ORFC ONLINE 2023

Abi Huff
Transforming Food Culture to Transform our World
Abi is a dedicated educator, speaker, and healing justice organiser who, through their work and commitment to BIPOC communities supports land rematriation and stewardship. Abi uses their connection to earth, plants, and food as a tool of Ancestral Connection and Reclamation. They are currently the resident Herbalist at Earthseed Farm and a staff person at The Center for Ethical Land Transitions located and lives in Northern California on Pomo, Miwuk Territory.

Adam Swan
Soil Food Web Microscopy in a Nutshell
Adam Swan is a self taught horticulturist and after three years of working at the lab an expert in soil food web development using compost as a bio-incubator. He is the Bio-Inculum Engineer at Soil Ecology Laboratory.

Ahirirwe Leticia
Sharing Youth Experiences in Practicing Agroecology for Climate Adaptation in Africa 
Ahirirwe Leticia, 23, is an active voice for gender equality, climate action and youth empowerment in Uganda. She is one of the incumbent Albanian Youth Delegates to the United Nations, where she advocates for climate issues and sustainable development and shares the perspective of youth in her country. She is a student at Mbarara university of Science and
Technology, pursuing Bachelors of science in Agricultural livelihood and Farm production in her third year. Leticia raises awareness on climate change and feminism and how they are inextricable from one another.

Aidee Guzman
Healing Grounds and Cultivating Diversity (above and below the soil)
Aidee is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Irvine, examining agroecological approaches that could harness biodiversity and ecosystem functioning for improved agricultural resilience. The overarching goal of her research programme is to support farmers, especially those who are historically under-served, through research, education, and outreach that builds on their innovations and demonstrates ecological pathways to agricultural resilience.

Albert Bahana
Eating in a Time of War: Food crisis or distribution crisis? Analysis and proposals by La Via Campesina
Albert is a lawyer and peasant leader of the Confédération paysanne du Congo-Principal regroupement paysan (COPACO-PRP), within which he is coordinator of the peasant legal department (CJP). He is a member of the International Coordination Committee of La Via Campesina for the South East Africa Region. He is also a member of the Regional Coordination Committee and participates in different working groups within the movement.

Alejandro Solano-Ugalde
Participatory Guarantee Systems as Social Strategy for Certification
Alejandro was born in Costa Rica, where his training began on the family farm. He studied to become a nature guide, which led him to become a specialist in ecology and sustainable development. For more than 20 years he has been living in Ecuador, where he looks after a nature reserve with his partner, practising and sharing methods of ecological restoration following permaculture principles. He currently supports the coordination of the Participatory Guarantee Systems for the Seed Guardians Network of Ecuador.

Alessandra Turco
SOS GMOs! The need for a citizen-peasant alliance to protect the right to seeds in Europe
She is a peasant and agronomist, expert in international cooperation project management in the field of agroecology. She runs and actively works in her own 5.5 ha farm in the hills of Tourin where she produces cereals and vegetables through micro-farming projects, from seed to direct sale of the agricultural or processed product. She is part of the coordination committee of the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) as well as of Associazione Rurale Italiana (ARI), member of ECVC in Italy. She is also part of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) in which she follows the work on agro-biodiversity as representative of La Via Campesina. 

Alfredo Cortez
Sharing Experiences of Drought and Resilience Between Indigenous Farmers
Alfredo Cortez is an Indigenous Maya-Achí family farmer from the community of Xesiguan, Guatemala. He is co-founder of the community organization ACPC (Association of Committees for Community Production), which works in two dozen communities in the Xesiguan Watershed and focuses on restoring agroecological practices, and creating a development alternative that incorporates local values, needs, and cosmovision.

Alice Martin-Prével
Creating a Future of Collective Land Ownership and Responsibilities
Alice is involved in Terre de Liens and the Access to Land network, which work to preserve agricultural land and support access to land for peasant agroecological farmers. She explores in particular how land organisations and public actors can work together to change land use and management models, create more resilient territories, and foster solidarity and social land initiatives.

Alice Ndlovu
Planting Water with a Water School Africa
Alice is the Director of Operations and Administration at the Muonde Trust in Zimbabwe. She has an Honors and a Masters Degree in Development Studies from Midlands State University, a certificate in “working with communities affected by poverty displacement and HIV and AIDS” from the University of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa, and a postgraduate Diploma in development leadership from Coady Institute and St Francis Xavier University in Canada.  Alice has been working in Mazvihwa and across Zvishavane District and has a keen interest in agroecology, water harvesting and girls’ and women’s empowerment.

Alison Karley
From the Caribbean to the Pacific: On the sharp end of food insecurity and climate change
Alison is an agroecologist at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. She is researching sustainable cropping practices for improved agrobiodiversity and ecosystem function, and to reduce agrochemical inputs. She works collaboratively with farmers and other food system stakeholders in the UK and internationally to trial agroecological practices and develop innovative methods for sharing data and knowledge.

