Глобальный форум по продовольственной безопасности и питанию (Форум FSN)

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Gian Linard Nicolay

Член с
Организация: FiBL
Страна: Швейцария
Область (области) знаний:
I am working on:

Sociology and agronomy of food security and sustainable food systems in Africa and other regions. Academic science, research, management and networking; with particular focus on organic and ecologic agriculture and their institutional relations within societies (local, national, world). Particular interest in soil-society relations and its sustainability context.

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    • Need to address the local scale

      The scale matters. The resilience of Agriculture and Food systems looks very different if we compare household, community or national level, as the socio-economic and political and cultural-historic realities are very different according to the perspective taken. 

      I miss the local level, as being situated between the community and national level. This local scale, including local governments (communes), indigenous peoples and cultures, local authorities and leadership, concrete agroecological settings, knowledgeable private sector knowing the concrete business opportunities, local markets and its (untapped) potentials, infrastructures and particularly concrete agency with concrete and interlinked actors (both individual and collective) could be the most relevant scale if it comes to resilience building (but also when dealing with developing potentials and increasing system performance related to food systems).

      This missing perspective looking at the local scale as defined here (between communities and national scale) is one of the weakest points in the current global food system. Whenever shocks happen, they are always local (and only sometimes national and beyond). The lack of local perspectives, plans and budgets are may be the biggest gap in the current portfolio of country adaptation / resilience policies.

      I plead to reconsider the local level understood as including communities, local governments and landscape-agroecological context including local culture, history and agency.

    • To Q1, I propose some differentiation and new elements to highlight the challenges:

      - digital literacy for skills development should address better cooperation with mobile companies (PPP), vocational schools as well as well organised farmer organisations, ideally at national a/o local level.

      - the rural/urban divide should be added in bullet 6

      - research and science-based information (in the form of R&D) can enhance the trust of information, hence the need to cooperate with research institutes interesetd in promoting education and skills for farmers.

      To Q2, the principles highlighted may still be improved. My proposal:

      - to add: (i) be accountable; (ii) subsidiary, i.e. the higher level of the Council should only intervene if the lower is not capable to do it; (iii) The main production systems should be differentiated, as the required knowledge/information need is often very specific to the production system. At least the distinction between industrial/big farming and agroecology/organic/smallholder farming should be made.

      - the DC should operate more as a network than a hierarchical structure and so encourage the open sharing of experiences between regions and countries. The focus of the DC should be on enhancing the framework conditions by taking a leadership role, promoting pilotes and communicate effectively.

      - under "neutral": the DC has not to accelerate digital agriculture, but to assure that the sector makes best use of it.

      - under "be accessible". It is not the role (and competency) of DC only to make DA available and affordable, but together with the private sector (service providers) and the farmers communities.

      To Q3, I think that the 3 key ecosystem gaps are fine for defining the roles for the DC. But what I miss is the distinction into the anticipated 4 levels, i.e. local, national, regional and global. See above my comment on decentralization and subsidiarity principles.

      To Q4: An alternative model would be a network architecture, where the Secretariate would provide and receive information from the regional and national nodes, and the EC just be responsible for strategic decisions. All operational decisions should be regional, national and local. Desigend as it is, the public sector has too much weight and risks to end in a bureacratic and static organisation, not following the fast technological and social developments.