inventory. We have recorded 70 seed guardians and almost 2,000 different crops and seeds over the past two years. We label the seeds and encourage people to save, share or sell seeds.
Q: What is the difference between a formal and informal seed system?
NurFitri: There are two types of seeds in the supply chain. Formal seed systems are seeds that have been produced by companies. The contract farmers produce seeds for companies, and these seeds are protected by plant breeders’ rights. Most of the seeds are protected by this law and farmers can only save and multiply these seeds for their own use in very limited conditions. They cannot share or sell the seed to others like in the past as a part of their tradition. Most farmers would obtain their seeds from these companies.
Izzeady: An informal seed system is a system where seeds are being preserved by people themselves. Seed guardians are part of these informal seed systems, and they could be home gardeners, farmers as well as community farms all over Malaysia.
Jarum Galah paddy seeds kept in a glass bottle.
Q: What is the primary goal of FKMM, the NGO that initiated Rizab Benih?
NurFitri: FKMM is a platform set up to help farmers fight for themselves. Farmers in Malaysia are not doing so well, with the exception of those with big capital. Individual farmers in villages do not have a voice to bargain.
They have to accept what is decided by the market, middleman or the consumer. You can imagine that a cucumber naturally will have variations in shape, and not all will grow straight. But the price difference (between a straight cucumber and a naturally curved cucumber) can be more than five times. We want to help farmers get a fair price for their produce.
Q: Why did you start Rizab Benih under FKMM?
NurFitri: This project was started to support FKMM’s vision of ensuring food security and sovereignty for Malaysian farmers. Instead of relying on one source of seed supply, we try to diversify the supply.
Izzeady: Having worked with many indigenous communities and villages, I found that much of the traditional knowledge regarding plants and ecosystems held by the older generation is more oral and not well documented, and we, the younger generation, are losing this kind of knowledge.
Recently, an Orang Asli from the Temiar group in Kelantan passed away and it was a great loss. He had brought me on a tour to show me all the herbs that he used to (purportedly) cure many diseases.
It’s amazing because depending on the state, different plants are used. For example, for small cuts in Perlis, they use this plant called “Kapal Terbang” but in Kelantan, they use “Selaput Tunggul”.
The IRBK committee members during a retreat at Ulu Yam.
Q: What seeds does IRBK try to preserve?
Izzeady: We record mostly edible plants, herbs for medicinal purposes, flowers and fruit trees. We try to highlight heirloom seeds, native plants and interesting varieties – for example, moringa with extra long fruit or a petola (loofah) which is more fibrous and suitable to be used for scrubbing.
Q: What are the benefits of seed saving in Malaysia?
Izzeady: The tradition of saving seeds is mostly done by those who live in changing seasons. Here in our Malaysian climate, we are evergreen and have no need to keep seeds.
That is why we are a bit behind in the seed industry because we don’t see it as a problem.
The seeds that are being sold in the farming industry are sold as a package together with pesticides and herbicides as well.
This takes away farmers’ resiliency as they will be more dependent on the system, which is not good.
The first commercial seed that we started saving was rice padi. In Malay communities, we have the “jelapang”, which refers to a small hut built next to the house where all the padi seeds are kept until the next season.
However, because most padi seeds are controlled by Bernas, you are not allowed to save the seeds or commercialise it.
Q: What is the danger in relying on the formal seed system too much?
NurFitri: Formal seed systems tend to supply seeds that are protected. A protected seed is a plant that has been given plant breeders’ rights, meaning in 20-25 years, no other person can reproduce the plant. The danger is it can undermine agrobiodiversity, with less variety planted by the farmers because those who decide what to plant are the companies, and not the farmers themselves. It will reduce biodiversity and the industry’s resilience to climate change and increase potential threat by diseases and pests.
Izzeady: In the US, there have been some cases where protected corn seeds have cross pollinated with some farmers’ own corn seeds in the open farm; and because they have the same genetics as the patented seeds, the company can claim that the farmer has stolen from them.
Q: Is the government currently encouraging farmers to seed-save and become seed producers?
NurFitri: The government currently is not encouraging farmers to save seeds because it is in the process of making seed-saving and seed-sharing more restricted with the proposed Seed Quality Bill, which obligates farmers and anybody who wants to process seeds to have a license. The amendment of the Protection of New Plant Varieties Act 2004 will give more monopoly to seed companies so that the government can join the UPOV 1991. These two laws will restrict farmers’ rights more.
Q: How would you encourage more people to become seed guardians?
