A3. Agroecology

ANPFA has mobilized its cadres and district organizations for search, rescue, and relief work alongside security forces and local government. Its provincial committees in Bagmati are coordinating support for displaced families.

The post Nepal Flash Floods: Early Assessment by ANPFA Indicates Extensive Damage in Villages Near the Border appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Haiti through the eyes of a peasant woman and activist from Tèt Kolé, a member organization of LVC. From the countryside, she speaks to us about food sovereignty, agrarian reform, feminism and resistance, and shows us another side of Haiti, far from the dominant narratives.

The post Haiti: “We are the ones who produce food, we are the force of the land and of life.” appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) invites applications from qualified African researchers to support the first phase of the African Food Baskets initiative. Ten Country Researchers will be selected—one from each participating country—to document the foods, dishes, beverages, recipes, food sources, menus, stories, proverbs and cultural knowledge that shape their country’s food heritage.

The initiative forms part of the TAFS Project, funded by Sida, and contributes to AFSA’s My Food Is African campaign. It aims to preserve and promote African food knowledge while building a continental resource for advocacy, research, education, communication and policy engagement.

The first phase will cover ten countries, selected to ensure regional balance across Africa and representation of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone contexts. The final list of participating countries will be determined after the applications have been reviewed.

Using the African Food Baskets KoboToolbox Toolkit, selected researchers will work with communities and local knowledge holders to document their country’s food basket. The assignment will include community engagement, field data collection, photography, validation of findings, and submission of a complete country data package and brief narrative report.

Applications must be submitted to afsa@afsafrica.org by 6 September 2026 and may be submitted in English, French or Portuguese.

Please refer to the full Terms of Reference (TOR) for details on the scope of work, eligibility criteria, deliverables, timeline, selection process and application requirements.

Download the Terms of Reference:
[English] | [French]

By mid-2026, Honduras was under a far-right government that had intensified agrarian conflict, deepening criminalization, persecution, and violence in rural areas. On May 21, 20 peasants were killed in the village of Rigores, in Trujillo, Colón, in the Bajo Aguán region. “This tragedy brings mourning not only to Honduras, but to the entire Mesoamerican and Latin American peasant movement,”

The post Honduras: “This Law Legalizes the Dispossession of Communities From Their Territories” appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

AFSA and partners launch a three-day gathering to advance agroecology, food sovereignty, biodiversity and climate justice across the Congo Basin

Yaoundé, Cameroon — 25 August 2026 — The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), together with the Concertation Nationale des Organisations Paysannes au Cameroun (CNOP-CAM) and Congo Basin partners, today officially opens the Second Congo Basin Convening — “Securing the Heart of Africa: People, Nature, Food and Climate Resilience” — running from 25 to 27 August 2026 at the Franco Hôtel in Yaoundé.

Three years after the inaugural Congo Basin Summit in Kinshasa, DRC (August 2023), this second gathering brings together an estimated 120 delegates from the six Congo Basin countries — Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea — alongside representatives from Angola, Chad, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. Governments, farmer organisations, Indigenous Peoples, women’s and youth movements, researchers, financial partners and civil society will spend three days reviewing progress since Kinshasa and charting a shared regional roadmap for inclusive agroecology, sustainable food systems, biodiversity conservation and climate justice.

The Convening will be officially opened by His Excellency Gabriel Mbaïrobe, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of the Republic of Cameroon, whose government graciously agreed to host the gathering. Ahead of today’s opening, the AFSA delegation briefed the Minister on the Convening’s preparations and final agenda, and thanked the Government of Cameroon for its support.

Day One brings the region’s story into focus. Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator of AFSA, will introduce the Alliance’s continental work; Joséphine Atangana, AFSA’s Focal Point for the Congo Basin, will assess the achievements of the past three years and outline what this Convening aims to deliver; and Elisabeth Atangana, President of CNOP-CAM and Treasurer of the AFSA Board of Directors, will deliver welcome remarks ahead of the Minister’s official opening address. The day continues with plenary sessions on ecological resilience and the Congo Basin’s financing needs, a community agroecology exhibition, and a Cameroonian cultural dinner in the evening.

“Agroecology represents an alternative that promotes biodiversity, nourishes the soil, respects indigenous and local knowledge, and strengthens local economies,” says Dr Million Belay, AFSA’s General Coordinator.

Over the following two days, delegates will work through thematic sessions on land rights, climate justice and resource mobilisation, before adopting the Yaoundé 2026 Declaration and a regional action roadmap on 27 August.

About AFSA The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) is the continent’s largest civil society platform advocating for food sovereignty and agroecology, uniting 48 member alliances active in 50 African countries and reaching more than 200 million people.

Press contact
Patricia Mengong — +237 672 38 26 26
Charles Onana — +237 699 51 63 45

O‘ahu is building its first comprehensive plan focused on food systems. It is the local government’s first attempt at formalizing its role in identifying and addressing food and agriculture issues on the Hawaiian island.

The five-year Oʻahu Food Systems Plan—led by the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency (CCSR)—outlines 10 broad strategies for the island’s government agencies. Following the release of the draft plan in May, CCSR received hundreds of comments during its public comment phase, ranging from calls for more accountability mechanisms to clarification on the plan’s integration of Hawaiian values. The office now works to incorporate suggestions and get a final draft adopted by the Honolulu City Council by the end of the year, according to CCSR’s Food Systems Fellow Kaitlyn Judd. 

