Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

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¿Qué papel pueden desempeñar las escuelas y universidades en la promoción de carreras agrícolas para los jóvenes?

Es muy importante que los gobiernos aprueben leyes, donde las universidades estén obligadas a participar en la formación agrícola. En Venezuela la Universidad Simón Bolívar  (USB), creo el Diplomado Gerencia de la Industria del Cacao dirigido profesionales y emprendedores que buscan especializarse en cacao y sus derivados.

En dicho diplomado se ha podido observar que los jones tienen interés en el Cacao Venezolano, la experiencia asido todo un éxito, anexo la pagina web:  www.usb.ve Twitter: @cacaoUSB

Como también existe el caso de la Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela (UBV) www.ubv.edu.ve, desarrollan diplomados en materia agrícola, desinan becas para estudiar en Europa, Africa y Así. El pasado 23 de Septiembre se realizo el primer Congreso Venezolano de Agroecología 2014, donde pudieron participar más de 20 países de Centro América y América del Sur.

¿Qué medidas pueden tomar las organizaciones de desarrollo y los gobiernos para hacer que las áreas rurales sean más atractivas para los futuros agricultores?

Conozco el caso de la creación de un proyecto llamado “Tejiendo Comunidad” del señor Rodrigo Calcagni Gonzales, Chileno.  Por medio de unas cartas creadas por el autor, realiza un juego donde todos los participantes podrán descubrir su liderazgo comunitario.  

Basados en mi experiencia en Ocumare de la Costa de Oro, estado Aragua Venezuela, con la comunidad de agricultores y pescadores de Bahía de Cata. Creo que los agricultores necesitan mucho apoyo terapéutico, ya que en sus historias de familia hay mucho que curar. Yo estoy desarrollando un método llamado Coaching-Agrícola, donde luego de un acompañamiento persona se decide si el agricultor está listo para emprender un proyecto agrícola. Muchas veces no se logran los proyectos agrícolas ya que las personas no están preparadas por razones familiares.

What role can schools and universities play in promoting agricultural careers to youth?

It is important that governments adopt laws forcing universities to get engaged in agricultural training. In Venezuela, the Simón Bolívar University (known in Spanish as USB), created the Cocoa Industry Management Diploma aimed at professionals and entrepreneurs who want to specialize in cocoa and its derivatives.

In this Diploma it has been noted that young people are interested in the Venezuelan cocoa. The experience has been a success. I enclose its website and Twitter account: www.usb.ve; Twitter:@cacaoUSB

The Bolivarian University of Venezuela (known in Spanish as UBV) (Website: www.ubv.edu.ve) also offers agricultural diplomas, granting scholarships to study in Europe, Africa and Asia. On September 23 the first Venezuelan Congress of Agroecology 2014 took place, attracting participants from more than 20 countries of Central America and South America.

What measures can development organizations and governments take to make rural areas more appealing for future farmers?

I know a project called "Weaving Community", developed by Mr. Rodrigo Calcagni Gonzales, from Chile. Using several cards created by himself, he develops a game in which all participants can discover their community leadership.

My experience has taken place in Ocumare de la Costa de Oro, in the Aragua state in Venezuela, and has involved the Bahia de Cata farmers and fishermen community. I think farmers need significant therapeutic support as their family stories are distressing and require substantial psychological healing. I am developing a method called “Agricultural Coaching” by which, after escorting a farmer, one decides if he/she is ready to undertake an agricultural project. Often agricultural projects fail because people are not prepared to implement them due to family reasons.

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Para el fomento de la mujer agricultura un método podría ser en princio, el fomento de la huerta agricola ligada a la mujer, destinada a el autoconsumo y la venta o trueque de excedentes, mientras el resto de la finca es ligada a cultivos no alimentarios o de mayor rentabilidad, este paso como punto de partida es necesario para la identificación de capacidades técnicas y de liderazgos, para la implementación futura de intervenciones comunitarias; como la creación de cooperativas de producción y procesamiento de alimentos, ya que la asociatividad sin la vinculación de liderazgos y capacidades técnicas locales tienden al fracaso, además es necesario el acompañamiento integral, coordinado e ininterrumpido de las entidades cooperantes.

