Since the earliest origins of agriculture, farmers and cultivated plants (or crops) have rightly been credited with securing copious food supplies and enabling the rise of complex societies. From Mesopotamia over the High Andes to the Yellow River Basin, crop domestication and farmers’ immense creativity enabled a lasting shift away...

This document begins with a description of how farmers’ seed systems and formal systems interact, then discusses some of the challenges facing farmers’ seed systems including climate change, the private ownership of seeds, the difficulty of registration and certification for farmers’ seeds, and the role of international treaties on national...

This book is based on an 8-part webinar series conducted by AFSA through the Healthy Soil Healthy Food Initiative. This series covered a range of agroecological methods that foster healthy soils and ecosystems. The series, conducted from October 2023 to February 2024, was co-developed by the organising committee and the expert...

Over the past two decades, the Mekong region has experienced significant transformation of its agricultural sector from subsistence farming to export crops driven by the expansion of agricultural land and of irrigation, plus intensification thanks to mechanization and the use of chemical inputs. In the context of agrarian transition, maintaining...

Peruvian smallholder farmers have practiced Indigenous farming methods for maintaining and developing their family’s unique collection of native potato seeds for centuries. Through their farming practices, they naturally preserve their seed and potato varieties, but also slowly help evolve them over time. It’s this preservation coupled with evolution that’s critical...

This policy factsheet aims to present decision and policymakers and experts in the context of international cooperation with concise information on how AE/O approaches can contribute to a beneficial transformation of production systems in the Tropics. It concisely argues that agroecology and organic can facilitate a beneficial transformation of production systems...