There are more than 500 million family farms in the world. These farms are owned and/or operated by a family and include many of the world’s poor and disadvantaged peoples - peasants, artisan fishers, pastoralists and indigenous people. Yet family farms have a central role in the production of more than 80 per cent of the world’s food.
The Partners in GFAR recognize the critical importance of family farmers, including their role in research and innovation processes, in order to secure a food secure future for all. Several Partners in GFAR, mobilized in particular by the World Rural Forum, have been very successfully promoting the need for a UN IYFF+10 Decade of Family Farming, 2019-2028, to advocate for improving living and working conditions for family farmers—both women and men—across all five continents. The Decade was officially adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 2017 and will now provide a valuable framework for fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on eradicating hunger and poverty, by improving public policies in support of Family Farming.
In Derio, Spain, on 20 and 21 February 2018, the World Rural Forum, with other Partners in GFAR, will launch a GFAR Collective Action for “Enhancing participatory processes between Family Farmers, Civil Society/Rural Communities, Research Institutes”, to continue to strengthen the participation of family farmers, civil society organizations, rural communities and their small and medium enterprises in research processes – an agenda long championed through GFAR’s collective actions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of real collaboration in the field and the impacts for rural communities, it is also essential to be able to monitor and measure the impacts of these partnerships between farmers and research for innovation.
A full design and action plan for this Collective Action will be agreed among participating Partners in GFAR as a basis for joint collaboration. The Collective Action will create a learning space grounded in fostering bottom-up processes, mutual learning, open sharing and breaking down institutional barriers. Through dialogue, with farmers themselves at the center, this Collective Action will bolster and demonstrate the crucial links between research and society, between science and the people who use it to bring food to our tables.
More information on the event is soon forthcoming.
Read more about World Rural Forum’s work on IYFF and Participatory Research as part of the IYFF+10 initiative.
Photo at top: FAO