The plan’s strategies primarily focus on reducing food insecurity, promoting food sovereignty, and ensuring the long-term resilience of Oʻahu’s natural resources and small food producers.  One of CCSR’s first priorities is the creation of a working group across numerous Oʻahu public agencies, which would help the government avoid redundant or conflicting programs as well as compile resources, knowledge, and funding.  

“A key goal is building the capacity needed to effectively coordinate and implement these actions,” Judd tells Food Tank. “The collaborative process used to develop the draft plan has already helped to establish connections between departments and provide a solid foundation for this ongoing coordination.” 

The draft plan contains around 70 actions for local government, each of which belongs to one of the 10 strategies. Many proposals build on existing government and nonprofit work to address gaps in the island’s food system. 

One action under the strategy to “enhance market opportunities and value chain coordination for local food,” for example, would expand the O‘ahu Good Food Program, which aims to support local business by making it easier for institutions to buy food from O‘ahu’s small and medium-sized producers at scale. In Hawaiʻi, where around 90 percent of food is imported, according to the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, local institutional purchasing offers a unique opportunity to boost the state’s economy and build food system resilience.

Every year, food producers brace for the impacts of seasonal Kona low storms, which can cause massive structural damage and financial losses. Farmers in Hawaiʻi also pay higher labor costs than those on the U.S. mainland due to the smaller scale of their agriculture operations and struggle to compete with lower prices from producers in states like California, according to Albie Miles—a sustainable food systems professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at West O‘ahu and the Director of its Transforming Hawaiʻi’s Food System Together initiative.    

“You start to combine these things—high rates of household food insecurity, low rates of emergency and commercial food storage, critical points of vulnerability on the south shore of O‘ahu,” Miles tells Food Tank. “If any of that is disturbed as a result of a hurricane, for example, then the structural bottleneck—the port of Honolulu—is disrupted, and that interferes with our ability to import and distribute food across the entire state.”

Other non-governmental organizations, including the Hawai‘i Good Food Alliance (HGFA), are partnering directly with CCSR to carry out the plan’s action items. Around one in three households in Hawaiʻi experience food insecurity—nearly triple the national average, per the Hawaiʻi Food Bank’s most recent data. As part of its strategy on food security, CCSR is leveraging services provided by the HGFA to reduce administrative and logistical barriers that might prevent farmers markets and other food hubs from accepting federal food assistance benefits.

Another action item in the strategy details how local government will continue to explore subway stations as “visible demonstrations of sustainable food practices,” like hosting food distribution events and growing culturally significant plants. In its strategy focused on food-producing gardens, the plan also identifies public housing as a crucial site for community gardening, and suggests that Honolulu pursue public and private funding for growing spaces. Proposals like these identify elements of the built environment as potential places for food systems change.

If adopted by Honolulu City Council, the Oʻahu Food Systems Plan will likely become the island’s primary outline for addressing a range of agriculture and food issues over the next five years. Though its action items would remain as guidance, not requirements, Judd says the plan can serve as a long-term framework and path toward idea-sharing across disciplines and sectors.

“Unless there are planning processes like the Oʻahu Food Systems Plan or other state and regional food system planning initiatives to implement policy recommendations, all this research that happens in higher education just sits there and it’s never implemented into actionable strategies,” Miles says.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of the City and County of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency

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Walk into any of the world’s great seed banks, and you will find one of humanity’s quietest triumphs.

Within carefully monitored facilities are millions of seeds, protected as a vital safeguard against war, climate change, disease, and loss. Governments, scientists, farmers, nonprofits, Indigenous communities, and others have spent decades building an extraordinary safety net for our food system.

This work is essential. But it is not enough.

Every time I stand in one of these collections, I find myself asking a singular question. It’s not, “Have we saved enough seeds?” Instead, it’s, “Who will carry these seeds forward?”

For decades, much of the conversation about agricultural biodiversity has centered on preservation. How many varieties have been collected? How many are safely stored? How many have been documented, cataloged, and protected?

These are important questions. But seeds have never saved themselves.

Every variety that still exists today survived because someone, somewhere, decided it was worth growing for one more season. Perhaps it produced through a drought. Perhaps it thrived in a mountain valley where little else would. Perhaps it made the best sauce, the sweetest pie, or the meal that brought a family together every August.

Long before there were professional plant breeders and modern gene banks, Indigenous peoples, and generations of farmers, gardeners, cooks, neighbors, and grandparents were making careful seed-saving choices year after year.

They selected the plants that performed well, tasted good, or held meaning for their communities. They saved those seeds and passed them on.

We often call these varieties “heirlooms,” a word that can make them sound like antiques. But heirlooms are not objects preserved behind glass. They are the result of continuous observation, adaptation, and innovation by dedicated people.

Every year someone selected the best of them. Every year someone decided they were worth saving again. That is not nostalgia. It is one of the longest-running experiments in human history.

Today, we rightly celebrate new agricultural technologies and advances in plant breeding. They can also help farmers respond to changing climates, emerging pests, disease, and shifting production needs.

But somewhere along the way, we began to assume that newer automatically means better.

Better for whom?

Better for shipping across a continent? Better for mechanical harvest? Better for shelf life? Sometimes the answer is yes. But what about flavor? What about local adaptation developed over generations by people who knew their land intimately? What about the bean a community continued to grow because nothing else matched its taste or cultural significance?

Those choices contain knowledge. And that knowledge ought to help guide the future of agriculture alongside the latest scientific breakthroughs.

