ILEIA focuses on Family Farming

Tags: Worldwide, Small Producers Agency

One of the pillars in the global network on sustainable farming is ILEIA based in Netherlands. ILEIA is best known for its magazine that was recently renamed into Farming Matters, produced in 50.000 copies in six languages.

The new name of the magazine heralds the shift from relatively technical focus (low external input farming) to a focus on family farming in the developing world. A recent jubilee conference called the Future of Family Farming commemorated the magazine’s 25th anniversary. The conference covered many subjects, such as the opportunities for family farms on the emergent global carbon sequestration market, urban family farming in Africa, the move away from national bulk markets to more local or traditional crops and the need to make small scale farming attractive for young people. Although trends and opportunities are highly variegated and sometimes even contradictory, one common message appeared to underlie the whole conference: the key to the future of family farming is to establish synergy between autonomy, self-organization, networks, knowledge and pride to be a farmer.