Izzeady: Don’t throw away your fruit seeds; try and grow it on your own. Focus on non-hybrid seeds and preferably what is grown organically. Seeds are one of the basic necessities or foundations in farming and gardening. It is very important for us to empower our own resources for our future resiliency. On April 26, Inisiatif Rizab Benih Komuniti and FKMM will be organising an Agroecology Conference on Community Seed Systems 2024 (AECoSS24) in Bangi, Selangor, in conjunction with the annual International Seed Day. This event will be a platform to discuss strategic action focusing on food security and sovereignty, farmers’ rights and seed rights.
If you have a special variant of seed you would like to register with Benih Komuniti, find out more at www.benihkomuniti.com or follow them on Facebook.
At its roots, agroecology is about iterative, applied learning. The lessons from this learning are best shared—for practical application—by the organizations and networks that are engaged in on-the-ground science, practice, and advocacy. This commitment to collective “action-reflection-action” is what makes a movement strong.
In addition to our global and regional grant programs, The Agroecology Fund is honored to provide support for two participatory action and learning processes to leading organizations and networks in their territories. While shifting funding toward agroecology is our primary mission, creating space for learning, facilitating research, and collaborating across geographies is also central to our work.
Participatory Research for Agroecology in Latin America and the Caribbean
In April 2023 the Agroecology Fund launched the Participatory Research for Agroecology in Latin America and the Caribbean (IPA-LAC) initiative with funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). We approved grants for seven participatory research collectives in Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.
The Research Group on Agroecology at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) provides methodological support to each collective and facilitates the learning community. Each collective seeks to answer research questions relevant to local actors committed to the transition and scaling up of agroecology for the construction of resilient food systems. In addition to virtual meetings, the IPA-LAC collective holds face-to-face meetings to deepen reflection on strategic themes.
The First Meeting of the Regional Collective for Participatory Research in Agroecology in Latin America and the Caribbean, took place from July 23 to 27, 2023, in the city of Cotacachi-Ecuador, with delegates from nine countries. The Regional Collective bases its unity on the diversity of approaches, territories, dynamics and experiences. They recognize that the Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant organizations of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean have historically struggled to resist and transform food systems and join to support their processes. The Regional Collective comes together to rethink and embrace the holistic nature of agroecology, and to discuss interest in promoting agroecology as a transformative practice.
With this large investment in the Agroecology Fund, Waverley Street Foundation is demonstrating to the donor community how we can collectively invest in grassroots, movement-led food systems change at scale.
Daniel Moss, Co-Director, Agroecology Fund
This partnership, inspired by the IPA-LAC initiative model, enabled the Agroecology Fund to deepen its existing partners’ work in Asia (India and Indonesia), Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa), Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and the USA) and Europe (France), building on successes and momentum. Through participatory action research, multi-sectoral collaborations will implement, research, and strengthen advocacy strategies for food systems policies that link climate resilience, food systems, and agroecology.
Agroecology Fund reflects our commitment to climate solutions that address community resilience. We believe it is imperative to shift policy and public funding toward supporting healthy, climate-resilient food systems rooted in agroecology.
Amanda Eller, Strategy Director, Waverley Street Foundation
Over the next four years, guided by a participatory research approach, these collaboratives will pursue critical research questions and leverage data to galvanize policy changes supporting agroecology-based food systems as climate resilience strategies. The process will also contribute to strengthening the agency of civil society in food systems governance.
This article was originally published by Agroecology Fund Advisor Milka Chepkorir and Aquilas Koko Ngomo for the ICCA Consortium.
Adopting the Global Biodiversity Framework was a historic step towards social and environmental justice. The framework includes provisions for protecting environmental human rights defenders, respecting human rights, recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and recognizing their roles in and contributions to nature conservation.
However, with great concern, we note that the violations of the universal and special rights of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities have continued throughout the last year and into 2024.
Practices by many states and non-government organizations (NGOs) in Africa have continuously had Indigenous Peoples and local communities paying for the price of conservation; this is unfortunate in a world where “fortress conservation” practices, which refer to excluding Indigenous Peoples and local communities from protected areas, are claimed to be a thing of the past.
We strongly condemn the ongoing violations of rights in the name of conservation and development in Africa. It is concerning to see a continued trend of rights violations and attacks on the defenders of universal human rights and rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities resulting from the processes that should otherwise protect them
We are concerned about the situation in many territories of life in Africa and those defending them. While the international community of nations discusses sustainable development, addressing climate change, conservation of biodiversity, and general conservation strategies, we are witnessing immense disregard for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities related to lands and resources, which all these strategies target to protect. Yet, we remain hopeful and believe in the power of collective action and the willingness of African leaders and conservation organizations to make a positive change.
As we are writing this, threats, forced eviction, and killings of Indigenous Peoples and local communities have been happening in multiple countries in Africa, such as Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania, and Cameroon. Furthermore, those who defend the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities are targeted, undergo threats, and are even assassinated. These violations have severe negative impacts on Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and their lands and territories.
Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights to lands and resources and free, prior, and informed consent, among other rights, are infringed by business operators, armed groups, and governments to occupy their lands and worsen their living conditions, which are already bad enough.
Since October 2023, the Ogiek Indigenous Peoples of Kenya have been evicted from their ancestral territories in Narok County. The Ogiek are one of the hunter-gatherer Indigenous Peoples in Kenya. They live in and around the Mau Complex, their ancestral territory that has been and continues to be conserved and managed by past and current generations through their Indigenous knowledge systems.
Ensure a human rights-based approach, especially recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights to their territories during or before carbon projects come to these territories.
As a consequence of these forceful acts to remove the Ogiek from their land, many women, youth, children, and elderly Ogiek People have been exposed to many threats. Their territory has been exposed to more significant threats in the hands of those who do not have a connection to the land, like the Ogiek.
Reports indicate that these evictions are related to a carbon offsetting deal between the government of Kenya and a Dubai-based Carbon offsetting company.
Many carbon projects are starting across the world, this becomes the latest and most threatening precedent for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We call on all institutions, from the global to the national and local levels, to ensure a human rights-based approach, especially recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights to their territories during or before carbon projects come to these territories.
In the Cherangany Hills of Kenya, Kenya Forest Service guards have been continuing threats, harassment, illegal and forceful evictions, and burning down homes and villages of Sengwer Indigenous People of Embobut from their ancestral territories. The attacks and evictions escalated in May 2024 with the burning of at least 600 houses in the Embobut forest. The Sengwer Council of Elders issued a press statement On 14th May 2024, calling on the government of Kenya and foreign donor agencies to halt the violent evictions.
In DRC alone, thousands of Indigenous peoples and local communities have been killed. Others were displaced from their living areas around Virunga National Park due to armed conflicts and attacks by the M23 and ADF armed groups operating in North Kivu and Ituri provinces to exploit natural resources and conquer Indigenous Peoples’ lands by terrorizing them and forcibly displacing them from their territories of life.
The victims remain in displacement camps and surrounding villages without assistance, even though the true assistance should be to ensure their rights are respected and they return to their lands and territories where their lives fit.
In Cameroon, an Indigenous rights defender was targeted, seriously injured, his home destroyed, and his wife raped for defending an Indigenous land this year. For security reasons, we are not publishing their names.
The protection of rights defenders should be a priority for african leaders
Together with the allied organizations working to support the custodian and guardian communities of the ICCAs—territories of life, the ICCA Consortium continues to advocate for protecting Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights. States and conservation NGOs must embrace the new global biodiversity framework as an essential tool to achieve that.
More than one year has passed since the Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted. This is the second International Day for Biological Diversity after the framework was adopted. We take this occasion to highlight once again our call that Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ rights violations must stop in the name of conservation or under any other excuse.
Furthermore, advocating for equal protection of all rights holders in Africa, including Indigenous Peoples and local communities on their lands and territories, should not be criminalized. The protection of rights defenders should be a priority for African leaders.
African leaders and conservation organizations are responsible for taking a stand and prioritizing the protection of environmental human rights defenders, including those from Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
We urge local, national, and international decision-makers and law enforcement authorities to pay attention to these issues and ensure strict respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Abuse, threat, and killing of rights defenders in Africa must stop. Those defending individual and collective rights in different African countries, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, deserve complete protection from authorities under national and international laws in force.
In the Brazilian Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse tropical savanna, traditional and Indigenous communities have been harvesting a bean pod called faveira for selling into markets for decades. However, local families earned very little money for their harvests due to low yields and the low quality of their products until the 2000s, when Cerrado Agroecological Development Center (CEDAC), an agroecology association that works to strengthen traditional communities and conserve socio-biodiversity, began working with small farmers to develop sustainable management practices.
CEDAC conducted an evaluation and proposed a management plan emphasizing sustainable fruit collection, elimination of child labor, equal rights for women in establishing and setting prices, and no more land burning, said Alessandra Karla da Silva, CEDAC Coordinator. “We began in 2002 with two native species and 300 families with participatory monitoring, with the objective of creating collective work for the sustainability of local peoples.”
CEDAC’s management protocol evolved into a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS), a locally focused, quality assurance system designed to make organic, healthy foods accessible to all. PGS are an alternative to third-party certification, which can be costly for small-scale farmers and consumers alike.
By 2012, CEDAC had created a PGS network covering 7,000 families, based on their sustainable management protocol. The Ministry of Agriculture accepted CEDAC’s collaborative certification program, or PGS, allowing families to sell their products with Brazil’s organic seal.
