Grassroots Innovations for Agroecology
* Report of the Grassroots Innovations Assembly. Schola Campesina, 2023.
"This report documents the first international gathering of the Grassroots Innovations Assembly fromOct 18-21 in Gallese, Italy: with participation of e Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysan, and Schola Campesina."
Summary
"As food producers confront climate crises, corporate capture, and the new extractive technologies of AG 4.0, smallholders are organizing their own innovation and knowledge-sharing networks. Most of these organizations work regionally, with few opportunities to join forces with aligned organizations globally. In 2023, a unique opportunity arose for representatives from 12 grassroots innovations groups from around the world to gather in person to articulate shared values, share experiences, build trust and initiate an international Grassroots Innovations Assembly. This report documents the facilitation methods, findings, creations, and future plans that came out of this gathering.
The convening brought together organizations with a wide range of perspectives, expertise, and questions as small farmers, peasant unions, knowledge sharing networks, agroecology schools, farmer makerspaces, software developers, and more. Representatives of these organizations gathered at a beautiful farm stay in Gallese, Italy for three days of workshops, community bonding, inspiration, and organizing future work together. On the fourth day, the group presented the insights from the convening at the Data Working Group of the Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism to the Committee on World Food Security (CSIPM). The gathering was organized emergently, including lots of play and co-creation. The host organizations provided a container to get started, and after the first day we took turns facilitating and deciding the agenda.
The first two days of the gathering gave space for intensive discussion on topics that are central to grassroots innovations work. The first session was dedicated to discussing what “grassroots innovations for agroecology” means to each person. The participants voiced that grassroots innovation is agroecology; it is the power to create the future. It is inherent, constant, ongoing, and necessary for survival as agroecological food producers. While capitalist innovation creates learned helplessness for farmers, grassroots innovations are created through smallholders’ lived experience as a form of empowerment.
The group compared different innovations processes and shared an abundance of practical methods to mobilize networks and innovate together, from co-builds, to innovation catalogues, to innovations fairs. The discussion explored the role that digital tools should play in all of this, understanding both the risks and the potential. Participants exchanged guidance about when and how to form effective partnerships, and debated the importance of knowledge protection strategies. Many common challenges emerged where participants could share advice, coming from a diversity of sizes, levels of development, expertise, models, and contexts.
On the last day, the sessions focused on the creation of a Grassroots Innovations Assembly. The group expressed belief in this space as a global force for technological sovereignty, and dreams for further collaboration that continues the environment of trust, creativity, and equal say that emerged at the gathering. Through a facilitated consensus-building process, all of these ideas came together into a plan to form a long-lasting collectively-led Assembly. The participants formed three working groups for communications, drafting a collective charter, and planning thd next gathering. Everyone left energized and inspired, with a commitment to sustain this emerging community for knowledge sharing and global advocacy."
Status
"After our three-day gathering, we shared our creations and findings at the annual forum of the Civil Society and Indigenous People’s Mechanism (CSIPM) to the World Committee on Food Security (CFS).
We chose this forum because the CFS is one of the few international governance bodies where civil society has a strong influence - through the CSIPM. The CSIPM fights for the right to food and the rights of smallholders through the CFS. The CSIPM has also become a space to discuss an agroecological vision about the future of agri-food technology. This year, the CSIPM participated in a CFS workstream called Data for Food Security and Nutrition, and took the opportunity to discuss a global civil society stance on agricultural digitalization.
The Assembly brings the perspective of alternative futures to this forum, moving beyond the critiques of extractive technologies to existing empowering solutions. The Assembly builds our power to resist policies that support corporate technologies, and fight for policies that serve food sovereignty. Our successes in grassroots innovations demonstrate that peasants do not need corporate technologies in order to feed our communities or fight climate change. We are already collecting and using data to support our food security and nutrition. For example, our needs mapping projects are data collection that provide evidence about the types of technologies that should be supported by policy in order to benefit smallholders."
Excerpts
What are Grassroots Innovations?
"Our innovations grow from ancestral knowledge. Innovation does not have to be new, it may be something which worked and was forgotten or erased. What is common in one place, or at one time, is an innovation in another context.
Our innovations solve real problems. An innovation starts with users’ needs, often the need to adapt to a changing environment.
Our innovations come from the grassroots and are tested in the grassroots. They are local solutions to local problems that rely on the resources we have at our disposal and the generational knowledge of agroecological farmers. Even GMO seeds require an ancestral peasant-created seed to modify. They are a result of farmers’ inherent experimentation that is a necessity just to survive. There has never been stability, or a “way it's always been.”
Our innovations encompass the complexity of agroecology, including the social, political and ecological dimensions. Our innovations address ecosystem health and the wellbeing of our communities, not only food production. Our innovations may be mechanical, technological, or social; they may be a method rather than an object or artifact. We may innovate the innovation process itself.
Community governance and feedback systems determine the success of our innovations and make sure they do not create new problems. We recognize that governance requires increasing our communities’ capacity to critically discuss technology.
We discussed many innovation questions that agroecological farmers must tackle. How do we farm without fossil fuels? Without plastic? How do we survive the effects of climate change? How do we make tools accessible to all bodies? How do we advocate for our needs as smallholder farmers? How do we ethically engage with digital tools for our own empowerment?"
Characteristics of grassroots innovations
"Grassroots innovations for agroecology sustain autonomy and create independence from extractive economies.
Autonomy does not mean individualism, but a choice of who we want to work with and how, within a strong network of resilient farms and territories. Autonomy is built into the way we innovate using horizontal and bottom-up innovation that is always evolving in response to feedback.
Grassroots innovation empowers us to create our own solutions, whereas capitalism teaches us to be passive, waiting for a solution to be sold to us.
Grassroots innovations come from peasants, whereas capitalism tells us that innovations come from academics, trained scientists, and engineers.
Grassroots innovation trains farmers to be artists, engineers, organizers, and scientists, whereas capitalist economies turn food producers into consumers that purchase seeds, tools and chemicals.
Grassroots innovations are simple tools to do complex t simp whereas capitalism sells us complex and difficult to repair tools to do simple tasks.
Grassroots innovations are driven by shared values, whereas top-down innovation is driven by profits.
Innovation provides a common ground for our movements for autonomy to expand. For Tzoumakers, their makerspace is becoming a hub for a multisectoral cooperative. Fabriek Paysan shared that conservative farmers “talk really easy with us because we talk only machinery or innovation...Once we say that we are some activism in climate change they say, ah 'but I thought that all the climate activists were against us.” And once we begin to talk and we say no we are not against you, we are against the system and…they begin to understand everything.”
Collaboration principles
"We also discussed general principles we follow, regardless of what specific methods are used:
- Always start with problems that farmers raise
- Before making something new, assess existing solutions
- Facilitate collaboration between peasants, technologists, and researchers
- Where we meet matters. Host events in community spaces (farms, schools, churches),
not institutional spaces
- Use knowledge sharing (horizontal) not communication (unidirectional)
- Documenting processes and products is necessary for results to matter and to create
inspiration, replication and adaptation.
- Use digital tools, don’t focus on digital tools as a goal
- Give space for individuals with disruptive ideas
- Base innovations in traditional knowledge."