Promoting Food Autonomy

From December 14th to 16th 2012 the I Seminar on Local Agroecological Promotion, organized through the PIC and supported by Grundtvig Lifelong Learning Programme, took place in Barcelona. More than 80 people participated in it, mainly from Catalunya but also from other regions of Spain (Galícia, Euskal Herria, Canarias, Andalucía, Extremadura, Madrid...). The attendees were mainly experienced people, engaged in different kinds of Agroecological projects, who showed high affinity with the conceptual and methodological framework proposed for the seminar. The event quickly turned into a hard working atmosphere, in which everyone was highly self-motivated, sharing their experiences, learning from each other and networking for their project. This created a high level of exchange between inputs and discussions, allowing us to build a common ground of how to further promote Agroecological practices in our local communities.

Although the objectives and methodology proposed were very ambitious, the general evaluation of the seminar gave a highly positive response from the participants. The working-by-projects approach, and the hands-on methodology based on in-depth participatory techniques, allowed us to deal with different and innovative methodologies, and at the same time opened different discussions related to the complexity of Agroecology diffusion in our de-farmed postindustrial countryside. Working on three real case studies presented by their creators and representatives built up an emotional atmosphere in which we all got deeply involved in discussing the different realities. Participants and organizers of the three selected projects were highly satisfied with the outcomes of the seminar, in terms of both the methodological and strategic contents of each case study. At the end, everyone asked for a second edition of this seminar, to take place in one of the locations of the three projects we worked on during the seminar.

From May 2013 we have worked on the conclusions of the seminar, which will be published in an online document as a “Guide for Local Agroecological Promotion”. This Guide will compile every document and participatory piece of knowledge produced and collected during the seminar. Hopefully we will be able to edit some audiovisual documents with the most interesting outcomes of the seminar, such as the main talks, concluding remarks and some interviews of participants and speakers. For these documents, which will be posted in our open-access blog, we arranged a crowd-funding campaign in order to allow us to manage the technical and compilation work needed to analyze the results, and communicate the outcomes.