Amanda Swinimer
Seaweed Is Already Saving the World
Amanda Swinimer is a seaweed harvester, author, business owner, and educator who lives and works on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. She began her own business, Dakini Tidal Wilds, in 2003, hand-harvesting wild edible seaweed from the beaches and kelp forests surrounding her home. Swinimer’s unique expertise makes her a sought-after speaker at international conferences, speaking about the ecological importance of seaweeds and the extraordinary health benefits. She has been conducting seaweed workshops and tours as well as teaching young people in the British Columbia school system for years, passing on her rare knowledge and sharing her intensely joyful connection to the ocean with diverse audiences. She holds a BSc in marine biology and is the author of The Science and Spirit of Seaweed: Discovering Food, Medicine and Purpose in the Kelp Forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Amelia Lake
Finding Solutions to the Fertiliser Crisis: Practical on farm innovation for home grown fertility
Amelia is a farmer and member of the compost management field lab. Amelia co-founded the Real Food Garden, a 2-acre market garden set within a regenerative holding with extensively managed livestock in 2016. The zero-carbon business produces for an onsite farm shop and veg box scheme. Amelia also acts as a consultant and adviser on agroecological horticulture and land management.
@realfoodgarden

Andre Kpodonu
Seeding Reparations: Making the UK’s food corporations pay
As Head of Activism for Feedback, Andre Kpodonu leads on broadening and deepening participation within the organisation’s work to ensure our food is good for the living planet and its people. Andre has over a decade of experience working with and in communities grappling with marginalisation and structural disadvantage. These experiences along with his academic background in sociology, criminology and anthropology, underpin his analysis of the ways in which our food system interacts with societal power. His portfolio of projects includes Seeding Reparations, EcoTalent, Sussex Surplus, Alchemic Kitchen, and Green Futures – all projects seeking to innovate new mechanisms to ensure the drive for food system transformation places anti-oppressive practice at its core.

Anita McNaught
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
Anita McNaught has a long history in TV news as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, CNN, Fox News and Al Jazeera, specialising in the Middle East. Everywhere she reported, she slipped in a story about farming. In 2014, life took an unexpected turn when her Aunt left her an 85 acre farm in Sussex. It was a loss-making wreck. She turned it around.

Anna Lappé
The Dirty Truth About Pesticides and What We Can Do About It
Anna is a national bestselling author, an advocate for sustainability and justice along the food chain, and a funder investing in food system transformation. For the past twenty years, she has led the Small Planet Fund, a small grantmaking program housed at RSF Social Finance and she developed and leads the Food Sovereignty Fund of the Panta Rhea Foundation. A James Beard Leadership Award winner, Anna is the co-author or author of three books on food, farming, and sustainability and the contributing author to fourteen more. Her most recent book is Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. Anna is the founder or co-founder of three national organizations including the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund. Anna is an active board member of Rainforest Action Network and Mesa Refuge. She also serves as a founding Steering Committee member of the Castanea Fellowship and the Food and Farm Communications Fund and is a member of the advisory council of the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

Anna Van Der Hurd
What Role Can Philanthropy Play to Catalyze Change in Food Systems?
Anna has directed the A Team Foundation’s philanthropy since its shift of focus to food and farming in 2009. Seeing the wisdom and need for charities to align their investments with mission, Anna spearheaded and now guides the Foundation’s mission-related investment fund, drawing upon over ten years of grant giving in the field.

Anne Lasimbang
Future in the Hands of Young People: Moving from pesticides to agroecology in Asia
Anne is Executive Director of Partners of Community Organizations in Sabah (“PACOS”) Trust, a community-based organisation that originally formed out of a student-led movement Anne established while at university. For over 25 years, PACOS has been empowering indigenous communities in Malaysian Borneo through capacity-building programmes focused on education, human rights and the environment.

Anne Maina
Seed Battles in Africa: Farmer’s rights and greedy corporates
Anne is the National Coordinator of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya. She works on challenging false solutions being pushed in Africa like genetic engineering, biofuels, the push for a green revolution and carbon markets as a strategy to cope with climate change. She has been instrumental in the growth and development of networks such as the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF), Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) and the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).

Anne Mottet
Adjusting to the New Normal: Building resilient food systems in the face of climate change, crisis, and rising energy costs
Anne is Livestock Development Officer with the Animal Production and Health Division (NSA) of the FAO and coordinates the FAO’s activities on livestock and agroecology. Her areas of expertise include analysis and modelling of livestock production systems, livestock policies formulation and assessment, and providing support to international policy dialogues. She specialises in agricultural economics, agro-food chains and farm economics.
@Anne_Mottet

Antonio Onorati
A Journey via Land: Breaking the silence on land struggles in Europe
Antonio is a farmer and member of the Associazione Rurale Italiana, part of the European Coordination of La Via Campesina. In his role as president of the Centro Internazionale Crocevia (1992-2016), Antonio chaired the organising committee of the 1996 Forum parallelo della Società Civile, and served as International Focal Point for the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty from 2002 to 2011.

