AGROECOLOGY REPORTS These reports relate to agroEcology, food & seed sovereignty, and the rights of indigenous communities and smallholder farmers. In alphabetical order
A Viable Food Future-- Part IPart II Utviklingsfondet / The Development Fund, Norway-- 2010
Agricultural Technology for Development: Report of the UN Secretary General 68th Session, Item 19 (A/68/150) -- 19 Aug 2013 Consensus is growing that freeing humanity from poverty and hunger requires a shift to sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems in order to ensure food and nutrition security, contribute to poverty eradication and protect natural resources.
Agroecology: Environmental, Social and Economic Justice Vanessa Black, Biowatch South Africa -- May 2016 "Soil fertility depends on complex dynamics between its structure, nutrients and living organisms. The addition of organic matter to create favourable conditions for beneficial soil organisms is a core principle of agroecology because soil health is the foundation for healthy plants and water retention .... cover crops and micro-organisms are encouraged that will naturally turn and fertilise soils"
Agroecology: Putting Food Sovereignty into Action Calondra McArthur, WhyHunger -- Mar 2015 This report "highlights the social, political, cultural, nutritional and spiritual meanings of agroecology from within communities that have been negatively impacted by the commodification of food."
Agroecology: Scaling Up for Food Sovereignty and Resiliency Miguel A. Altieri and C.I. Nicholls -- May 2012
Agroecology and Sustainable Development: Findings from the UN-led International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development Pesticide Action Network North America -- Apr 2009
Agroecology as a Solution to Global Hunger and Nutrition Interfaith Working Group on Global Hunger & Food Security, Washington, DC -- Feb 2014 "Agroecology requires a commitment to the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture systems, allows producers to play a lead role in innovation, and it places those who produce, distribute and consume food at the center of decisions on food systems and policies."
Avoiding Future Famines: Strengthening the Ecological Foundation of Food Security through Sustainable Food Systems A UNEP Synthesis Report -- 2012
Building a New Agricultural Future: Supporting Agro-Ecology for People and the Planet Gina E. Castillo, Oxfam international -- April 2014 "This briefing makes the case for the need to invest not in industrial-style farming but in agro-ecology to achieve truly sustainable agriculture and food security for some of the poorest farmers in the world."
Ecological Farming: The Seven Principles of a Food System that has People at its Heart Reyes Tirado, Greenpeace -- May 2015 "Ecological Farming combines modern science and innovation with respect for nature and biodiversity. It ensures healthy farming and healthy food. It protects the soil, the water and the climate. It does not contaminate the environment with chemical inputs or use genetically engineered crops. And, it places people and farmers - consumers and producers, rather than the corporations who control our food now - at its very heart."
Emissions Impossible: How big meat and dairy are heating up the planet (posted 08 Aug 2018) Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy and GRAIN -- 18 Jul 2018 "... cheap meat and dairy comes at a high cost due to social, environmental and animal welfare problems that continue to be under-regulated. In addition, this production is only made possible because the corporations receive an indirect subsidy from taxpayers in the form of government-funded price supports that keep grain cheap. It is past time to regulate the industry and redirect the massive subsidies and other public expenditures that currently support the big meat and dairy conglomerates towards local food and farming systems capable of looking after people and the planet."
Family Farmers for Sustainable Food Systems: A Synthesis of Reports by African Farmers' Regional Networks on Models of Food Production, Consumption and Markets EuropAfrica -- June 2013 Agricultural investments in Africa, how and where are they directed? What investments for what systems of production, for what products, for what markets, and to whose benefit?
Farming for the Future: Organic and Agroecological Solutions to Feed the World Christopher, D. Cook, Kari Hamerschlag, Kendra Klein, Friends of the Earth - Jun 2016 "Feeding the world sustainably requires that we protect the ecological resources that are essential for producing food now and in the future. As this report documents, four decades of scientific evidence show that agroecological farming, including diversified organic agriculture, is the most effective agricultural response to the environmental challenges that threaten our future food security, such as climate change, soil erosion, water scarcity and loss of biodiversity."