“Participatory guarantee systems, in addition to guaranteeing quality with a seal, generate local knowledge systems and empower local people to take control of information about methods that are fundamental for them to improve their quality of life,” said Laércio Meirelles,an agronomist, agroecologist, and facilitator of the Latin American PGS Forum.
Centro de Desenvolvimento Agroecológico do Cerrado (CEDAC)
The main idea is “a democratic and inclusive organic food market” that is accessible and affordable for everyone, including small family farmers and low-income urban populations worldwide, continued Meirelles. “We are not comfortable with the idea of producing healthy food that’s for the elite.”
Meirelles, Karla da Silva, and six Agroecology Fund grantee partners gathered to discuss their approaches to PGS on an Agroecology Fund webinar moderated by Agroecology Fund Advisor Georgina Catacora-Vargas, that was attended by nearly 600 people from 88 countries, and was translated in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The webinar was the first in the Agroecological Economies webinar series that will continue throughout the year. The conversation focused on grassroots experiences with PGS as a way to strengthen access to markets and trust between consumers and producers. Participants described PGS with differing structures and norms depending on the needs and circumstances of local communities.
“What is now known as PGS began much earlier in the agroecological movement as a way of resisting expensive, one-sided international auditing systems that were alien to local realities. At the time, we called it participatory certification, bringing farming families to the forefront of the process. More than an economic tool, one of the principles at the root of the PGS is to build relationships of trust and knowledge exchange, involving producers and consumers.”
Angela Cordeiro, Co-Director, Agroecology Fund
First, how do you get PGS going?
Jayakumar Chelaton, founder of Thanal Trust in India, said that setting up a PGS is “not a complicated process.”
“It is a lot of participation and people taking leadership, coming together, doing collective work and also collectively bargaining for better prices for markets and access in markets.”
A minimum of five farmers are needed to form a group in India’s system, which was started by a civil society organization but is now run by the regional government, he said. The group signs a formal organic farming pledge and meets to determine its structure and processes. The government trains the group on organic production techniques and uploads the registration data to a digital platform. “Once the registration is completed, the farmer group can work on their own. If they don’t have the capacity, a Regional Council can help them,” said Chelaton.
Peer appraisals are carried out three times a year for any cropping season, and if everything is satisfactory, the group gets the certificate. Groups must meet every week or two to three times monthly, and every meeting should have 50 percent of the people attending. “We are making sure that there is a large participation of the democratic decision making in the group,” said Chelaton.
Rashida Kabanda, program assistant at Eastern and Southern Africa Small-scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF) Uganda, the largest small-scale farmer-led advocacy movement in Uganda, which represents more than 300,000 small-scale farmers, described a similar process. Fifteen to 20 people will typically come together to form a PGS, learn how it will function and register with ESAFF Uganda, she said. Then, the group works to design a shared vision after discussing the group’s environmental, political and economic situation.
“The whole group must agree that they’re looking for common organic markets, but the PGS is for everyone in the group. And then after that, they develop standards on how the PGS will work” and how they will govern it, said Kabanda. Group members pledge to follow the standards of the group and meet regularly to implement their plan.
“They follow up with each other to know that each of them is producing organic products,” said Kabanda. ESAFF Uganda provides organic certificates and seals and created a resource guide for any farmers interested in forming a PGS.
Different PGS Models
PGS programs share goals of expanding sustainable land use, helping farmers find markets and educating consumers, but they can serve different communities — from rural farmers and harvesters to urban communities to seed savers.
In Bolivia, AGRECOL Andes Foundation works with both rural farmers and urban farms, said Alberto Cardenas, who coordinates the Metropolitan program. “Unfortunately, the urban stain around the cities has been polluting the agricultural areas, so we’re implementing a metropolitan program to address this issue. It can be kitchen gardens, greenhouses, biointensive gardening… any other agroecological production method.”
Semilla Nativa Colombia meanwhile created a participatory process to guarantee that seeds are produced under agroecological mechanisms, are free of transgenics and copyrights, and are adaptable to local conditions. The group supports PGS through regional seed custodian schools. Researchers, farmers, and promoters work together on the implementation and expansion of PGS and also on developing technical capacities to resolve production problems, especially related to the new climate dynamics and government regulation, said Carol Rojas Vargas, ecologist, seed saver, and founder of Semilla Nativa.
“With the system, we guarantee that the seeds are produced by the families who are custodians of the seeds, and they are kept in these communities, seed houses, and by local farmers.”
Semilla Nativa Colombia
The Dyikan Muras Seed Savers Network in Kyrgyzstan similarly developed a PGS for organic seeds to revitalize native vegetable production, said Aida Jamangulova, Director of the Agency for Development Initiatives in Kyrgyzstan. The network strives to improve seed quality and educate consumers about locally produced vegetable seeds.
