Access To Land
In the small-scale farmers’ world, P2P can stand for more than peer-to-peer and evoke a traditional (not yet lost!) type of agriculture that can teach us much for the future, P2P can also start to mean ’peasant-to-peasant’.
“Peasant to Peasant Agroecology” was the name chosen for a European Erasmus+ learning exchange project involving six European peasant organisations: Ecoruralis (Romania), Confederation Paysanne (France-project leader), Ehne Bizkaia (Spain), NBS (Norway), ARI (Italy) and MAP (Belgium). This project started in October 2018 and will end in February 2021. For all partners in the project it is important to put the focus on ’peasant agroecology’ as opposed to other understandings of agroecology such as ’green tech, biotech’ solutions that industrial agriculture practices are also dubbing “agroecological”.
The project works towards a systematic and global approach to peasant agroecology and includes the understanding of the political issues that influence its development. The theoretical framing of the project comes from many years of consultation by small-scale farmers in France that arrived at formulating The Charter of Peasant Agroecology as ten principles and six themes.
The main activity projected is a series of five international training seminars which are hosted by the various partners and surround a certain topic.
Thus in 2019:
– the identification of peasant agroecology in farms was hosted by Enhe Bzikaia, in the Basque country, and there a group of 30 peasants and interpreters made a deep dive into the definitions and guides of peasant agroecoeology by FADEAR
– the ins and outs of farm succession on agroecological peasant farms was analyzed and displayed thanks to the host Le MAP in Wallonia, Belgium
In 2020:
– the topic of technological autonomy on peasant farms will be explored in Italy (Piemont) through the help of local hosts ARI
– Cultivated biodiversity will be discussed and better understood as a peasant practice in a seminar in Romania, hosted by Eco Ruralis
– The objective of food autonomy/sovereignty of a society through local agroecological production will be shared in France by Confederation Paysanne as hosts.
When in Belgium, addressing the hot topic of farm succession, the project invited A2LN members and partners DeLandgenoten and Toekomstboeren to take part. The organizers (MAP) co-operated perfectly with Terre-en-Vue, the Wallonian Access to Land organization to guide the whole seminar and also host a public conference. Local authorities were invited to take note of the current state of affairs of very difficult access to land and farms in Wallonia and design suitable solutions for future peasant-farmers.