Arlette Saint Ville
From the Caribbean to the Pacific: On the sharp end of food insecurity and climate change
Arlette is a Human Geography Lecturer at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. She has a keen interest in agri-food systems of small island developing states, and building nutrition sensitive value chains for school feeding programmes using multi- stakeholder partnerships.
@ArletteSaint

Asif Khan
Rehabilitation through Agroecology: Surviving the floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh
Asif Khan is a peasant leader and one of the Steering Committee members of Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek (PKMT), a small and landless farmers mass movement that remains committed to sensitize, mobilize and organize rural communities for campaigns on the right to land, right to food, right to all productive recourse most importantly seed. Mr. Khan is an organic intellectual and community educator and playing an instrumental role in PKMT not just with his critical analytical skill but also engaging with the communities on a daily basis.

Barbara Ntambirweki
“Precision” Farming: Digitalised Nirvana or corporate-controlled nightmare?
Barbara is a lawyer and advocate of the High Courts of Uganda, and also a Lecturer of Intellectual Property Rights law based in Uganda. She has over 10 years of experience in research and policy analysis on food system issues and emerging technologies around GMO crops, synthetic biology, and digital agriculture. She works as a consultant for ETC, coordinating the African Working Group on Digitalization. The Group forms part of the African Technology Assessment Platform (AfriTAP).

Barbara Siegieńczuk
A Journey via Land: Breaking the silence on land struggles in Europe
Barbara is president of the Zielony Żurawlów Association in Poland. Since 2012, she has been actively participating in events related to shale gas extraction and the threat it poses to the natural environment, farming and rural communities’ livelihoods. In 2013, the Green Żurawlów Association was created to stop the illegal activities of Chevron in relation to shale gas extraction, land grabbing and water resources.

Ben Raskin
Peat-Free Growing Media in Commercial Horticulture
Ben Raskin is Head of Horticulture and Agroforestry at the Soil Association and has worked in horticulture and agroforestry for over 25 years. He has a wide range of practical commercial growing experience. For the Soil Association, he provides growers with technical, marketing, policy, supply chain and networking support. Ben has authored gardening books for children and grownups, including The Woodchip Handbook. He has been implementing a 200-acre agroforestry planting in Wiltshire since 2016. Ben also co-chairs the Defra Edibles Horticulture Roundtable and sits on the board of the Community Supported Agriculture Network UK and the Farm Woodland Forum committee.

Bob Martin
Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections: The human impacts of animal agriculture
Bob directs the Food System Policy Program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and co-authored the 2021 Essential and in Crisis report on US farmworkers. Before starting with the Center in 2011, Martin worked on Capitol Hill and in a state legislature, as well as for a family farm advocacy group. He also worked for the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he served as a senior officer at the Pew Environment Group and executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.

Bridget Murphy
Farms across Four Nations: Towards a more inclusive subsidy system & Agroecology and Feminism: Transforming our economy and our society
Bridget Murphy has over 30 years’ experience in land use, tenure, land administration and agrarian reform – both in Southern Africa and Ireland. She is currently project managing a Soil Biodiversity European Innovation Partnership project for the Irish agroecological farm organisation Talamh Beo, while also managing her hill farm in County Sligo which is transitioning from hill sheep to organic wildflower seed, bees and agroforestry.

Bright Thamie Phiri
Seed Battles in Africa: Farmers’ rights and greedy corporates
Bright is a distinguished Biodiplomat with international experience in policy research, analysis and advocacy on issues related to biodiversity and biosafety; food sovereignty and community rights; and climate and food justice. Bright has played leading roles for civil society in the national and regional policy and legislative development processes on seed and food security.

Bruce Pascoe
Fire, Farming and Food Sovereignty in Australia
Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man, a writer and farmer who has been observing the recovery of his own and others’ land in Australia since the devastating Black Summer fires of 2019-2020, and exploring the potential for food forests, cultural burning, and biodiverse plantings over monocultures.

Camilla Hayselden-Ashby
Experts in their Field: Exploring the benefits and challenges of farmer-led research
Camilla is a farmer, hemp advocate and technologist, growing hemp for seed and fibre on her family’s mixed sheep and arable farm in Kent since 2021. She is a Nuffield Scholar studying how hemp can be a profitable and sustainable crop. She is also Head of Product at Fieldmargin, a farming technology start-up.
@ukhemphunter

Carl Wassilie
Honouring Indigenous Aquaculture and the Struggle for Sovereignty from Hawaii to Alaska
Carl was born and raised in Alaska. His Yup’ik name is Angut’aq; he has feet in both the Yup’ik and Western worldviews as a Yup’ik biologist. Since the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, Carl has worked to defend salmon ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. He has worked with sovereign Tribes, First Nations and other communities across Turtle Island to resist oil, gas and mining companies that attempt to colonise some of the last great ecosystems left on the planet.

Caron Whaley
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
Having initially qualified as a civil and structural engineer, specialising in international, infrastructure projects, Caron subsequently retrained in industrial psychology before moving into the third sector, with a focus on the delivery of support and services. As Director of Services at RABI, Caron is proud to be part of a professional team focusing on supporting farming people.