“There’s a bias that they’re not as good as imported seeds,” said Jamangulova. “Another challenge is the lack of knowledge on seed production, especially among small-scale female farmers, who make up the majority of their 700 members.
In 2015, they began training women farmers in agroecological schools and cultivating seed plots. Farmers cannot sell native seeds, but they can share them and market the agricultural product that comes from the organic seeds.
The group implemented a PGS system after seeing India’s system, said Jamangulova. They developed PGS guidelines covering soil, biodiversity, irrigation, weeds, pests, diseases and other topics and created a PGS Committee, which includes three farmers, one consumer and one agronomist. Farmers are evaluated by the committee.
“We like the participatory approach,” said Jamangulova, who is now working on legislation for its seed PGS to be recognized by the government.
Government recognition
Brazilian law recognizes PGS, which, while not crucial for expansion, has helped CEDAC expand its reach. Close to 1,000 farm communities, spread across 5,000 hectares of organic agriculture and 875,000 hectares of sustainable harvesting in the Cerrado ecoregion of Brazil have developed PGS using CEDAC’s seals and scopes of certification for gender equity and agroecology — which now cover 173 native species and 100 forest products. Some of those PGS are even accepted by international markets, said Karla da Silva.
Similarly, partnering with the government of Kerala helped India’s PGS expand its reach 10-fold, said Chelaton, gain consumer confidence and address other challenges. “There was always the issue of funding, the issue of acceptance by the government agency implementing the Food Safety Act, and how to convince the health authorities that we are organic agriculture, what our program is and how we do it.”
AGRECOL Andes Foundation, working with local authorities, utilizes two seals for ecological production with the 68 PGS groups in its network. Additionally, PGS groups sell directly to local governments, such as school breakfasts, and sign agreements with municipal governments to organize local agroecology fairs, said Cardenas.
In Ecuador, the Agroecological Collective has found that “integrating local government authorities as well as schools or academic institutions” into PGS helps guarantee greater sustainability, said Roberto Gortaire Amézcua, founder and member of the Advisory Council of the Collective. Additionally, “local ordinances or legal frameworks that have been implemented allowing for local governments and ministries to invest in the cities and local political will,” help PGS succeed, he said.
While government support can help groups expand their reach, it isn’t always desired because there are trade-offs that come with government recognition, cautioned Mierelles. “It’s important to get state recognition without losing sight of the principle of simplicity,” for PGS he said. “We need simplicity because it will be understood by everyone.”
Regulators “demand forms to be filled out based on the social cultural norms of those bureaucrats as opposed to the peoples and communities who are working with these organic products,” he continued.
CEDAC, in fact, is facing several challenges, including getting traditional peoples’ landholdings legally recognized in government computer systems for non-timber products, as well as gaining acceptance for oral communications in the PGS registry.
Gaining Social Recognition
For Meirelles, social recognition is more important than legal recognition. “We need to create a strategy for communicating with society, communicating with people, for them to recognize the efforts we’re making to generate quality food and the effort we’re making to ensure the quality of those products.”
But getting that social recognition can be difficult, said Kabanda. “Finding markets can be hard so sometimes farmers end up selling at the same price as others who aren’t in the PGS,” she said. “They do marketing analysis, how they will find their markets for themselves and how they’ll convince these markets to buy their organic products.”
AGRECOL Andes Foundation works to gain social acceptance through both short market and long market circuits, said Cardenas. That includes local direct sales, house to house sales, a Whatsapp group, stores, mobile stores, fairs, and markets in urban and rural areas. They also sign agreements with municipal governments.
“There is good agroecological production. PGS is becoming more recognized,” he said. “We also work very closely with the consumers because they have to be involved in the PGS.” Activities include tastings that educate people about agroecological production and help consumers understand the problems of the rural people.
“You can break the myth that agroecological product is more expensive and help farmers to generate their own income,” said Cardenas.
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The Agroecology Fund aspires to move massive amounts of funding into grassroots-led agroecology. It’s a big ambition, clearly something we can’t do alone. While we continue to grow the number of funders participating in the Agroecology Fund’s multi-donor fund – now over 50! – we also participate in networks that share a commitment to agroecology principles and the urgent need to extend funding to agroecology movements across the globe.
The Roddenberry Foundation’s +1 Global Fund is a collaborative platform for discovering, strengthening, connecting, and amplifying locally-led change in the Global South. It launched in 2022 with its first cohort of awardees. Leveraging a “network of networks” model, the Fund brings together philanthropists, foundations, and partners who collectively believe that the engine for change lies in the efforts of locally-led, earlier-stage organizations.