Preserving this knowledge has always been a shared responsibility. Indigenous communities, farmers, gardeners, seed libraries, nonprofit organizations, public gene banks, and universities all serve as bridges between generations. They carry forward genetic material along with the stories, practices, relationships, and ways of understanding the land connected to it.

Much of this work happens quietly and with modest resources, even though it sits at the intersection of some of the defining challenges of our time: food security, climate resilience, biodiversity, and cultural survival.

We have invested in preserving seeds. We must also invest just as deliberately in the people who will keep them alive and useful.

It means creating opportunities for young farmers and gardeners to learn how to select, save, and share seeds. It means making collections more accessible to the communities and growers who can put them to use. And it means supporting the next generation of plant breeders and gene bank professionals.

It also means recognizing that chefs, seed companies, educators, and eaters have roles to play. When people choose diverse crops, ask where their food comes from, grow unfamiliar varieties, or support organizations maintaining public collections, they help create a future for those seeds.

Agricultural biodiversity is not something we simply store. It is something we participate in.

A seed may remain alive in a freezer for a century, but its fullest value is realized when someone plants it. When someone tastes it. When someone observes how it responds to a changing environment. When someone decides, among all the other options available, “This one is worth saving and growing again.”

That decision, repeated, is how diversity has always moved through history.

The most compelling question before us today is not whether we can preserve the biological diversity we have inherited. It is whether we can inspire enough people to see themselves as part of its future.

Every generation receives this extraordinary inheritance. No generation can claim it as its achievement alone. We borrow it from those who came before us, add our own chapter, and pass it along.

The future of crop diversity will not be decided by freezers, databases, or scientific breakthroughs alone. It will be decided by people—by what we choose to grow, eat, share, study, support, and save.

Who will carry the diversity forward?

The answer must be all of us.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of 

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Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

U.N. Conference on Drought and Desertification Begins

The 17th session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) kicked off this week, where decision makers are gathering in Mongolia to tackle drought and land degradation. 

WWF calls drought, which dries soils and makes farming more uncertain, “one of the clearest ways people feel climate change.” Today, land degradation and drought are estimated to cost the global economy nearly US$900 billion every year, affecting up to 40 per cent of the world’s land and 3.2 billion people, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. 

During the conference, governments, investors, businesses, scientists, and civil society organizations will discuss solutions to restore lands. 

A major focus at this year’s Conference is to allocate the US$12 billion that was pledged by countries and institutions under the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership two years ago at COP16. The funds are intended to help 74 countries stricken by drought and land degradation. Although there’s still a long way to go to secure the finance needed—an estimated $2.6 trillion by 2030 according to the UNCCD—to restore the world’s lands, it’s a welcome step in the right direction. 

Yasmine Fouad, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, also reports that more than 70 countries submitted their drought management plans, which now need to be converted into projects for implementation.

NGOs Mobilize to Help Earthquake Victims

Humanitarian organizations are stepping in to help communities recover following major earthquakes in Colombia and Indonesia.

The earthquake in Western Colombia—one of the largest the country has seen in years—has resulted in around 300 deaths, more than 4,000 injuries, and the destruction of over 26,000 homes. And in Indonesia, just days before independence day celebrations, a major earthquake struck the island of Flores. More than 60 people have died and around 5,000 people have been displaced from their homes. Landslides have made it harder to deliver much-needed aid as fears of starvation grow. 

The United Nations announced it is scaling up humanitarian assistance in Colombia to reach those affected by the disaster. Done directly to the World Food Programme’s efforts clicking HERE. And World Central Kitchen is on the ground in Colombia and Indonesia, working to serve meals to people in need as quickly as possible. Support their work at wck.org.

Women Fishers in sub-Saharan Africa Cut Post-Harvest Losses

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women fishers face limited access to the technology, storage facilities, processing equipment, and business training. This leads to higher post-harvest losses compared to their male counterparts and leaves them with lower quality products and reduced incomes. WorldFish wants to change that.

In Tanzania, for example, the research center is helping seaweed farmers and entrepreneurs connect with equipment to develop products that can be sold for more than raw seaweed. Women are also receiving training on certification, marketing, and business management. And along the coast of Kenya, new solar-powered freezers are helping fishers reduce spoilage, giving women more flexibility over when they sell their product.

“The seaweed milling machine has saved me time and money,” says Tanzanian seaweed processor and trader Rehema Mkweka. “I can now process my seaweed close to home and produce higher-value products.”

New Resource Helps Decision Makers Target Crops for Investment

The new Priority List from the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is helping decision makers identify the crops that are most worth investing in.

GAIN’s resource uses a holistic system to analyze nearly 800 locally available foods in low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The assessment will help decision makers identify the most nutritious ones to support through programs and policies. Many of the top scorers from GAIN’s list are traditional foods with particularly high nutrient density, such as the African star apple and amaranth leaves. 

GAIN also offers two complementary tools to ensure the Priority List has the greatest possible impact. One allows users to compare foods to understand how they’ll perform when matched with a particular program or policy goal. The second compares nutritional value with environmental impact, focusing on food systems in three countries: Indonesia, Kenya, and Rwanda. 

California Begins Phasing Out Paraquat

The state of California is beginning to phase out the use of paraquat, a weedkiller linked to Parkinson’s disease, thyroid disease, childhood leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and birth defects.

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation announced that all manufacturers of pesticide products containing the active ingredient paraquat have voluntarily cancelled their product registrations, which allow them to sell the chemical in the state. 

The move sends “a powerful message that there is no place for paraquat in modern agriculture,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro, Environmental Working Group’s Senior Vice President for California. 