Catherine St Germans
Seaweed Is Already Saving the World
Catherine is a journalist, co-founder and Director of Port Eliot Festival, co-founder and Director of Farms to Feed Us CIC and organiser of the Regenerative Agricultural Gatherings.
@cathystgermans

Cathi Pawson
Farming under Fire: Cultivating land and life in occupied Palestine
Cathi is co-founder of Zaytoun CIC, a social enterprise supporting the lives and livelihoods of Palestinian farming communities through developing a sustainable market for their produce in the UK.

Cécile Muret
A Journey via Land: Breaking the silence on land struggles in Europe

Cecilia Elizondo
From Sri Lanka to Mexico: Government failures and grassroots solutions to advancing agroecological policy
Since September 2020 Cecilia has worked with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. She is an External Expert Adviser on Agroecology Transition and Food Systems, and a member of the Intersectoral Group on Health, Food, Environment and Competitiveness (GISAMAC). In October 2022 she was part of the Mexican Delegation to the 50th Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), where she presented Mexico’s experience in the implementation of public policies for food systems transformation in the country.

Chathu Sewwandi
From Sri Lanka to Mexico: Government failures and grassroots solutions to advancing agroecological policy
Chathu is a lawyer and programme coordinator at Vikalpani National Women’s Federation in Sri Lanka. She also works as the project coordinator of the Law and Society Trust. She has direct experience of agroecology, maintaining an ecological farm school together with her family. Using her experience as an environmental lawyer, she is now working to empower rural women and women farmers.

Chengeto Sandra Muzira 
Agroecology as a Climate Solution: Grassroots advocacy strategies at COP and beyond
Chengeto Sandra Muzira is a young farmer based in Mutoko, Zimbabwe. Practising agroecology in small grain production, horticulture and small livestock. She is a member of the Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers Forum, LVC youth ICC representing Africa continent as well as the founder of the 6 Girls Club. Chengeto holds a diploma in Agro-ecology and has been part of the struggle for Agro-ecology policy to be recognized in Zimbabwe. She has also participated in international forum on Climate, women and youth issues. She is passionate about learning new things,  empowering and helping other, adventure and personal growth.

Chito Medina
Rehabilitation through Agroecology: Surviving the floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh
Chito Medina is an agriculturist, ecologist and environmental scientist. He is founding member of Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development (MASIPAG), and also served as national coordinator of the network. He has worked directly with farmers in developing practical climate change resilience and agroecology for 37 years.  In the academe, he taught graduate courses in Environmental Science in three leading universities in the Philippines.  He was involved in the design, and one of the lead authors, of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).  In the government, he has served as member of the National Organic Agriculture Board (NOAB) of the Department of Agriculture and a consultant to the secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform.

Chris Packham
As a broadcaster he is a presenter of BBC’s BAAFTA Award winning Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch series. He presents notable natural history series such as Nature’s Weirdest Events, World’s Weirdest Events, World’s Sneakiest Animals, Cats V Dogs, The Burrowers, Inside the Animal Mind, Operation Iceberg and Secrets of our Living Planet. He was featured in The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon (NBC – US) where he introduced Jimmy to a Porcupine and baby spotted Hyena, and sent a Black Vulture flying to him as he stood in the audience.

Chris Smaje
Reconnecting to Food: Healing our planet and ourselves
Chris works a small mixed farm in Somerset, and blogs at smallfarmfuture.org.uk. He is the author of A Small Farm Future. He has also written on environmental and agricultural issues for publications like The Land, Permaculture Magazine, and Dark Mountain, and in academic journals.

Christina Cooke
Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections: The human impacts of animal agriculture
Christina is an associate editor at Civil Eats. Based in North Carolina, she has covered people, place, science, business, and culture for venues including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Oxford American, and High Country News. In the past, she has worked as a staff writer for the Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee and a weekly paper in Portland, Oregon. She teaches interviewing and non-fiction writing at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Chukki Nanjundaswamy
Nyéléni Global Process: Working together on people’s solutions to transform the global food system and achieve food sovereignty
Born into a family of farmer-activists in India, Chukki has been involved in the farmers’ movement at local, national, and international levels. She is the Executive Chairperson of the Karnataka State Farmers Movement and a member of the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movements. She heads the International Center for Sustainable Development, Amrita Bhoomi (Eternal Earth), which hosts the South Asian Agroecology School of La Via Campesina.
@ChukkiKrrs

Claire Ratinon
Cultivating Belonging: Exploring diasporic relationships to land
Claire is an organic food grower, writer and author of ‘Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong’. Claire has grown edible plants in a variety of roles including growing crops for the Ottolenghi restaurant, Rovi and for the social enterprise Growing Communities. She co-wrote the pamphlet, ‘Horticultural Appropriation’ for Rough Trade Books with artist Sam Ayre and her first book, ‘How To Grow Your Dinner Without Leaving The House’ was published in August 2020.

Clem Sandison
Agroecology and Feminism: Transforming our economy and our society
Clem Sandison is an artist, facilitator and aspiring urban farmer based in Glasgow. She co-manages a community food forest in the east end of the city and runs projects enabling women to build mutual support networks and access land for ecological farming. She works for The Landworkers’ Alliance and Pasture for Life supporting peer-to-peer learning between farmers, growers, crofters and foresters in Scotland.