Para el caso del joven agricultor, el fomento de la formación a niveles técnicos y profesiones,  y su vinculación a procesos cooperativos y emprededores en su comunidad. 

To promote women in agriculture, a method could be -in principle-, promoting home gardens linked to women, intended for self-consumption and the sale or barter of surpluses, while the rest of the farm is devoted to non-food crops, or more profitable.

This step is needed as a starting point to identify the technical and leadership skills for the future implementation of community interventions. Among them figures the establishment of food production and processing cooperatives, as associationship without local leadership and technical skills tend to fail. Besides, comprehensive, coordinated and uninterrupted support of the cooperating entities is necessary.

For the young farmer, we need to promote training at technical and professional levels, linked to cooperative and entrepreneurial processes in his/her community.

Estimados todos:

Sin duda los puntos que se marcan para este debate son esenciales en cualquier programa que pretenda atender la problemática de la pobreza entre los pequeños productores del campo, sin embargo, considero que la cuestión de  fondo se establece en la frase de inicio que nos dice que “los jóvenes abandonan las zonas rurales en busca de una vida mejor” , pues debemos entender que la principal razón para que los jóvenes abandonen el campo en busca de una vida mejor, especialmente en los países en desarrollo, la constituye el hecho de que entienden muy bien ellos que quedarse en el campo significa condenarse a una vida de pobreza.  Esta pobreza que compartimos en el campo los países en desarrollo no es una cuestión coyuntural, sino la expresión de las fallas estructurales de nuestro sistema político económico. Sin educación, sin infraestructura, sin maquinaria, sin acceso al financiamiento, ¿realmente esperamos que nuestros campesinos puedan competir con las corporaciones gigantescas que manejan los mercados?

¿Queremos que el campo sea atractivo para nuestros jóvenes?  Hagámoslo realmente atractivo. Invirtamos  en infraestructura, en educación, en salud, en generar  valor público, de tal manera que permanecer en el campo constituya para los jóvenes, para todos los jóvenes, una opción de vida digna.

 Actualmente el gobierno mexicano tiene un gasto altísimo en extensionismo, sin que por ello se obtengan buenos resultados. Se  paga la maquinaria, el capital de trabajo y la capacitación  de aquellos que consiguen el apoyo, lo cual significa que para ese productor en particular, los ingresos pueden cambiar, pero, ¿y los demás?  Se atiende a un productor, pero el entorno socioeconómico, cuyas características son las que nos están generando la pobreza, sigue intacto.  Si nos encargamos de tener sociedades justas en todas sus dimensiones, el resultado será que nuestros jóvenes y mujeres campesinas tendrán buenas oportunidades de desarrollo personal.

Ahora bien, no podemos negar la existencia de grandes desventajas para nuestros pequeños productores al querer competir en un mercado abierto, como ahora se pretende y en este sentido ya Brasil nos puso el ejemplo de cómo compensarlo, con su programa Hambre Cero. Ellos les compraron a sus productores más pequeños la comida que usaron para darla a los que la necesitaban. En México, un programa de asistencia similar, le compra a las grandes compañías.  

Saludos cordiales.

M.V.Z. Moisés Gómez Porchini

After five years of piloting smallholder-friendly procurement models in 20 diverse countries, Purchase for Progress (P4P) has released a new report reviewing how market development can and cannot promote women’s empowerment based upon five years of field experience.

We have summarized our key findings in regards to approaches most successful in promoting the equality of female farmers. If you are interested you can read more about our findings in the full report P4P’s Women’s Empowerment Pathways: Roadblocks and Successes

Context-specific action plans: 

In order to empower women economically, the underlying causes of income inequalities must be addressed. Due to the immense variation between culture, religion, and infrastructure which can exist even in areas only a few miles apart, strategies to empower women farmers cannot be ‘one-size-fits-all’. Implementation must be informed by country-level, context- and culturally-specific assessments to determine the needs of women farmers on a community, regional and country level in order to tailor approaches which will address underlying causes of inequality while ensuring women’s well-being. This should be informed by a broader gender strategy which establishes long-term goals and guides the intervention.