The Agroecology Fund is honored to be counted as a network partner of the +1 Global Fund for Food Security, a network-based approach to improving food access and resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a network partner, for each grant round we’ve identified nominators from our grassroots movement network — leaders with expertise in specific agroecology-related themes from the regions where the grassroots work is being carried out. In total, we’ve identified four nominators including long-term partner Alliance for Food Sovereignty Africa, The ICCA Consortium, African Women’s Collaborative for Healthy Food Systems, and independent consultant Samuel Nnah Ndobe, which resulted in seven associated awardees including four awardees from the Agroecology Fund’s grantee cohort including Schools and Colleges Permaculture Program (SCOPE Kenya), Regional Schools & Colleges Permaculture Programme (ReSCOPE), Kenyans Peasants League (KPL), and Solidarité des Femmes sur le Fleuve Congo (SOFFLECO).
This month, the +1 Global Fund for Food Security recently welcomed the third cohort of 15 awardees, including two Agroecology Fund nominator-affiliated awardees — grantee partner Kenyan Peasants League(KPL) and Solidarité des Femmes sur le Fleuve Congo (SOFFLECO).
These initiatives, hailing from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, are bravely confronting some of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most pressing food and nutrition security issues. Their dedication and the significance of their work are a beacon of hope, demonstrating that change is possible even in the most challenging circumstances.
“We are thrilled to be part of this great network, which will allow us to learn from the experiences of others and see how we can all impact our communities together.” -Solidarité des Femmes sur le Fleuve Congo (SOFFLECO), Democratic Republic of Congo
These awardees are enabling food system transformations across regions and sectors, from promoting agroecological farming to empowering farmers to improve their practices and access reliable markets — all towards ensuring their communities have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for an active and healthy life. Besides the financial support provided by +1 Food Security, awardees will also join the +1 Network, through which they can connect with each other to exchange knowledge, provide mutual support, and/or coordinate their efforts.
We are thrilled to collaborate with the +1 Global Fund to move essential resources to impactful agroecology movements.
The following article was published in The Seattle Times in March of 2024. You can read the original here.
ZIGUINCHOR, Senegal (AP) — Mariama Sonko’s voice resounded through the circle of 40 women farmers sitting in the shade of a cashew tree. They scribbled notes, brows furrowed in concentration as her lecture was punctuated by the thud of falling fruit.
This quiet village in Senegal is the headquarters of a 115,000-strong rural women’s rights movement in West Africa, We Are the Solution. Sonko, its president, is training female farmers from cultures where women are often excluded from ownership of the land they work so closely.
Across Senegal, women farmers make up 70% of the agricultural workforce and produce 80% of the crops but have little access to land, education and finance compared to men, the United Nations says.
“We work from dawn until dusk, but with all that we do, what do we get out of it?” Sonko asked.
She believes that when rural women are given land, responsibilities and resources, it has a ripple effect through communities. Her movement is training women farmers who traditionally have no access to education, explaining their rights and financing women-led agricultural projects.
Across West Africa, women usually don’t own land because it is expected that when they marry, they leave the community. But when they move to their husbands’ homes, they are not given land because they are not related by blood.
Mariama Sonko Mariama Sonko poses in the seed hut of her agroecological training center in the Casamance village of Niaguis, Senegal, Wednesday, March 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Cherkaoui)
Sonko grew up watching her mother struggle after her father died, with young children to support.
“If she had land, she could have supported us,” she recalled, her normally booming voice now tender. Instead, Sonko had to marry young, abandon her studies and leave her ancestral home.
After moving to her husband’s town at age 19, Sonko and several other women convinced a landowner to rent to them a small plot of land in return for part of their harvest. They planted fruit trees and started a market garden. Five years later, when the trees were full of papayas and grapefruit, the owner kicked them off.
The experience marked Sonko.
“This made me fight so that women can have the space to thrive and manage their rights,” she said. When she later got a job with a women’s charity funded by Catholic Relief Services, coordinating micro-loans for rural women, that work began.
“Women farmers are invisible,” said Laure Tall, research director at Agricultural and Rural Prospect Initiative, a Senegalese rural think tank. That’s even though women work on farms two to four hours longer than men on an average day.
But when women earn money, they reinvest it in their community, health and children’s education, Tall said. Men spend some on household expenses but can choose to spend the rest how they please. Sonko listed common examples like finding a new wife, drinking and buying fertilizer and pesticides for crops that make money instead of providing food.
Mariama Sonko and other members of the “Nous Sommes la Solution” movement take part in a lemon balm pecking workshop in the Casamance village of Niaguis, Senegal, Wednesday, March 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Cherkaoui)
With encouragement from her husband, who died in 1997, Sonko chose to invest in other women. Her training center now employs over 20 people, with support from small philanthropic organizations such as Agroecology Fund and CLIMA Fund.