Cornelia Kirchner
Participatory Guarantee Systems as Social Strategy for Certification
Cornelia works as a consultant on organic guarantee systems and participatory processes. She was part of the Organic Policy and Guarantee team at IFOAM Organics International for 10 years. One of her main areas of expertise is Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS), a locally-oriented alternative to third-party organic certification. She has participated in PGS development projects in West Africa and East/Southeast Asia.

Dan Saladino
Feeding Britain from the Ground Up: Why we should align our future diets with regenerative farming systems
Dan Saladino is a food journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme. His first book, Eating to Extinction: The World’s Most Endangered Foods and Why We Need to Save Them is an epic journey into the history, culture and future of food,and involved 15 years of travel and story collecting. Eating to Extinction has won multiple awards, including: Winner of the prestigious Wainwright Prize for Conservation and Nature, recipient of The Jane Grigson Trust prize for a debut food book, Special Commendation by the Andre Simon Awards, awarded The Fortnum & Mason Book of the Year, winner of the Guild of Food Writers Food Book Award and also the Guild’s First Book Award.

Daniel Moss
Agroecology as a Climate Solution: Grassroots Advocacy Strategies at COP and beyond
Daniel serves as Executive Director at the Agroecology Fund. Trained as a community organiser, he strengthened tenant organisations in public housing in Boston and then lived in El Salvador and Mexico for five years, working in support of social movements defending rights to land and water. In addition to work with the Agroecology Fund, he collaborates with the Equitable Food Initiative as an on-farm trainer and with Latin American water utilities to strengthen watershed conservation strategies. He holds a Master’s degree in City Planning from MIT and writes frequently on food and water issues for traditional and online media.

Daniel Piovesan do Nascimento
Struggles for Land Justice: Sharing strategies from the UK, Brazil, and East Africa
Daniel is a graduate in Social Work and has a masters in Rural Development. He currently works in the coordination of the MST settlement cooperation in Rio Grande do Sol, a state in the south of Brazil. He is part of the collective focused on relations with society and the landless LGBT national collective.

Daniel Tyrkiel
Soil Food Web Microscopy in a Nutshell
Daniel Tyrkiel is director of the Soil Ecology Laboratory. He has been in the business of developing soil microbes since 2017.

Danny Fisher
Local Food Economies: How do we join the dots?
Danny Fisher worked as a market gardener for 6 years in the South-West of England before joining Organiclea in North East London, where he was the produce co-ordinator. Danny then went on to set up and run the Better Food Shed, a distribution hub based on the edge of London, that coordinates buying produce for box schemes across London from organic farms around London and further afield.

Darina Allen
Seaweed Is Already Saving the World & Feeding Britain from the Ground Up: Why we should align our future diets with regenerative farming systems
Darina, a well-known chef, author and presenter, is co-founder of Ballymaloe Cookery School, a sustainable farm-to-table project situated on an 100-acre organic farm in East Cork, Ireland. The family hotel, Ballymaloe House has been the recipient of numerous awards for its seasonal, local and home-grown food and hospitality. Darina has also been instrumental in setting up the Farmers’ Market Movement in Ireland and is President of East Cork Convivium of Slow Food.
@darinaallen

Dave Goulson
Averting the Insect Apocalypse with Dave Goulson and Vicki Hird
Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at University of Sussex, specializing in bee ecology. He has published more than 350 scientific articles, plus seven books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers A Sting in the Tale (2013), the Garden Jungle (2019), and Silent Earth (2021). Goulson founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2006.

Debbie Berkowitz
Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections: The human impacts of animal agriculture
A fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative, Debbie is a worker safety and health policy expert and advocate. She has helped develop policies and campaigns that improved conditions for vulnerable, low-wage workers in dangerous industries, including the meat, poultry, and food industry. From 2009 to 2015 she was chief of staff and then senior policy advisor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). She has testified before Congressional committees on the health and safety hazards facing meatpacking and poultry workers.

Deirdre (Dee) Woods
Intersectional Struggles for Justice in Food Systems & A Care Income to Protect the Land, the People and the Natural World
Dee is a food and farming action-ist who advocates for good food for all and a just, equitable food system, challenging the systemic barriers that impact marginalised communities and food producers. Dee’s work sits at the nexus of food and farming, particularly in intersectionality, diversity, equity and anti-oppression, decolonisation, reparations, the right to food and nutrition, participatory policymaking, community food systems, food system change, food commons, agroecology, and food sovereignty. She is co-founder of Granville Community Kitchen and the African and Caribbean Heritage Food Network.
@Didara

Dennis Hutson
Turning a Small Farm into a Catalyst for Community Development
Dennis is a retired minister from the Desert Southwest Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. He became interested in Allensworth, California after his mother moved there in 1977. It is a disadvantaged rural community, historically all African-American, now more than 90 percent Hispanic. Dennis is implementing an agricultural economic development venture to help improve the lives of residents there, together with Tulare County officials, Center on Race, Poverty and Environment (CRPE), Agricultural Land Based Association (ALBA), and Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Devlin Kuyek
The New Business of Carbon Farming and other ‘Nature Based Solutions’: Panacea or disaster?
Devlin joined GRAIN – a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems – in 2003, after working with NGOs and peasant organisations in Malaysia and the Philippines. He is GRAIN’s most active researcher, focusing on monitoring and analysing global agribusiness, including land grabs. Devlin is based in Montreal, Canada.