The last companies to cancel their registrations now have two years before they must stop selling paraquat-based products.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Jame Baltz, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: Earthquake Recovery, Cutting Food Loss, Phasing Out Paraquat appeared first on Food Tank.

A version of this piece was featured in Food Tank’s newsletter, released weekly on Thursdays. To make sure it lands straight in your inbox and to be among the first to receive it, subscribe now by clicking here.

For nearly a year now, Food Tank has been bringing our live storytelling series “Voices of Farmers: A Love Story” around the world.

On sold-out stages across three continents just in the past year alone—including Sundance, London Climate Action Week, SXSW, Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, Climate Week NYC, and Adelaide Fringe in Australia—farmers have shared moving personal stories of deep connections to the land and to our food.

I love this storytelling style, because it accomplishes something bigger than just a one-night event. For farmers, it’s a launchpad to help audiences understand the many ways farmers power the food system, nourish their communities, and lead climate-smart innovation. And each of us listening can channel the emotion and passion we’re hearing onstage into transformative action steps in our own communities and professional worlds.

Next Tuesday, Aug. 25, we’re heading to Minneapolis for Celebrating Minnesota’s Farmers: A Love Story, in partnership with the City of Minneapolis, the Minnesota Farmers Union, and Niman Ranch. The event starts at 6 p.m. at the gorgeous Minneapolis Central Library, and you can reserve your FREE spot by CLICKING HERE.

Our farmer storytellers include fourth-generation organic dairy farmer Emily Zweber, food systems advocate and urban farmer Sina War, regenerative farmer and on-the-ground educator Trisha Zachman, organic farmer and trailblazing Hmong entrepreneur Mhonpaj Lee, third-generation Cameroonian farmer Anita Nain Fondikum, and seventh-generation livestock farmer and advocate Maddie Hokanson. They are all amazing!

In addition, we’ll have a fireside chat with celebrity chef and U.N. Goodwill Ambassador Andrew Zimmern and hear remarks from speakers including Ed Eiffler-Jaramillo, City of Minneapolis Mayor’s Office; Victor Stefanescu, Star Tribune; Zoe Hollomon, Midwest Farmers of Color; Gary Wertish, Minnesota Farmers Union; Mark Ritchie, Former Minnesota Secretary of State; Thom Petersen, Minnesota Commissioner of Agriculture; and State Representative Pam Altendorf. We’re also honored to have video remarks from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Governor Tim Walz, and Congresswoman Kelly Morrison.

The whole show is dramaturged and directed by my Food Tank co-founder Bernard Pollack! We’ll also be debuting original Food Tank shorts created by filmmaker Haven Worley to accompany the farmers’ stories. (Haven also directed Food Tank’s original documentary short “Irish Farmers: A Love Story,” which began as a farmer storytelling theater event in Dublin and is now being accepted into major festivals. You can watch it HERE with the special password Irishfarmers.)

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, I know firsthand that this part of the United States is not a monolith or “flyover country”—it’s home to resilient, complex, forward-looking communities that are globally connected but deeply rooted. I’m so excited to hear these farmers’ stories and to share them with all of you!

If you live in Minnesota, I hope you’ll join us. And if you don’t live in Minnesota, this event is worth the drive—and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that we Midwesterners aren’t afraid of a good road trip! So CLICK HERE again to grab a free ticket, and I’ll see you next week.

And looking forward to the rest of the year, we hope you’ll join us for more farmer storytelling. To kick off Climate Week NYC, in partnership with Whole Foods on Sunday, September 20, we’re excited to present “Putting Farmers First: How Young Farmers are Shaping the Future of Food,” which you can find out more about HERE. And as part of the International Year of the Woman Farmer, we’re heading to Capitol Hill in partnership with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on December 7 as part of the 2nd Annual Food and Agriculture Policy Summit Week. Registration will open soon HERE.

We also bring you on-the-ground stories of family farmers as part of our regular Farmer Friday series, which you can find on FoodTank.com.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Frances Gunn, Unsplash

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The webinar provided a forum for farmers’ organisations, cooperatives, academics and international institutions from various countries to share experiences and learn from one another.

The post SPI, Indonesia: Agricultural Cooperatives the Cornerstone of Land Reform and Food Sovereignty appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

In Paraguay, the National Peasants’ Federation (FNC), condemns the murder of the Indigenous leader and teacher . It also expresses its deep concern regarding the situation facing indigenous and peasant communities across the country.

The post Paraguay : FNC Condemns the Killing of a Peasant leader, Denounces Criminalization appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

FENOCIN in light of recent events that undermine the constitutional rule of law, justice and collective rights in Ecuador, , unanimously express its strong rejection of the pre-trial detention order against its president, Guido Perugachi

The post Ecuador: FENOCIN denounces political persecution of Guido Perugachi appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation in California is working to scale regenerative land management to improve climate stability while promoting the health of humans, animals, and the planet. 

The Foundation’s home base is an 1,800-acre grass-fed cattle ranch in the San Francisco Bay Area, known as TomKat Ranch. The site serves as a “learning laboratory about regenerative practice to de-risk and broadcast it,” Founder Kat Taylor tells Food Tank. Their goal is to provide an evidence base demonstrating that regenerative models are environmentally beneficial and economically viable. This work is complemented by efforts to advance good policy and build strong markets. 

“Every farm and ranch is a business first,” Taylor explains. “If we don’t sustain them that way, they become imperiled personally, the practice doesn’t scale, and they are subject to competition from the incumbent system.” 