In a recent week, Sonko and her team trained over 100 women from three countries, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Gambia, in agroforestry – growing trees and crops together as a measure of protection from extreme weather – and micro gardening, growing food in tiny spaces when there is little access to land.
One trainee, Binta Diatta, said We Are the Solution bought irrigation equipment, seeds, and fencing — an investment of $4,000 — and helped the women of her town access land for a market garden, one of more than 50 financed by the organization.
When Diatta started to earn money, she said, she spent it on food, clothes and her children’s schooling. Her efforts were noticed.
“Next season, all the men accompanied us to the market garden because they saw it as valuable,” she said, recalling how they came simply to witness it.
Mariama Sonko and other members of the “Nous Sommes la Solution” (We Are the Solution) movement take a census of the different varieties of rice in the Casamance village of Niaguis, Senegal, Wednesday, March 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Cherkaoui)
Now another challenge has emerged affecting women and men alike: climate change.
In Senegal and the surrounding region, temperatures are rising 50% more than the global average, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the UN Environment Program says rainfall could drop by 38% in the coming decades.
Where Sonko lives, the rainy season has become shorter and less predictable. Saltwater is invading her rice paddies bordering the tidal estuary and mangroves, caused by rising sea levels. In some cases, yield losses are so acute that farmers abandon their rice fields.
But adapting to a heating planet has proven to be a strength for women since they adopt climate innovations much faster than men, said Ena Derenoncourt, an investment specialist for women-led farming projects at agricultural research agency AICCRA.
“They have no choice because they are the most vulnerable and affected by climate change,” Derenoncourt said. “They are the most motivated to find solutions.”
On a recent day, Sonko gathered 30 prominent women rice growers to document hundreds of local rice varieties. She bellowed out the names of rice – some hundreds of years old, named after prominent women farmers, passed from generation to generation – and the women echoed with what they call it in their villages.
Mariama Sonko and other members of the “Nous Sommes la Solution” (We Are the Solution) movement take a census of the different varieties of rice in the Casamance village of Niaguis, Senegal, Wednesday, March 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Cherkaoui)
This preservation of indigenous rice varieties is not only key to adapting to climate change but also about emphasizing the status of women as the traditional guardians of seeds.
“Seeds are wholly feminine and give value to women in their communities,” Sonko said. “That’s why we’re working on them, to give them more confidence and responsibility in agriculture.”
The knowledge of hundreds of seeds and how they respond to different growing conditions has been vital in giving women a more influential role in communities.
Sonko claimed to have a seed for every condition including too rainy, too dry and even those more resistant to salt for the mangroves.
Last year, she produced 2 tons of rice on her half-hectare plot with none of the synthetic pesticides or fertilizer that are heavily subsidized in Senegal. The yield was more than double that of plots with full use of chemical products in a 2017 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization project in the same region.
“Our seeds are resilient,” Sonko said, sifting through rice-filled clay pots designed to preserve seeds for decades. “Conventional seeds do not resist climate change and are very demanding. They need fertilizer and pesticides.”
The cultural intimacy between female farmers, their seeds and the land means they are more likely to shun chemicals harming the soil, said Charles Katy, an expert on indigenous wisdom in Senegal who is helping to document Sonko’s rice varieties.
He noted the organic fertilizer that Sonko made from manure, and the biopesticides made from ginger, garlic and chilli.
Plants grow at Mariama Sonko’s agro-ecological training center in the Casamance village of Niaguis, Senegal, Wednesday, March 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Cherkaoui)
One of Sonko’s trainees, Sounkarou Kébé, recounted her experiments against parasites in her tomato plot. Instead of using manufactured insecticides, she tried using a tree bark traditionally used in Senegal’s Casamance region to treat intestinal problems in humans caused by parasites.
A week later, all the disease was gone, Kébé said.
As dusk approached at the training center, insects hummed in the background and Sonko prepared for another training session. “There’s too much demand,” she said. She is now trying to set up seven other farming centers across southern Senegal.
Glancing back at the circle of women studying in the fading light, she said: “My great fight in the movement is to make humanity understand the importance of women.”
Photographs by Camila Falquez Text by Isvett Verde
The following article was published in The New York Times in October of 2022. You can read the original here.
The natural resources that Indigenous peoples depend on are inextricably linked to their identities, cultures and livelihoods. Even relatively small changes in temperature or rainfall can make their lands more susceptible to rising sea levels, droughts and forest fires. As the climate crisis escalates, activists fighting to protect what remain of the world’s forests are at risk of being persecuted by their governments — and even at risk of death.