Didi Pershouse
How Other Species Regulate the Climate, and How Humans Can Help
Didi Pershouse is the author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function.  She founded the Land and Leadership Initiative, and develops the participatory training materials for the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.

Doha Asous
Farming under Fire: Cultivating land and life in occupied Palestine
Doha is a family farmer from the Palestinian village of Burin, and a member of Slow Food Palestine. Surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements, she farms her family land in the way her ancestors have done for generations, opening her home and sharing traditional food with international volunteers who come to support her olive harvest. Over recent years, however, her crops have been burnt by the settlers, while access to cultivate her own land has been restricted by the occupation. Climate change is also affecting her yields. Since 2006, British volunteers have come together in a Protective Presence team, to support Doha and other farmers to safely bring their harvests home.

Doug Bierend
Mycelium’s Moment: Understanding the growing fascination with fungi
Doug is a New York-based writer, and author of In Search of Mycotopia. He has written in WIRED, Vice, Motherboard, The Atlantic, Civil Eats, The Counter, Outside Magazine, Real Life Magazine and elsewhere, with a special interest in science, technology, food systems, ecology, biodiversity, and general subversiveness. As of November 2021, Doug is also Senior Communications Specialist for Ecovative, a leading company in the emerging field of mycelium biomaterials.

Ele Rose
GM’s False Promises: Could the UK be next?
Ele Rose holds a degree in biology from Balliol College, Oxford; is currently researching climate change adaptation as a PhD student at Pennsylvania State University; and has written and researched numerous publications for the Landworkers’ Alliance, including novel research for an upcoming publication on land use in an agroecological UK.

Eliane Bakker
A Journey via Land: Breaking the silence on land struggles in Europe
Eliane is a part-time farmer who works for Stichting Lenteland, and is active in Vereniging Toekomstboeren (member of La Via Campesina in the Netherlands). Connecting the environmental crisis and the crucial role of agriculture, Elaine holds degrees in future planet studies and organic agriculture & agroecology. Within Vereniging Toekomstboeren she does research on commons. Within Lenteland, a foundation that develops regenerative community farms, she focuses on development and sharing of knowledge and experience about regeneration and commons.

Emile Frison
Adjusting to the New Normal: Building resilient food systems in the face of climate change, crisis, and rising energy costs
Emile is an IPES-Food panel member, and an expert on conservation and agricultural biodiversity. Emile headed Bioversity International for ten years, after holding top positions at several global research institutes. He has a particular interest in sustainable food systems and the deployment of agricultural biodiversity to improve nutrition and the resilience and sustainability of agricultural systems.
@EmileFrison

Emma Cardwell
Struggles for Land Justice: Sharing strategies from the UK, Brazil, and East Africa
Emma Cardwell is a lecturer in economic geography at Lancaster Environment Centre. She has been conducting research on property and labour in the UK food system for the last twelve years.

Emma Shires
Local Food Economies: How do we join the dots?
Emma Shires is a miller and founding member of the Nottingham Mill Coop. She has a flour milling business run from the Coop, selling flour and pasta to bakeries and retail in Nottinghamshire. She also works and volunteers at FarmEco Community Farm, leading on their organic conversion and growing grain for milling.

Emmanuel Hallard
A Journey via Land: Breaking the silence on land struggles in Europe
Emmanuel is a sociologist who specialises in environmental management and agroforestry.  He has worked as a researcher at the National University of Costa Rica on “Agrarian crises and policies in Latin America”, and has been a consultant for agroforestry projects in rural Latin America. He has collaborated for many years with the Mouvement wallon d’Action Paysanne (Belgium) on land access issues and the environmental component of the European Common Agricultural Policy.

Esther Penunia
Adjusting to the New Normal: Building resilient food systems in the face of climate change, crisis, and rising energy costs
Esther is Interim Coordinator of the Agroecology Coalition and Secretary General of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA), which includes 20 national Farmers Organisations in 16 countries, representing around 13 million family farmers. Esther has more than four decades of professional experience in rural development.
@EstherPenunia

Eufemia C. Cullamat
Building Community Resilience in Indigenous Communities from India to Benin to the Philippines
Eufemia is a former member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines. She is working towards the recognition of ancestral land rights as a component of agrarian and land reform, and has experience in sustainable agriculture through her work as an indigenous women activist and progressive legislator. She is the secretary-general of Kalumaran (Mindanao-wide alliance of Lumad organisations) and spokesperson of Sandugo (Movement of Moro and Indigenous Peoples for Self-Determination).

