Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Many thanks to you all who have submitted a contribution to this forum discussion until now...
We encourage you to come back and provide further reflections or also comments to other people’s contribution. I was delighted to see how George Kent actually summarized previous contributions and made some further thinking on them. Thank you George!
We also hope that many others will still contribute as the forum will be open until 16 May 2014.
Peter Steele’s contribution is highly appreciated. I personally feel delighted that he provided his comments as he with other colleagues from FAO were the pioneers of one of the themes that is closely related to Care/Social Farming, namely the one which concentrates on how to involve people with disabilities in Agriculture. I am grateful for his insights and the Guidelines he shared will be very useful for the development of the framework on Care/Social Farming.
Among others, Peter refers to the government’s responsibilities in providing care services for the disabled and to the fact that often people with disabilities rely only on public authorities to provide the much needed services. This is a very important aspect, and raises further thoughts about the roles of the different sectors, including the public, private, public-private and the community.
He also mentions that nonetheless of the many well-intended initiatives, laws and regulations to provide people with disabilities the same life opportunities, they continue to live marginalized. Among the main reasons is that these initiatives often focuses only on health and social development, but do not manage to have a real empowering effect, that is, an effect that makes people with disabilities feel useful and appreciated. Creating opportunities for them to engage in meaningful employment through care farming can be a means to achieve this effect. The importance of gainful employment for empowerment was confirmed earlier also by Magda Rich when she shared her experience from India and said that “another reason why they (people with disabilities) are considered as a curse or a burden to their families is because they are not financially productive. ... financial inclusion is extremely important. It is one of the basic ways to gain respect and become part of the community.”
Finally, Peter confirms that developing a long term strategy in consultation with all relevant actors is the one that can have lasting and sustainable impact. This is what we intend to do, to develop with a participatory approach a framework that can be useful to help national initiatives to encourage and sustain care/social farming practices for the benefit of small-scale local farmers, rural women and those in need of social services, in particular, the children, the elderly, people with disabilities and other socially disadvantaged groups. The overall aim is to foster sustainable initiatives that can lead to improvements in food security, poverty reduction and social inclusion
Nuttitude K. Price from Australia suggested that we watch the Food Inc movie. I have not seen it but could watch the trailer online. It seems that the movie is really relevant. It calls for a change in farming and in our eating habits and campaigns for local and nutritious food production. Care/social farming is a farming practice that fully promotes these values. Care/social farms promote sustainable farming practices, often organic farming, local food systems, short food supply chains and they are able to create niche markets with the produce that has an important social value. Besides being healthy and nutritious and a source of income for local farmers, care/social farming products are products that were created through a process that have given sense of dignity and self-confidence to the people who produced them.
Mr Wayne Roberts shared with us the title of his book so that we can look for it and read. It seems from available book reviews, that in The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food he was very successful in giving a comprehensive view on what characterizes industrialized agriculture, its weaknesses and impact on our lifestyle and health, and on the alternative models. What I found really useful is his reflection on the link between cheap food and cheap labour. [Cheap food] ... “sustains poorly paid workers in factories, and it leads farmers unable to compete with cheap imports to leave rural areas, in turn lowering the cost of urban labor.” (Book review from Daniel Bornstein)
Dr Jacqueline Fletcher from France mentions the relation between care farming and permaculture. If we consider that the philosophy behind permaculture is looking at plants and animals in all their functions and that one of the principles of permaculture is care for the people, then it is certainly an interesting link and desires further reflection.
Magda Rich from the Czech Republic shared a very interesting experience. This is a project she was involved in and through which they created a butterfly garden for therapeutic and training reasons for disabled students who receive practical gardening training to increase their chances to be hired outside the school to earn their living. The garden functions also as an environmental education centre and thus visited by school children and the public. They have a chance to see the work of the disabled which hopefully positively influences their way of seeing the PWD’s. As she explains, this is not a care farm as we know it from Europe. But this is exactly what we are looking for: examples that carry the aspects and principles of care/social farming adjusted to the local context.
Hajnalka Petrics