Fed Up: Now's the Time to Invest in Agroecology Alex Wijeratna et al, Act!onAid International - Jun 2012
For whom? Questioning the food and farming research agenda: A special edition magazine from the Food Ethics Council Food Ethics Council, Edited by Liz Barling -- Jan 2018 "The Food Ethics Council asked international experts to explore where the power lies in setting our food and farming research agenda. We also asked who benefits from both publicly and privately funded research. We believe the status quo research agenda is not delivering the public good required for a food system that serves the needs of people, planet and animals."
From the Roots Up: Agroecology Can Feed Africa Dr. Ian Fitzpatrick, Global Justice Now -- Feb 2015 "Around the world, peasant organisations, pastoralists, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, women and civil society groups are forming a movement for food sovereignty which allows communities control over the way food is produced, traded and consumed. Food sovereignty, therefore, provides the framework within which agroecological systems and techniques should be developed."
From Uniformity to Diversity: A Paradigm Shift from Industrial Agricultural to Diversified Agroecological Systems Emile A. Frison (Lead Coordinating Author), IPES-Food -- Jun 2016 "Today’s food and farming systems have succeeded in supplying large volumes of foods to global markets, but are generating negative outcomes on multiple fronts: widespread degradation of land, water and ecosystems; high GHG emissions; biodiversity losses; persistent hunger and micro-nutrient deficiencies alongside the rapid rise of obesity and diet-related diseases; and livelihood stresses for farmers around the world."
Grow-ing disaster: the Fortune 500 goes farming GRAIN -- 15 Dec 2016 "While claiming to promote food security and benefit small farmers, Grow's focus on a small number of high-value commodities exposes the programme’s real objective: to expand production of a handful of commodities to profit a handful of corporations."
Healthy Harvests: The Benefits of Sustainable Agriculture in Africa and Asia Christian Aid UK Report -- 2011
Innovative Education in Agroecology: Experiential Learning for a Sustainable Agriculture C.K. Francis, N. Jordan, et al, Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, Vol. 30, Issue 1-2:226-237 -- Apr 2011
International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development(IAASTD) -- conclusions ratified at Intergovernmental Plenary Meeting -- April 2008 Agriculture at a Crossroads - Global Report:Right to Food
IAASTD Summary Greenpeace International, 63 pages -- Oct 2009 "Climate change, hunger and poverty, loss of biodiversity, forest destruction, water crises, food safety – what all these threats have in common is that a principal cause for each of them is in the way we produce, trade, consume and discard food and other agricultural products."
International Forum for Agroecology - Small Scale Food Producers Launch the First Ever Joint Vision for Agroecology Nyéléni Center, Sélingué, Mali -- 24-27 Feb 2015 “Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society. We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world.”
International Symposium on Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition: Final Report UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), Rome, Italy -- 18-19 Sep 2014 "AGROECOLOGY is the integrative study of the ecology of the entire food system, encompassing ecological, economic and social dimensions. It focuses on working with and understanding the interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment within agricultural systems. By bringing ecological principles to bear in agroecosystems through ecological intensification, novel management approaches can be identified, building on key interactions and strengthening “virtuous cycles” in agricultural production that would not otherwise be considered."
Mainstreaming Agroecology: Implications for Global Food and Farming Systems [discussion paper] Wibbelmann, M., Schmutz, U., Wright, J., Udall, D., Rayns, F., Kneafsey, M., Trenchard, L., Bennett, J. and Lennartsson, M., Centre for Agroecology and Food Security (joint initiative of Coventry University & Garden Organic, UK) -- 16 Oct 2013 "Agroecological practitioners design food production systems which aim to maintain the functions that natural systems provide, both internal and external to production, and which are robust, productive and equitable. This means integrating instead of segregating, closing systems and relying on local inputs, increasing biological and genetic diversity, and regenerating instead of degrading."
New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa (Study) Olivier De Schutter, EU Directorate for External Policies, Policy Department -- Adopted June 2016 "They promote a reform of seed regulations, with a view to strengthening the protection of plant breeders' rights, but without acknowledging the need to support farmers' seed systems. They are weak on nutrition, hardly acknowledging the links between agricultural production, food and health, and the need to support healthy and diversified diets."