Famara Diédhiou
Seed Battles in Africa: Farmer’s rights and greedy corporates
Famara is a programme officer for the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). He has 17 years of professional experience working mostly in rural development, particularly in the establishment of community seed and cereal banks, and organising women’s groups for urban-rural partnership and advocacy. Currently Famara is active in various networks in West Africa to advance the food sovereignty struggle and African-driven solutions.

Ferdinand Wafula
Andhra Pradesh to Africa: Taking agroecology to scale through farmer-to-farmer online exchanges
Ferdinand is an agroecology practitioner and farmer trained in community-based development, bio-intensive and permaculture methods. He is a promoter and trainer on healthy soils for healthy food, using bio-inputs at the farmer level. He is the chief executive officer of Bio Gardening Innovations (BIOGI), a non-profit based in Vihiga, Western Kenya that collaborates widely with other organisations and networks working towards sustainable food systems.

Fernanda Meister
What Role can Philanthropy Play to Catalyze Change in Food Systems?
After 13 years working as an attorney in litigation and consultancy, Fernanda took the chance to connect her specialty in Environmental Law to Food Studies. In 2018 she started working as an independent researcher and consultant focused on disruptive solutions in Sustainable Food Systems. She is the General Manager of Meraki’s branch in Brazil and the Investors Relation Officer for one of its investee companies, Pasto Vivo, an innovative regenerative livestock farm project in Mato Grosso, Brazil. She is deeply connected to Instituto Meraki, supporting its actions on social and climate justice for a more fair and equitable society.

ffinlo Costain
Adjusting to the New Normal: Building resilient food systems in the face of climate change, crisis, and rising energy costs
ffinlo is chief executive of Farmwel and founder of the Food & Global Security Network. ffinlo has expertise in the positioning of agricultural policy in the social and political context, with 25 years of experience in politics, NGOs, communications and consultancy, having also spent time as a journalist and broadcaster. ffinlo produces the Farm Gate podcast.
@ffinlocostain

Fiona Mountain
Our Wild Farming Life with Lynn Cassells
Fiona  is Marketing Manager at FarmED and Cotswold Seeds. She’s an award-winning novelist with books published across the world. She’s chaired events at the Hay Festival and has a background in broadcasting and journalism, having worked for the BBC, written for publications including The Times and appeared on programmes including R4 Woman’s Hour.

Frances Davies
Seed Battles in Africa: Farmer’s rights and greedy corporates
Frances is the co-founder and co-ordinator of ZAAB, the Zambia Alliance for Agroecology and Biodiversity. ZAAB is an advocacy network of faith, farmer and civil society organisations which promotes and supports a just and sustainable food and agroecological system. Frances is a researcher, activist and sustainability leader with a broad interest in global food systems. She collaborates with NGO partners in the region and has helped SAFCEI map its emerging work on food and climate justice, providing valuable regional insights.

Fuad Abu Saif
Eating in a Time of War: Food crisis or distribution crisis? Analysis and proposals by La Via Campesina
Fuad is a human rights defender, a leader and a developer of hundreds of agricultural programs, initiatives and coalitions – contributing to the development of the agricultural sector by empowering farmers’ steadfastness and sovereignty over resources within a sustainable community-based liberational developmental framework. Fuad was one of the founders of the local Palestinian seed bank. He supported Palestine’s membership in La Via Campesina, and has played a major role in establishing La Via Campesina’s Arab Region North Africa regional work. Fuad brings farmers’ voices to the national policy level and regional and international arenas.

Gabriela Galarza-Ferrín
Participatory Guarantee Systems as Social Strategy for Certification
Gabriela is co-founder of La Cuica Cósmica (The Cosmic Earthworm), a small organisation based in Ecuador which aims to explore and experience how to create and promote regenerative life systems using permaculture, ecology and education. She currently works with Imaymana Foundation on the regeneration and improved governance of the Andean Chocó Model Forest. She works as coordinator of the Flower PGS for the Seed Guardians Network of Ecuador.

Georgie Gilmore
Meditations with Satish Kumar
Georgie works for The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity for environmental and social justice. Her role involves increasing the charity’s outreach and impact, organising and facilitating many of Resurgence’s dynamic events, and offering meditation and self-reflection journeys that support people to live in deeper connection with the land and with themselves.

Gerald Miles
GM’s False Promises: Could the UK be next? & Sharing Experiences of Drought and Resilience Between Indigenous Farmers
Gerald Miles is an organic farmer and campaigner against genetically modified crops and pesticides. In 2003 he drove his tractor all the way from West Wales to Downing St to protest about GM crops and to raise support from fellow farmers. Gerald in 2010 launched Wales’ first community supported agriculture scheme (CSA). He believes the CSA model allows a mutually beneficial relationship between farmers and the community. The people who joined his CSA came to the farm regularly and began to refer to it as ‘our farm’.

Gertrude Pswarayi-Jabson
Women as Custodians of Land and Agriculture in the African Context: For resilient and sustainable food systems
Gertrude is the Country Coordinator for Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Zimbabwe. For the past 17 years she has been working with Civil Society Organisations to raise consciousness on agroecology, food systems, gender, information and communication technologies and livelihoods on a practical and political level. Gertrude is an award-winning journalist and a member of the African Earth Jurisprudence collective.