As multiple crises, from wealth consolidation to climate change, come to a head, building regenerative models is a way to create an alternative future that is grounded in resilience. Taylor believes that the time is right to drive these efforts forward, stating, “We have this incredible moment in history to redesign civilization, to protect our values, to still harness the power of capitalism and create an economy that serves civilization, not vice versa.”

But the Foundation realizes they can’t do this alone. “Almost everything we do, we try to do in coalition,” Taylor says. “We are crowdsourcing design solutions at a time that it’s important to rethink and redesign, and we don’t have all the answers.”

This also means working alongside people they may not always agree with. “We are trying to listen deeply, empathize completely, and work with people where they are,” Taylor tells Food Tank. All people, she believes, want the same thing: thriving economies, a healthy planet, land that can be passed on to future generations. 

Listen to the full conversation with Kat Taylor on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg” to hear more about the ways that the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation is helping to mitigate risk for food producers, Taylor’s work to advance school meals for all, and how we return to healthy, safe, and vibrant food and farming systems. 

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of William Milliot, TomKat Ranch

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The Indonesian Peasants’ Union (SPI) expresses its deepest condolences and solidarity following the earthquake that struck the East Nusa Tenggara/Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) region on Saturday (15/8/2026).

The post Indonesia : SPI Calls for Solidarity for Victims of the NTT Earthquake appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Land tenure is the legal or customary framework governing the ownership, control, and transfer of land. Land tenure systems determine who can use land, for how long, and under what conditions.

Secure land tenure refers to the assurance that individuals and communities can exercise recognized rights to access and benefit from land without fear of eviction, displacement, or competing claims. Tenure security varies with local conditions, including legal protections, social recognition, and the institutions that uphold land rights.

Ownership, tenure, or use rights are formally documented for just 35 percent of the world’s land, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). And almost one in four adults worldwide, or 1.1 billion people, believe they may lose rights to some or all of their land or housing in the next five years.

Historically marginalized groups are particularly susceptible to tenure insecurity, often facing disproportionate challenges in accessing and securing land rights. 90 percent of landholdings in low- and middle-income countries are not documented.

Indigenous Peoples and other customary tenure holders hold ownership rights for only one of the 5.5 billion hectares of land that they occupy. And men are more likely than women to own or hold secure rights to land in almost every country with available data.

Meanwhile, population growth and urbanization are driving demand for land, degradation is reducing suitable farmland, and, according to the World Resources Institute, administrative barriers to ownership are growing.

According to international organizations including FAO, UN-Habitat, and Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and research published in the Journal of Land Use Policy and Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, clear, secure, and equitable land tenure and property rights are fundamental to improving food security, reducing poverty, supporting climate resilience, and advancing gender equality.

Land insecurity can lead to lower productivity, says FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero.

Many practices that increase production require investments that may take years to produce returns. Growers may hesitate to invest in infrastructure or soil improvements without certainty that they will retain long-term land access, Nikhita Jain, Senior Urban Agriculture Program Associate at LAFPC, tells Food Tank.

For many rural communities, access to land underpins livelihoods, and insecure tenure can limit economic opportunities and perpetuate poverty. Informal arrangements can also make it harder to access certain grants and government programs that require documentation of land tenure, Jain explains.

By supporting investment in agricultural productivity, improved access to credit and financing, and more stable livelihoods, secure tenure can help reduce vulnerability to poverty and food insecurity. “Secure land tenure is the difference between short-term survival and long-term food security,” says Torero.

Secure land tenure can also support more sustainable agriculture and climate action. Clear, protected rights can encourage farmers to invest in sustainable land management. Clear tenure can also make it easier to identify and manage land for conservation, restoration, and other climate initiatives.

Women produce more than half of all grown food, but rarely own the land they work and often have limited control over its use. “Women feed the world, but we would say that they feed it on somebody else’s land,” Michael Taylor, Secretariat Director of the International Land Coalition, tells Food Tank.

Discriminatory laws and social norms, inheritance and marital property rules, and weak enforcement can limit their rights, contributing to a gender gap that exceeds 20 percent in nearly half of countries with available data.

According to Landesa, an organization that has strengthened land rights for more than 700 million people, at least one-third of married women believe they would lose their land rights if their marriage ends. This insecurity not only restricts economic opportunities, but also increase vulnerability to poverty, hunger, displacement, and violence.

Land tenure is increasingly reflected in global development and climate commitments. U.N. Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, and 5 address secure land rights, including access for small-scale producers and women, while the FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) establishes international guidance for governing tenure. At COP26, the U.N. Climate Conference 2021 (COP26), 141 countries pledged US$1.7 billion to secure Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ land rights.

Experts recommend multiple paths to stronger tenure security. The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty highlights recognizing Indigenous and traditional territories and supporting community-based management. WRI calls for simpler processes for communities to formalize their rights, and measures to reduce imbalances between communities and companies competing for land.

Landesa points to several approaches for strengthening women’s land rights, including improving legal literacy and expanding women’s access to and role in governing land under customary tenure systems.

Society for Conservation Biology researchers caution against one-size-fits-all approaches, recommending that interventions account for local conditions, traditional governance, and customary practices.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Luiza Braun

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As the dusk of summer nears, I feel embodied with a renewed sense of possibility. Summer has a way of inviting us into our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit. With each hike, I feel stronger. I am acutely aware of my heartbeat on steep inclines, sweat rising and drying almost instantly in the summer sun. I am in awe of the orchestra of wildflower bloom, the air alive with aromas of sage, grass, and juniper. Immersion in forests is itself a practice of health.

