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Initiative to further the Global Guidelines for the promotion of Family Farming
The International Year of Family Farming IYFF-2014 highlighted the importance of implementing policies to ensure the access and use of available natural and financial resources by family farmers. It showed the importance of creating favourable conditions so that the potential of Family Farming can be deployed.
In order to promote this enabling environment for family farms, smallholders, indigenous communities, pastoralists and artisanal fishers, the initiative started to boost the Global Guidelines for the Governance of Agricultural Systems based on Family Farming. A process that seeks to generate common frameworks that support the development of agricultural public policies or revise existing ones, paying particular attention to the situation of women and youth in rural areas.
The proposal to create global guidelines for the promotion of Family Farming emerged from the Civil Society. After analyzing the achievements and processes initiated during the IYFF-2014 at the World Conference of Women and Men Farmers Leaders, held in November 2014 in Brasilia, with the participation of many agricultural and rural organizations from five continents, there was an agreement to create a common regulatory framework to emphasise “the fundamental requirements to ensure the proper development of Family Farming” and which encourages countries “to generate public policies beneficial to its consolidation as a sustainable agricultural model”.
Therefore, in the context of the initiative IYFF+10, the WRF has activated a process of building this common framework, based on three levels. At national and regional level it will seek to propose some national and regional guidelines. Based on national and regional inputs, afterwards global guidelines may get agreed on.
The mechanism of the Civil Society in CONSAN – CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) has already asked to agree on common guidelines to boost Family Farming as part of the process that CPLP is conducting to strengthen this agricultural model. It is also expected that another pilot region will join soon in this process.
Meanwhile, at the national level, it is expected that several National Family Farming Committees will participate in this initial phase, which will start building this process from the base.
The push of this common framework in turn was made to complement, not to reformulate, existing global guidelines on the Right to Food, Land Tenure or Sustainable Small Scale Fisheries. Additionally, the process of building the Global Guidelines for Family Farming will take into consideration the process that is taking place in Geneva on the Rights of Peasants. All this will serve to further encourage Family Farming, and thus food sovereignty and security.