For decades Indigenous activists have been sounding the alarm. But their warnings have too often been ignored. So, they organized.
“For us, the plants, the trees have life, they have a spirit, that’s why we have to respect it, take care of it and protect it. The women in my community have planted trees, bananas, cassava. We are dressing Mother Earth.”
— Briceida Iglesias, the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, Panama
“Guna Yala is where we come from. It is not just a territory; it is more than that. It is a community — a family. ‘You are the next generation,’ my father told me. ‘And you must fight for your future.’ That gave me the drive to finish college and return to work for my community.”
— Yaily Castillo, the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, Panama.
“Everyone agrees on the conservation of nature, on fighting climate change. But in practice they say that where you put the money you put the heart, and governments are not putting the heart. We want to be seen as partners in this fight.”
— Gustavo Sánchez, the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, Mexico.
“Our spiritual, ritualistic and cultural practices are closely linked to the flow of nature. We use the rivers as a means of transport, but the rains have become scarce, isolating many communities. Several species — flora and fauna — are disappearing, which has led to a shortage of food and has limited our ability to perform certain rituals. This has had a dramatic impact on our culture. The cause is partly climate change, but these changes can also be linked to our government’s dismantling of environmental policy.”
— Dinamam Tuxá, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, Brazil.
“The oil that comes out of the Amazon, the gold — these natural resources feed development models, but we are left with garbage, oil pollution and mercury in the rivers. It is very sad that the United Nations only speaks to the presidents because their governments do not listen to us. The voice of the people must be respected. I call on the world to join our fight.”
— Gregorio Mirabal, Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin, Venezuela.
Working across multiple languages and political and legal systems, the alliance settled on five priorities: land rights, free prior and informed consent before any intervention into their territories, direct access to climate funding, protection of people from violence and prosecution, and the recognition of traditional knowledge in the fight to defend the planet.
In September, members of the alliance and their allies visited New York to meet with policymakers and donors during Climate Week, which brings together international leaders to push for global climate action.
They harnessed the power of speaking as a united voice, describing promises made by governments and international bodies that have failed to materialize into action. They explained how even though money to fight climate change so often doesn’t reach them, they have managed to develop programs that are helping communities mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. Imagine what could be possible with more funding and support.
“We have no more land to put our animals, to grow our medicinal plants. We want our trees back. We want to give our children our own medicine. We are part of the solution. We have our local knowledge, and we have ancestral knowledge. Give us a chance to bring our knowledge to the table.”
— Aissatou Oumarou, the Network of Indigenous and Local Populations for the Sustainable Management of Forest Ecosystems in Central Africa, Chad.
“Hope always needs to be nurtured. Everything is a process and, like any slow process, it has its time. Just as things in nature also have their time. And we only ask the creator for strength to give us wisdom, discernment. But we don’t feed on hope. So day after day, we fight.”
— Cristiane Julião Pankaruru, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, Brazil.
“My community and territory has already been destroyed by palm oil plantations. There is only a very small forest left. The loss of the territory, the forest, the traditions, the cultural rituals — these things are what makes us who we are. When we lost that, we lost everything.”
— Mina Susana Setra, the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago, Indonesia.
“Indigenous youths are the future leaders and policymakers. We are doing their part to keep the knowledge alive and language alive, and I think that’s really the face or the picture of what hope is.”
— Monica Ndoen, the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago, Indonesia.
“We hope that society as a whole can rethink its attitudes. Simple, everyday acts can go a long way. Rethink your rampant consumption. Rethink this capitalist way of living — relentless development. We want this philosophy of life to become part of everyday habits.”
— João Víctor Gomes de Oliveira, the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, Brazil.
“We have to re-naturalize ourselves. We have to have more awareness of our actions, more awareness of nature. Unite this divorce that exists between man and humanity and nature. Because what happens to nature, happens to us. It will take its toll on us.
— Tuntiak Katan, Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin, Ecuador.
“My grandparents were forcibly evicted to make way for the construction of a hydroelectric plant. As a result, our relationship with our sacred sites changed, as did our way of highlighting our identity through our language. It’s an example of how a development can destroy the very life of Indigenous peoples. I worry that we are all going to lose the cosmogonic spiritual wealth that we have within our Mother Earth.”
— Sara Omi Casama, the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, Panama.
“If we don’t preserve our traditional knowledge, it will disappear. We are cultivating intergenerational dialogue to enable our elders to share the knowledge that they have with the younger generations, so we can protect and preserve it for generations to come.”
— Aehshatou Manu, the Network of Indigenous and Local Populations for the Sustainable Management of Forest Ecosystems in Central Africa, Cameroon.
Camila Falquez is a photographer and visual artist living in New York. Isvett Verde is a staff editor in Opinion.