Summer can bring another kind of abundance through food. Vegetables and fruits that we eagerly await all year pop with the flavors of the landscape. For our family, the long-awaited fruits of the summer are Flathead cherries. Plump, sweet, tart, and minerally. We eat more whole foods grown close to home, carrying memories of soil, season, interactions with other life, and the hands of our community.

This summer, an unknown about my own health shifted the intensity with which I listen to my body. Health is something we wonder about and manage every day, yet sometimes an unknown can bring it into extraordinary focus, reminding us how deeply we value each other and participating in life. It brought me back to three deceptively simple and connected questions: What is health? How do we know what is healthy? And how do we cultivate health?

Across cultures, people have cultivated traditions of health grounded in different epistemologies, worldviews, observations, and forms of evidence. The field of medical anthropology explores this question, examining how health and healing are understood and experienced.

Ayurveda understands health, or svasthya, through balance among body, mind, food, behavior, season, and environment. Food and medicinal plants are integral to maintaining health and treating illness, with transformation central to their effects. The Ayurvedic concept of agni, often translated as digestive fire, considers what we eat and our capacity to digest and transform it, while prana speaks to the vital life force that sustains us. Agni reminds us that the same food may result in different biological exposure in different people depending on their constitution.

Traditional Chinese Medicine and Tibetan medical systems offer their own understandings of balance, including relationships among food, medicinal plants, individual constitution, season, and environment.

Years earlier, during fieldwork with Piaroa and Yekuana Amerindian communities in Venezuela’s Amazonas, I had asked this same question: What is health? Their responses expanded health beyond the individual. Health was collective, expressed through the vitality of families and communities, including the number of people in a community, and through relationships with the landscapes that sustained them. In Amazonian shamanic traditions, health extends further into cosmology. Plants, animals, people, spirits, and landscapes inhabit relational worlds in which healing extends beyond the individual body.

Since 1948, the World Health Organization has defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The NIH Whole Person Health framework similarly considers the whole person, emphasizing interconnected biological, behavioral, social, and environmental domains.

These ways of knowing reveal health as biological, personal, collective, and relational, shaped by what we eat, what our bodies make of it, the communities to which we belong, the living world we inhabit, and what we have access to.

And how do we know what is healthy? People have come to know what heals through observation and experimentation, taste and experience, and knowledge and evidence accumulated across generations. Humans learned to navigate landscapes of bitter, astringent, and potentially toxic plants through their senses and trial and error, discovering that some compounds that deter consumption can also have medicinal properties. This knowledge has shaped what people eat, avoid, and use for healing along a food-to-medicine continuum. This chemical diversity continues to shape medicine, with roughly half of small-molecule drugs tracing their structural origins to natural products.

Biomedical and molecular sciences expand how we know what is healthy through measurement. As a first-year doctoral student, I heard the late food chemist Edwin Frankel lecture on inflammation as a root of disease and the role of foods in exacerbating or mitigating inflammation. Over two decades of evidence later, inflammation has emerged as a biological thread across many chronic diseases, while diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds are associated with lower inflammation and chronic disease risk. Beyond essential nutrients, these foods contain prebiotic fibers, peptides, and diverse bioactive metabolites that interact with inflammatory pathways, metabolism, and the gut microbiome.

Human health also relies on planetary health. Understanding what is healthy means understanding what health looks like in the living landscapes that produce our food, from soil and biodiversity to the fungi, microbes, and other organisms that sustain food systems.

Omics technologies enable precise characterization of the molecular diversity of foods and their interactions across complex diets, revealing distinct biomolecular signatures. These same tools can measure biological responses to what we eat through biomarkers. AI can also connect food molecular patterns to human proteins and pathways. We can further build new evidence by backtracking to existing epidemiological and clinical studies to link molecular signatures of foods and diets with health outcomes. Predictions can then be tested experimentally and clinically, taking us from food molecular composition to biological exposure and health outcomes.

Ultimately, this growing evidence base is powerful for establishing intake ranges for food molecules whose structures and functions we may not yet know and, where scientifically supported, thresholds for harmful and health-supporting biomolecules to inform dietary guidelines and public health recommendations.

Collectively, this is the frontier of understanding food as biological exposure, one where we should dedicate resources, investments, and capacity strengthening toward healthier food systems. This is perhaps what excites me most about this emerging chapter of my career: the possibility of finally understanding the continuum of soil to food to health at unprecedented resolution and translating that knowledge to improve lives for all.

As our capacity for discovery grows, so must our capacity for stewardship. Access and Benefit Sharing, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and attribution must advance alongside discovery.

I also thought deeply about what it means to cultivate health this summer while developing an opening keynote for the WSU Bread Lab’s Grain Gathering, Cultivating Health and Nourishing Community with Food Intelligence. Amid the dreamy, diversified farms of the Skagit Valley, the idea came alive. At six in the morning on the second day of the gathering, farmers, breeders, millers, bakers, researchers, and makers gathered around a wood-fired oven making whole-grain bagels. At the center was one of humanity’s most ancient and essential crops: wheat.

Wheat offers a lens into how we cultivate health. A breeder selects for flavor, resilience, nutrition, and performance. A farmer cultivates that potential through soil, biodiversity, climate, and management. A miller determines what flows through the system, and a baker transforms flour with water, microbes, and heat. Our emerging work through The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) is revealing how the molecular and health attributes of wheat vary among varieties and shift with production and processing practices, including fermentation. This transformation continues when we eat. Our gut microbes transform components of wheat into metabolites that interact with our immune system, metabolism, and cells.