Nourishing the World Sustainably: Scaling up AgroEcology Edited by Peter Prove & Sara Speicher, Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance -- 2012
Nuanced rhetoric and the path to poverty: AGRA, small-scale farmers, and seed and soil fertility in Tanzania African Centre for Biosafety -- 17 Mar 2015 "This research report arises from a three-year research programme, which the African Centre for Biosafety is conducting, to investigate the impacts of Green Revolution technologies in Africa on small-scale farmers. The focus is on seed and soil fertility, and we aim to track the work of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in particular."
Organic 3.0: For Truly Sustainable Farming & Consumption Markus Arbenz, David Gould, Christopher Stopes, IFOAM & SOAAN, 2nd Updated Edition -- 2016
Organic Farming in the Tropics is as Productive as Conventional: Farm Systems Comparison in the Tropics FiBL (Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, Switzerland) -- 01 Jul 2016 "The project 'Farming Systems Comparison in the Tropics' ... aims to establish a scientific basis for discussions on the performance and potential of conventional and organic agricultural production systems in the tropics. It has been running since 2007. In three tropical countries – Kenya, India and Bolivia – long-term farming systems comparison field trials have been established in concert with participatory on-farm research on technology development, focusing on a different cropping system in each country."
Scaling-Up Agroecological Approaches: What, Why and How? Stéphane Parmentier, Oxfam-Solidarity -- Jan 2014 "Scaling up agroecology will require long-term efforts, essentially needed for: unlocking ideological barriers to its political recognition; supporting farmer-to-farmer networks; providing an enabling public policy environment; taking specific actions for empowering women; and improving agricultural and food governance."
Scaling Up Agroecology: Toward the Realization of the Right to Food Shiney Varghese & Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy -- Oct 2013 All through the second half of the twentieth century, agricultural development aid supported export-oriented production, rather than local food security. Donor support for agricultural food production and processing methods that simultaneously help small-scale producers realize their food sovereignty and protect the environment, would lead to a different outcome. Toward this end, we outline a set of principles and practices of agroecology.
SCI - The System of Crop Intensification: Agroecological Innovations for Improving Agricultural Production, Food Security, and Resilience to Climate Change Norman Uphoff, Binju Abraham, Hailu Araya et al, SRI International Network and Resources Center (SRI-Rice), Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA -- 2014 "SCI practices enable farmers to mobilize biological processes and potentials that are present and available within crop plants and within the soil systems that support them"
Seed Freedom: A Global Citizens' Report Dr. Vandana Shiva, Ruchi Shroff, Caroline Lockhart, Navdanya -- Oct 2012
Soil Fertility: Agro-Ecology and Not the Green Revolution for Africa African Center for Biodiversity (ACB) -- Jul 2016 "The only viable future for African agriculture is an agro-ecologically based approach that uses indigenous and context-specific knowledge, takes into account social relations, relies on locally available materials as inputs and encourages a participative, inclusive approach to production."
State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet The Worldwatch Institute, W.W. Norton & Co. -- 2011
Unravelling the Food-Health Nexus: Addressing Practices, Political Economy, and Power Relations to Build Healthier Food Systems Cecilia Rocha, IPES-Food, Global Alliance for the Future of Food -- Oct 2017 "Good food is a cornerstone of good health, and this fundamental relationship is widely understood. Yet profound changes in global food systems over the last decades have resulted in significant negative impacts on health and well-being that range from food insecurity to chronic disease, and from environmental degradation to diminished economic opportunity and the erosion of culture. These impacts are experienced unequally across the globe and between different groups of people in different places."
Using Agroecology to Enhance Dietary Diversity Michel Pimbert and Stefanie Lemke, Covenant University -- 2018 "Changes in farming and land-use practices over the last 60 years have resulted in a significant decline in overall agrobiodiversity. This decline in domesticated crop and livestock breeds, as well as edible wild plant and animal species, is occurring at an incredible rate."
Wake Up Before It Is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in a Changing Climate UNCTAD Trade and Environment Review 2013 -- 18 Sep 2013