Targeting women farmers:

Targeting women farmers can be challenging, because they may not be active in farmers’ organizations, and often produce crops for household consumption rather than for sale. Additionally, women farmers take on different and often overlapping roles; contributing their labour as unpaid family workers, taking on farm work as casual agricultural labourers, and sometimes as the principal producers of crops.  Women in the different roles will have different needs and interests and it is important to target support accordingly.

Equipment and capacity development:

Labour and time saving technologies and practices that contribute to reducing women’s workload and save them time are an important aspect to address if market development programmes are to succeed in empowering women, both socially and economically. Women also need assistance to develop the capacity necessary in order to increase their incomes. For this, a vital first step is to provide them with training as well as agricultural inputs and credit so that they can produce more, aggregate their crops, and market them collectively. However, giving women farmers the tools to produce more and market their crops does not guarantee that they will be able to do so or benefit economically from their work.

Inclusion of men:

Effective gender sensitization efforts incorporate the needs of communities, responding to the opportunities, challenges, and recommendations identified by country- and region-specific assessments. One effective method has been to ensure the inclusion of both men and women during gender sensitization, in order to acquire the buy-in of the most influential members of communities, such as religious and customary leaders, who are generally male. Within P4P, this has often been achieved by stressing the economic gains for households and communities which embrace gender equality. In many contexts, these methods have assisted men to understand that women’s empowerment does not mean men’s disempowerment. In the same way, male authorities and community leaders have played vital roles in supporting the increased agricultural production and economic gains of women farmers under the P4P pilot.

Be aware of the risks:

By overlooking generations-old cultural norms, initiatives which seek to empower women can cause social isolation and risk the safety of participants. Malawi is one example where some women farmers reported forceful resistance at household level, as the male heads of household resisted their wives’ efforts to independently earn and control income.  This highlights the importance of carefully designing culturally and context appropriate interventions in order to ensure the safety of women participants. Household negotiation is a powerful tool which can assist women to strategically gain voice and influence, while simultaneously reducing pressure within their households.

Tools for household negotiation:

A household negotiation approach emphasizes the inclusive management of household resources, assisting women and men to improve their collaboration at a household level. A woman farmer and field monitor named Mazouma, from Burkina Faso, says that in her community, many women are now able make family decisions in collaboration with their husbands, making it easier to manage their income. She also says that this has led to the increased inclusion of women in decision-making and planning in their farmers’ organizations and communities.

Any assessment of gender achievements must go beyond counting the number of women vs men involved. Nuanced examinations will inform new methods to more effectively facilitate the empowerment of women farmers. One such lesson learned for WFP was the importance of emphasizing the procurement of traditional “women’s crops”, such as niébé, in order to best increase women’s participation to sales.

4. Please share any relevant case studies about empowering women and youth in agriculture to achieve better food security.

While working with P4P, one of the most inspiring women I've met was Mazouma Sanou, a farmer from Burkina Faso. She spoke about her experience at P4P's 2014 Annual Consultation.

Mazouma is married and the mother of three children. She's a member of a P4P-supported cooperative union called UPPA-Houet, which has 20,500 members, 11,000 of whom are women. Mazouma contributes maize, sorghum, and niébé (cowpeas) to her union’s sales to WFP.

Mazouma also works as a field monitor paid by WFP and OXFAM to coach 25 rural women’s groups affiliated to her union, assisting them to produce and earn more. She works as an intermediary between groups and partners, and assists women to better organize their groups. She also supports them throughout the production process, making sure their products meet standards and working with them to improve their marketing and gain access to credit.

Mazouma says that since their involvement in P4P, many women are able to make family decisions in collaboration with their husbands. She states that this has made income management easier, allowing families to plan for the possibility of unexpected illness, and to set aside money for enrolling their children in school.

“Women have to help educate their husbands. Dialogue can certainly change attitudes, but you can’t command people to do things,” she says. “I ask the woman ‘if you get that money, what will you do,’ and she says ‘help the children,’ so I say ‘your husband can take another wife but your children can’t have another mother. Your children can really benefit from this.’”