During the bagel breakfast at the Grain Gathering, I was asked many incredible questions, but one made me stop and reflect: What makes you hopeful? In the face of uncertainty, tragedies, suffering, inequity, and threats to human and planetary health, hope itself can feel audacious. I find hope in the expansive possibility of knowing the continuum from soil to food to health at a resolution we have never known before, toward better lives for all. I find hope in gratitude for this beautiful living world. In love, higher purpose, the greater good, and faith in the goodness of humanity.

I have come to understand cultivation as creating the conditions for flourishing. Health is cultivated in much the same way. We cultivate health through the seeds we select, the landscapes we steward, the foods we grow, the knowledge we generate, the ways we move and rest, and the relationships we nourish. We cultivate it by expanding access, integrating healthy food into healthcare, and creating food systems where the healthy choice becomes the easy choice. Health is deeply personal and collective. Our health cannot be separated from the health of our communities and the living planet we share.

As the dusk of summer nears, I am grateful for the remarkable gift of participating in life. To cultivate health is to cultivate the conditions for life to flourish.

This essay is part of Food Tank’s Flourish Series: Food and Health from Molecules to Systems, authored by Selena Ahmed, exploring how food connects us to the living world while asking what it means to flourish. For more in the series, click here.

Artwork courtesy of Jeannie Ortiz commissioned for The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI) and Food Tank’s Flourish Series. All rights reserved.

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Request for Expression of Interest (EOI) To Undertake a Six-Country Study on Financial Services And Income-Enhancing Opportunities for African Agroecological Enterprises (AAEs)

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) intends to commission a consultancy to map financial services and income-enhancing opportunities available to African Agroecological Enterprises (AAEs) in Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Senegal and Togo. The study will identify and profile relevant providers, assess how accessible and suitable their services are for AAEs, and recommend practical service designs, partnerships and referral ways that respond to enterprise realities.

AFSA invites eligible individual consultants or consulting firms to submit technical and financial proposals for this assignment. The application should include:
• A signed letter of bid.
• A technical proposal of not more than six pages, excluding annexes, showing the applicant’s understanding of the assignment, proposed methodology, sampling approach, work plan, team organization and quality-assurance arrangements.
• A profile of the consultant or firm and evidence of relevant experience in inclusive finance, agricultural or enterprise finance, agroecology, food systems and multi-country research.
• At least two samples of comparable assignments, which AFSA will treat confidentially.
• Curricula vitae of the proposed team members, clearly indicating their roles and relevant experience.
• A financial proposal in United States dollars, showing professional fees, country-level costs, travel, translation, validation, taxes and any reimbursable expenses.

Technical and financial proposals should be submitted by email to afsa@afsafrica.org

The email subject should read: ‘AFSA – Financial Services and Income-Enhancing Opportunities Study’.

The submission deadline is 28 August 2026 at 5:00pm East African Time. Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.

The detailed Terms of Reference are provided below.

Download the TOR

Researchers at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya are using advanced satellite imaging data to improve food security. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, East Africa currently faces the greatest burden of acute food insecurity globally. Across the continent, nations continue to face substantial food crises driven by climatic fluctuations including drought and flooding as well as economic pressures like high food and fertilizer prices.

“Accessibility is the first step towards governance,” Tobias Landmann, Senior Research Scientist at icipe, tells Food Tank. “If you want to be independent of the Global North, you must have control over that analysis-ready data.”

icipe recently assumed full ownership and operation of the geospatial observation platform Digital Earth Africa (DEA). “This transition represents a powerful step toward sustained African ownership, ensuring the program continues to deliver critical Earth observation data and insights for the continent,” remarks Lisa-Maria Rebelo, Managing Director of DEA.

“icipe has an African mandate, working in all 54 countries to provide bio-efficient, biological solutions to farmers,” Landmann tells Food Tank. “[DEA] coming to icipe underpins that concept because now we can use big data that’s co-developed in Africa for Africa.” Digital Earth Africa’s technical advisory committee has included organizations such as the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa as well as the African Regional Institute for Geospatial Information Science and Technology.

By working with entirely Africa-led data, the platform completely changes how continental trends are studied. Containing some of the most ecologically diverse regions on Earth, Africa offers an unparalleled frontier for geospatial and topographic analysis, providing food system researchers and actors with the comprehensive data needed to safeguard community ecosystem health.

The Waterbodies Continental Service, for example, monitors over 750,000 water bodies across the continent with a minimum spatial resolution of 10 meters. As a part of DEA, this high-resolution imaging data allows researchers to track variables including nutrient enrichment across streams, rivers, and lakes as well as the proliferation of invasive plant species.

“Prosopis juliflora is an invasive shrub that we are mapping in Kenya and Ethiopian drylands. The shrub is basically invading all the water bodies, impeding biodiversity, aggravating drought… we don’t know where the intervention areas are,” explains Landmann. He notes that the platform’s analysis-ready data is designed directly to improve policy reporting. But because the African continent is dominated by small farms, the degree to which satellite imaging can improve agricultural productivity is context-dependent.

An FAO report finds that nearly 75 percent of all farm holdings in sub-Saharan Africa are two hectares or less—with just over half of all farms less than a single hectare. “We run a procedure based on Earth observation satellite data to see the deficiencies unique to certain [crop] fields,” states Landmann. “And that is a challenge because very often the fields are very small, smaller than the minimum mapping unit.”

