4.5 Open-Space Session – Brave farmers, green belts and wrong debates

Please download the Rapporteurs’ Report for this session here.

The session focuses on the need for multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approaches to link soil resilience with food security, equity and overall development issues. Three examples will illustrate this:

• A multi-functional approach to agriculture within the traditional terra cing system of the Konso, which has been declared a UNESCO world heritage,
• the claim of different agricultural knowledge systems like “traditional”, “organic”, “conventional” agriculture to provide the only solution to global food security in contrast to more integrative approaches
• the recent initiative to harmonize development issues with combating desertification through the establishment of a “resilient mosaic landscape” through the Great Green Wall along the Sahara.

To ensure that the audience really becomes an active part of the debate, the session will end with a simulation game, which is based on the paradigm that all action has an impact on soils, and soils have an impact on human-well being. Participants are invited to take over different roles within this game, such as pastoralists and farmers, policy makers, environmental activists, seed corporations etc.

Organisers:
Dr.Ingrid Hartmann, DRYRES (Germany)
Dr Hailu Araya, ISD/ BPA (Ethiopia)

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Download the session description here.

Contact: Thando Tilmann