Creating city region food systems
<p>As cities continue to expand and ever more people migrate to urban areas, current unsustainable patterns of urbanisation and ineffective policies are no longer acceptable. The typical approaches that
Farming Matters
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Growing a sense of place and community in Cape Town
<p>The Harvest of Hope initiative is a vegetable box scheme in Cape Town, South Africa, set up as a social enterprise by a local NGO. By promoting ecological urban farming, Abalimi Bezekhaya (meaning ‘Farmers
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Moving from vulnerability to resilience in Africa
In August 2012, the Seidu family had to cope with the bad harvest. Like many farming families in northern Ghana, they had to adopt the ‘one-zero-one’ strategy for the children and the ‘zero-zero-one’ strategy
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Local food systems in times of economic crisis
The Alentejo is the largest and poorest region of Portugal. Cooperatives and other social initiatives that arose after the Carnation Revolution in 1974 were later closed under pressure from the European
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The world’s largest safety net for family farmers?
India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is the largest public-works based employment programme in the world. Unanimously enacted by the Indian parliament in 2005, implementation
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Bees bring a new buzz to family farming in Zimbabwe
One way that family farmers improve their resilience to both climatic and economic shocks is to diversify what is produced. More and different crops and livestock, particularly local varieties and breeds
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Home nurseries: Viable businesses with environmental awareness
Butana is a dry plateau in northern Sudan, east of the river Nile. Covering 65,000 square kilometres, less than 10% can be described as ‘woodland’ in the vaguest sense of the word, and even these trees
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How Yapuchiris build climate resilience
Near Cochabamba in Bolivia’s Andean high plateau, a group of agroecological farmers are leading the way by developing and sharing innovative practices that help their communities break out of the vicious cycle of increased poverty and vulnerability. But challenges remain. Read this story published in Farming Matters, June 2014.
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Gaining control : "Re-peasantisation" in Araponga
Innovative policies in Brazil, such as the Zero Hunger Programme, have significantly reduced poverty in the past decade. Yet, land distribution remains a serious challenge: 46% of all land is controlled
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“Communities are smart enough to make the right choices”
Since the mid-1990s, the International Land Coalition (ILC) has been working to promote equitable and secure access to land for poor men and women in order to combat poverty and achieve food security.