When asked about the future of her cooperative, Mazouma says, “from the very start P4P has been a school where we have learned how to improve our work, how to improve quality. I think we need more training, so women can help women train each other and develop their work.”

“If you help a man you help one family, if you help a woman you help the country.”

(Read more about Mazouma in this interview)

In our work in Papua New Guinea (PNG), funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), we find a whole family approach essential for releasing women and girls to participate fully in the horticultural supply chain. As endorsed by our PNG research partners, if men appreciate the value to the  household economy of releasing women from domestic tasks to undertake smallholder farming, then men are cooperative with the empowerment of women. Our methodology, because of low literacy rates in many villages, reflects visual ethnography techniques, such as colourful posters depicting the local supply or value chain, photovoice or drawing. Taking an assets based approach to begin with assists out-of-country researchers to appreciate the knowledge, skills and technologies already present that may be built upon. Only then do we canvas training needs in horticulture, marketing and business practices. It is of course critical to follow-up, on-site, all training to see what has been adopted or adapted and what impact this has had on production, marketing and sales of vegetables. However, ensuring the human resources from in-country researchers and trainers to do this is the biggest challenge, in terms of cost and people power.

Policy change is elusive, sometimes seen to be interfering, but increasingly essential to improving women's and girl's access to education, agricultural training programs and land. Collaborative enterprises are starting to work in the Central Province of PNG where young women in Kerekadi - as one outcome of training - are sharing land and human resources to improve production (e.g. letting 'gardens' lie fallow) and marketing. Older women act as cooks and child minders, while the younger stronger women tend the gardens for soil preparation, irrigation, pest and disease managment, harvesting and marketing.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions, and for maintaining such a lively discussion! Commentators have offered great suggestions for legal, policy, economic, educational, and grass roots measures to increase the resources available women and young farmers.

Dr. Santosh Kumar Mishra shared strengthening the technical and entrepreneurial skills of young people is of paramount importance in rural areas, where literacy and training rates are often lower than elsewhere. Farmer field schools are platforms for training and experience-sharing between farmers and have proven effective in knowledge, technology and innovation dissemination.

Jim Currie acknowledges the age-old desire to provide “something better” for one’s children, but disagrees that this means a non-agricultural occupation. He shares that it may be possible to adapt the 4H model to serve and encourage youth in developing countries to stick with agricultural vocations. And moreover, the education system needs to produce more trainers to address the interests and needs of rural youth.

John Weatherhogg suggested finding opportunities for rural youth through hired agricultural services. For example, youth can hire a piece of machinery and charge as a contractor to till the fields of other community members, providing not only a valuable service but also creating a prestigious career for themselves.

And governments can help to make rural life appealing by connecting rural youth to technology that improves agriculture yields and also digitally connects them to the outside world. Improving infrastructure for cell phone coverage and internet accessibility is paramount to making this happen.

Simple innovations like raised beds can relieve many of the physical hardships associated with agricultural labor, making fieldwork for women and youth less draining.

Readers shared that gender sensitivity trainings are important to highlight the contributions of female community members to men. But in some contexts, women-only groups can provide enabling spaces where marginalized women can gain self-esteem, confidence, and skills by creating a space for them to identify their needs, understand their rights, and begin to articulate their demands.

Luis Sáez Tonacca described the experiences of a group of women in central Chile who, apart from doing the housekeeping, looking after their children, and caring for the sick, also cultivate the land and add value to their products. These are directly sold by themselves and constituting a source of income for their families. If government initiatives granted these groups access to the institutional public or private market and guaranteed a fair price for the sale of their products, they would reap huge profits.

Maria Antip believes that in order to make farming a viable and economically attractive profession for women and rural youth, farmers must have access to productive resources such as financing to purchase inputs, quality seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, and crop insurance. This is particularly true in Sub-Saharan Africa, where a wide yield gap means that not only farmers are unable to become commercial, but they often face hunger and malnutrition themselves.

Subhash Mehta disagrees, stating that governments and donors need to invest in climate friendly, low cost, agro ecological technologies and innovations. These are can be adapted successfully by farmers in the midst changing climates, as opposed to the high cost conventional green revolution technologies based industrial production. This will reduce barriers to entry for youth pursuing agriculture.

