ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED. LIMITED SPACES: 50

Farmer-to-farmer learning is a pillar of the food sovereignty and agroecology movements, enabling territorially-specific learning and alliance-building to support farmers’ livelihoods and broader socio-political transformations. Most accounts of experiences in this field are based on rural contexts and rural farm models. However, the broadening food sovereignty and agroecology movement is also reaching out to urban and peri-urban farmers, some of whom were once rural and found themselves absorbed by expanding urbanisation. Their livelihoods are affected by specific problems of neoliberal urbanisation: speculative land markets and gentrification impacting access to land and housing; erosion, pollution, and destruction of living soils; degradation of riverways; fragmentation of farmland and progressive farmers’ isolation from solidarity networks of proximity; lack of farming infrastructure; ongoing deskilling and producers-consumer’s separation. 

In this workshop, the organisers would like to hear from farmers and farmers’ movements of any political and practical training, strategising and learning initiatives that they have/are developing, to address these specific ‘urban’ challenges. This session aims to contribute to the co-creation of a ‘toolbox’ of strategies for shaping a political urban agroecology. The organisers will begin the session sharing some experiences drawn from the www.urbanisinginplace.org project. Participants are encouraged to prepare a 5-10 minute account of their experience.

This session will be of interest to farmers and activists engaged in farmer training and in the support and empowerment of peri-urban and urban agroecological farmers.