ILEIA Newsletter - LEISA Magazine - Farming Matters

FM 2016 Farming Matters Vol 32 Special Issue - 20/01/2016

• Access and benefit sharing of genetic resources for family farmers - theory and practice
• Improving access to vegetable seeds for resilient family farms in Costa Rica
• Access and benefit sharing in participatory plant breeding in Southwest China
• Evolutionary populations - living gene banks in farmers' fields in Iran
• Seed banks and national policy in Brazil
• Potato breeding in the Netherlands - successful colaboration between farmers and commercial breeds
• Implementing access and benefit sharing in eight countries
• Industry benefits but does not pay its dues- patents are an assault on genetic resources
• Giving new life to peasant seeds in Ecuador

FM 2017 Farming Matters Vol 33 #1 - 20/04/2017

• Agroecology for food sovereignty
• Food versus the big city of Istanbul
• Human-centred agriculture fighting exploitation and racism
• Food sovereignty taking root in women's knowledge
• Locally rooted ideas and initiatives from the field
• The vitality of everyday food
• Food sovereignty stories from Europe
• Resisting land grabbing in Germany
• Alternative food systems in the Czech Republic
• Human-centred agriculture fighting exploitation and racism

FM 2018 Farming Matters Vol 34 #1 - 20/03/2018

• Community supported agroecology thriving in China
• Farmers ensure safe water for New York City
• Agroecology is the way forward for Africa
• Organic and agroecology
• Women in Brazil build autonomy with agroecology
• Land grabbing threatens agroecology
• Rice Intensification in India
• Peasant agroecology in the Netherlands
• Farmer to farmer learning builds resilience in Nigeria

FM 2020 Farming Matters Vol 36 #1 - 20/01/2020

In this issue:

• Agroecology and feminist economics
• The path to feminist agroecology
• The economic potential of agroecology in Europe
• The rise of rural women's movements in Southern Africa
• Care ethics in agroecology
• Highland agriculture
• Growing equity through agroecology in Uganda

ILEIA Newsletter: 15 Years ILEIA - 01/01/1998

This publication considers the incredible impact in the 15 years of their existence. Throughout the text, those on the board of ILEA anticipate the growth this organization will see in the coming years. 

Participatory Technology Development In Sustainable Agriculture, ILEIA Workshop - 01/01/1989

This ILE|A workshop may be seen as a follow up of the workshop organized by the Institute for Development Studies, lDS, in Sussex, in June 1987: Farmers and Agricultural Research: Complementary methods. During the IDS workshop it was recommended that a number of regional meetings and workshops in the third world should be organised in order to link and exchange regional experiences in the field of farmer participation in technology development.

The ILEIA workshop was an intermediate step between the IDS workshop and the regionalworkshops; lt provided the opportunities

• To make a more comprehensive inventory and assessment of the existing experiences
• To agree on a format for describing practical methods and
• To formulate a strategy for the further development of the methods of participatory technology development.

Participatory Technology Development In Sustainable Agriculture - 01/01/1991

The ILEIA workshop made an important contribution to the emergence of operational approaches to sustainable agricultural technology development. A great number of cases and descriptions of field experiences has been compiled and assessed, existing networks on participatory technology development have been linked and a number of proposals for further development of field activities have been formulated.

Farmer's Research in Practice: Lessons From the Field - 01/01/1997

This book is about farmers' own research. In many parts of the world, farmers are seeking ways to improve their farming systems and to adapt their practices to changing agroecological and socioeconomic conditions. The contributions to this book give evidence of how farmers adopt, adapt and formulate new ideas and innovations, try them out in different settings, evaluate and assess the results, and make decisions about their potential value for improving the way they farm. All of these experiments, no matter what methods they employ, are refened to here as farmers' agricultural research. This is a considerable expansion of the conventional understanding of agricultural research, which is usually limited to scientifically designed, highly methodological and closely controlled experiments and investigations carried out on national and international agricultural research stations and in the field.

Let Farmers Judge - 01/01/1992

This reader is a follow-up to that workshop. It is a collection of papers on the theme of assessing sustainability in agriculture. The collection is divided into four parts. Following an introductory theme paper (Part I), the papers in Part II discuss the conceptual framework for assessment. Part III examines specific methodological issues, with the emphasis on farmers' assessment criteria. Part IV contains case studies comparing the performance of environmentally friendly farming practices and systems with that of conventional (high-external-input) agriculture.

Farming for the Future: An Introduction to Low-External-Input and Sustainable Agriculture - 01/01/1992

This is a book about farming. But, more than that, it is a book about farmers, about men and women farmers. It is seldom that farmers particularly those in the Third World - have an opportunity to make themselves heard. In this book, an effort has been made to give as much room as possible to the knowledge and experience of small-scale farmers in developing countries. In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in studies about small-scale farming and its potential for development, but I have the strong feeling that most of these studies are only meant to be food for discussion among experts. This is also a book about sustainability. Achieving and maintaining sustainable agriculture has become one of the focal points, not only within Dutch agricultural and environmental policies, but also within those of the international development community. Until now, agricultural policies - whether oriented toward export production or local food production - have focused too narrowly on maximising short-term profits rather than on long-term sustainable management of local resources by farmers. Although this is understandable from the point of view of policy makers confronted with questions of food security, employment, foreign exchange and population growth, it does not take into account sufficiently the interests of individual farmers and rural communities and does not lead to their empowerment.