“The most important stressor [icipe] can map is actually drought, water deficiency, or in irrigation terms, ‘water use inefficiency’ or deficits,” says Landmann. Extreme weather events such as El Niño can exacerbate drought and flooding across different parts of Africa, meaning that having up-to-date, accurate satellite imaging is crucial to analyze the spatiotemporal effects of such events on African farms.

“We scaled a very unique concept that was actually developed by Digital Earth Australia and then transferred to Africa called ‘geo-medians.’ So, our geo-medians are legendary. It’s a game changer,” says Landmann.

Geo-medians work by stitching together images captured by satellites at different times. This means that even when cloud cover obstructs a single photo, researchers still have a clear view of the entire landscape.

According to Landmann, policy frameworks and regional actors can immediately ingest this perfectly harmonized, long-term historical data into their systems. This allows them to bypass complex pre-processing and efficiently track macro-trends like deforestation, crop intensification, or changing water cycles over several years to inform long-term climate legislation.

Beyond agriculture, satellite data can also help researchers monitor water quality, air quality, urbanization trends, biodiversity loss, carbon neutrality, and value chains, Landmann adds. “There are so many kinds of use cases that you wouldn’t necessarily think about. There’s always a bias towards agriculture and food systems, which is understandable, but multiple thematic areas can benefit from this great data set.”

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Photo courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey

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We cannot transform this “neoliberal system” by fighting alone in our territories. It requires a global response and the globalization of our struggle to push back against this globalization of corporate power.  

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Terms of Reference (ToRs) for event rapporteur Continental Convening on strengthening African civil society climate action on food systems and agriculture towards COP32 Introduction and Background

Agriculture remains the backbone of most African economies, employing a significant proportion of the population while simultaneously being highly vulnerable to climate variability and extreme weather events. Rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, floods, and land degradation are already undermining agricultural productivity, disrupting food supply chains, and worsening nutrition outcomes across the continent. These impacts are disproportionately felt by smallholder farmers, pastoralists, women, youth, and indigenous communities whose livelihoods are directly dependent on natural resources.

At the same time, agriculture and food systems offer one of the most powerful entry points for climate action in Africa. They are critical for advancing adaptation, given their direct link to resilience and livelihoods, and they also present opportunities for mitigation through sustainable approaches like agroecology. Gradually, global climate policy spaces under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are recognizing the importance of agriculture and food systems, including through ongoing workstreams related to the Sharm el Sheikh Joint Work on Implementation of Climate Action on Agriculture and Food Security and outside negotiation spaces for example the establishment of the Food Systems Hub at COP30.

With the thirty second Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP32, scheduled to take place in Ethiopia in 2027, Africa is presented with a historic opportunity to shape global climate discourse from within the continent. The outcomes of ongoing negotiations, for example the operationalization of the Belem Adaptation indicators under the Belem-Addis Vision, are expected to culminate around this period, making it essential for African actors to be strategically aligned and influential. The period leading up to COP32 therefore represents a critical window for building a strong, unified, and well-coordinated African civil society voice on climate action in food systems.

In light of the above, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), in collaboration with likeminded African CSOs and partners has planned to hold a convening which will bring together various African CSOs working on advancing the food systems agenda within climate discussions. The convening will act as a space for these CSOs to plan their collective engagement in forthcoming regional and global climate events including COP31 and COP32.

To ensure strategic documentation of the proceedings from this multi-stakeholder gathering, AFSA seeks to engage a professional and experienced conference rapporteur to document the discussions from the convening.

        Purpose of the Assignment

The Rapporteur(s) will be responsible for documenting the discussions, outcomes, and key messages emerging from the gathering. This includes compiling a detailed report, capturing highlights, preparation of summary briefs and the civil society actors’ declaration from the convening.

            Key Responsibilities

• Attend and document all sessions, including plenaries, breakout discussions, and informal reflections.
• Accurately capture key points, recommendations, action items, and stakeholder contributions.
• Support the documentation of the declaration/call to action/communique that will come out of the convening.
• Produce a comprehensive final report of the event (10–15 pages).
• Draft a 2-page summary brief highlighting outcomes, key messages, and next steps.
• Ensure all outputs reflect the event’s diversity, policy depth, and strategic direction.
  
  
  

  Deliverables

• Daily session summaries (submitted each evening during the event)
• Draft declaration/call to action/communique that will come out of the convening (support editing and compilation with facilitators)
• Final Event Report (submitted within 5 working days post-event)
• Summary Outcome Brief (2 pages, for advocacy and dissemination)
  
  Qualifications and Experience

• Proven experience in reporting, documentation, and synthesis at high-level policy or cultural events.
• Strong background in food systems, climate change advocacy, African development, policy is highly desirable.
• Excellent writing, analytical, and listening skills.
• Ability to work independently and under pressure to meet deadlines.

  
  Duration and Location
  
  The consultancy will span 8 working days, including 3 days of on-site documentation and 5 days of post-event reporting and revision. The event will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and physical presence is required during the event.
  
  Reporting and Supervision
  
  The Rapporteur(s) will report to the Programme Coordinator for Climate Change and Agroecology at the AFSA Secretariat, working closely with the event coordination team and relevant thematic leads.
  
  Application Process
  
  Interested applicants should submit:

1. An application letter outlining their understanding of the assignment and proposed approach.
2. A CV highlighting relevant experience and sample previous reports.

Submissions should be sent to afsa@afsafrica.org and copy simon.bukenya@afsafrica.org not later than 21st August 2026.