Nicolas Ross believes family farming will remain unattractive to women and youth so long as the labor conditions remain as bleak as they are. The promotion of decent rural employment should therefore be an integral part of broader efforts to enhance productivity, incomes, and food security among family farmers.

Several readers expressed that governments should design educational curriculums that clearly demonstrate that all food products are derived from farming activities and that agriculture is the heart of development and food provision. By creating a food culture, agricultural appreciation may rise.

Thank you for your comments--keep them coming! I appreciate your contributions and thank you again for engaging in the discussion!

All the best,

Danielle Nierenberg

[email protected]

www.foodtank.com

Work on family farms is often characterized by inadequate remuneration and poor working conditions. Most of the world’s poor family farms are small-scale operations with low yields and productivity levels. This is typically associated with poor working conditions, as family members often engage in long, arduous and sometimes hazardous work to cut costs and keep the farm viable in the short run.

This dynamic has constrained family members’ productive potential and is one of the principal reasons that so many young women and men are uninterested in taking over their families’ farms. Poor working conditions undermine family members’ well-being and ability to develop human capital, reinforcing a vicious cycle of rural poverty. Because of intra-household dynamics, women and children are often disproportionately affected. Meanwhile, it is this low productivity, harsh working conditions and lack of opportunity that have turned so many young people away from pursuing careers in family farming, and in the agricultural sector more generally.

To help farming families break out of poverty, and thereby draw young women and men back into agriculture, support for family farms and the Decent Work Agenda must go hand in hand. Productivity gains must translate into improved working conditions if families – particularly women and children – are to accumulate the human capital needed to realize their full productive potential. Only then will family farming offer the kind of appealing and well-remunerated work to which young people aspire. The promotion of decent rural employment should therefore be an integral part of broader efforts to enhance productivity, incomes and food security among family farmers.

Elisenda Estruch-Puertas and Nicholas Ross, FAO, Italy

For more information, see FAO’s recently published brief, Turning family farm activity into decent work.

Please check out the Danish-run women empowering organic agriculture- and school meal-project in southern Nepal on this blog (the text is in Danish however, but the blog contains several photos that document the work in progress): http://skolemadtilnepal.wordpress.com

Sincerely, Sara Cox

In addition to being a more attractive alternative to factory farming where how a product receives the greatest attention rather than to its taste and flavour, family farming offers several attractive features:

1. It can serve as an upholder of bio-diversity in food crops and farm animals.
2. It can produce food of higher quality with respect to flavour and safety.
3. Its continuance reduces urban congestion.
4. Environmentally sustainable agriculture is easier to sustain at this level.

I think our current education strategy everywhere on earth has done a great deal of harm in deprecating agriculture in general and family  farming in particular by over-emphasising the important of technology and trade as the main areas of one's education.

I am convinced that it is high time to emphasise that agriculture has an indisputable logical priority in education everywhere. This will enable people to understand the obvious, which appears to be not very easy.

Then, it is important that the politicians are made to grasp the four benefits of continued family farming. Iformation dissemination by say the FAO to ministers of agriculture, and general public etc., would be of use here.

I can envisage two legal measures that may be required for the continued existence of family farming.

The first would be useless unless family farmers themselves understand the need for it, viz., a family farm has to be of a certain size if it is to remain a thriving entity. Inheritence laws in many countries allow small farms to be divided among the children of a family in equal shares, which results in their fragmentation into minute  bits.

Prevention of this by some appropriate legal means  seems to be absolutely necessary. However, it must include some equitable mechanism to compensate those who will be denied a portion of their non-movable patrimony.

Likewise, legal measures to sustain a family farm even when a creditor demands it foreclosure in lieu of a debt might be required in some cases. A loan transfer mechanism that does not entail burdensome interests  may prove useful here.

Effective agricultural help at local level may be organised by the authorities to sustain family farming in many ways.

Family farmers within a given area would greatly benefit if they organise themselves into co-operatives to make common purchases as well as to sell their products. Moreover, they may also serve as fora for thrashing out what represents a local best practice, how to bring about improvements, etc.

Thank you.

Lal Manavado.