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Agroecology has gained ground in recent years as the need to transform our agrifood system becomes increasingly clear. The food and financial crises of 2008, and the deepening climate and environmental crises, have revealed deep challenges for the way we produce and consume food. Global agrarian justice and food sovereignty movements, organised in global convergences like the Nyéléni Forum, have emphasised the importance of agroecology in this transformation. They highlight the political nature of agroecology: ‘it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society'.

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This discussion paper explores the process known as “financialization”. It intends to provide a basis for people’s movements, grassroots activists and other civil society organizations (CSOs) to build or strengthen their knowledge and to develop strategies to resist, reverse and prevent financialization.

Today the Nyéléni Food Sovereignty Movement in Europe and Central Asia (Nyéléni ECA) launches a practical tool to support and strengthen land struggles for small and medium-scale food producers and local communities.

Plans for reforming food and farming policies, in particular the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), feature digitalisation as a universal solution for more environmentally and pollinator-friendly farming. This new report warns however that digital farming, instead of benefiting the climate and environment, could further tighten the stranglehold of corporations on our food.

“Local communities on all continents are being displaced and impoverished by the combined actions of top down, ‘people-out’ fortress conservation and the expansion of industrial agriculture. This silent violence can be reversed by strengthening self-determining indigenous and community conserved areas as well as local food sovereignty. This is all about re-inventing conservation and development for a just and sustainable world”. – Michel Pimbert

This document intends to inform CSM positions towards the  upcoming CFS Policy Process on Agroecology and other innovations. A shorter version of this vision is also included in the new edition 2019 of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition  This text is the outcome of an incredible collective work and was adopted by the CSM Women Working Group that counts with 190 participating organisations in August 2019. It wouldn’t have been possible without the commitment and engagement of many special women.

The EU must urgently reform damaging farming subsidies to stand a chance of saving nature, preventing the worst effects of climate change and reviving small farms and our rural regions, according to the Agriculture Atlas 2019 – a unique publication of facts and figures on the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Friends of the Earth Europe and BirdLife Europe.

The Agriculture Atlas 2019 shows that:

Sustainable small farmers should be put at the core of EU agricultural policy, according to a new paper released today by the Nyeleni Europe and Central Asia Platform for Food Sovereignty [1]. The strongly documented publication comes ahead of a key vote in the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee in early April, and represents the position of a pan-European coalition of farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples and environmental organizations in regards to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

It is possible for communities, regions and whole countries to fundamentally redesign their food and farming systems – but doing so requires changes in the way communities envision their food systems, the way knowledge is shared, the way that food systems are governed, and the values underpinning them.

This was the message from IPES-Food’s new report, Breaking away from industrial food and farming systems: Seven case studies of agroecological transition.

Food Sovereignty NOW! An in-depth guide

In the following publication, the European Coordination Via Campesina delivers a thorough account of the concept of Food Sovereignty, an approach and process developed by the people most threatened by the processes of the consolidation of power in food and agricultural systems: peasant farmers. Instead of being destroyed by the forces of history they are offering a proposal to solve the multiple crises which humanity is facing.