Gillian Preece
Finding Solutions to the Fertiliser Crisis: Practical on farm innovation for home grown fertility
Gillian is a senior agricultural consultant with ADAS and is based in South Shropshire. She is an experienced consultant who has worked in the livestock sector throughout her 24 years in the industry. She works predominantly with beef, sheep and dairy farmers assisting them with business management, technical aspects of livestock production and accessing environmental schemes. As a partner in their own farm business Gillian also has practical experience of beef and sheep farming, alongside her husband Phil.

Gosiame Choabi
What did COP27 mean for Africa and Agroecology?
Gosiame works for the South African Council of Churches Gauteng Province as Ecumenical Secretary responsible for working with Churches for Church Action Together, promoting access to rights and respect. Involved with South African Civil BRICS Coordinating Committee, advancing recognition of TACK 3 (Civil Society within BRICS) countries. Gosiame is interested in issues that promote Integrity of Creation, including addressing food security and climate change.

Guy Kastler
SOS GMOs! The need for a citizen-peasant alliance to protect the right to seeds in Europe
Guy studied philosophy until 1970, then became a farmworker, winegrower, and shepherd. Guy is now a shepherd at an organic farm in the South of France, a founding member and representative of the Confédération Paysanne on the issues of seeds and GMOs, a general delegate of the Réseau Semences Paysannes français, and a member of the biodiversity commission of La Via Campesina international.

Guy Singh-Watson
Future Nut Production in the UK
Farmer, founder and creator of Britain’s largest supplier of organic veg boxes, Riverford. Over the last 30 years, Guy has taken Riverford from one man and a wheelbarrow delivering veg to friends, to a national veg box scheme delivering around 70,000 customers a week. In 2018, Guy placed the company into employee ownership but continues to innovate at his farm, Baddaford next door to Riverford HQ. Guy is an inspirational, passionate and opinionated figure in the world of organic farming and has long since challenged business norms.

Hanwant Singh Rathore
Humanity’s Herding Heritage: Perspectives on pastoralism from India to Spain
Hanwant is director of the Indian NGO Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan that is advocating for the grazing rights of the country’s pastoralists and providing them with veterinary support. Together with Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, he is co-founder of India’s first dedicated camel dairy that processes and markets dairy products from nomadic systems.

Helena Norberg-Hodge
Reconnecting to Food: Healing our planet and ourselves
Director of Local Futures, Helena is the author of Ancient Futures, Local is Our Future, From the Ground Up and Bringing the Food Economy Home, and producer of The Economics of Happiness. She is the recipient of the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Prize.

Holly Tomlinson
Farms across Four Nations: Towards a more inclusive UK subsidy system
Holly works for the Landworkers’ Alliance as policy lead for Wales, advocating for interests of small-scale agroecological farms and sustainable foresters in Welsh policymaking. Her work in Wales has covered four years of post Brexit subsidy scheme development by the Welsh Government from their initial “Brexit & Our Land” consultation in 2018 to their most recent Sustainable Farming Scheme Consultation and Agriculture (Wales) Bill.

Hsar Doe Doh Moo Htoo
Defending Indigenous Food Systems and Territories
Hsar Doe Doh Moo Htoo has been working as the Environmental Education Programme Coordinator for the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network since March 2013. For this position, he researches and develops education materials and syllabi, conducts outreach trainings for secondary and post-secondary schools, and facilitates the integration of environmental studies in the core academic curriculum of Karen education system. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Asia-Pacific International University in 2008 with a B.A. in Education and Psychology, and then finished his MSCP in Counseling Psychology at Assumption University, Bangkok in 2013. He is passionate about providing
opportunities for indigenous youth and exploring innovative ways to inspire youth to carry on indigenous values and concepts.

Hugh Blogg
Diversifying UK Fruit and Veg Produce: Perceptions, opportunities, and collaboration bringing ‘exotic’ crops to market
Proud to be part of the horticultural face of the Soil Association, implementing a range of short and long-term strategies, Hugh focuses on small scale systems, supply chain, innovation and diversity within the sector. Following studying for an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Hugh has held a variety of posts at the Soil Association spanning the press office, certification, and more recently grower-facing research and advice. Passionate about low input, circular economy systems, Hugh became Head Grower at Fungusloci – an urban mushroom micro-farm and was an Associate Director at Transition Stroud. He coordinated and launched the UK Robust Potato Pledge in 2021, inspired by research undertaken in EU projects Organic-PLUS and RELACS.

Iain Tolhurst
Peat-Free Growing Media in Commercial Horticulture & Feeding Britain from the Ground Up: Why we should align our future diets with regenerative farming systems
Iain Tolhurst has been at the forefront of the UK organic farming movement for over 40 years. His wealth of  knowledge and experience has been shared through books, articles and talks, which have garnered national and international recognition. His 8ha farm, Tolhurst Organic, uses farm green manures and diverse rotations, woodchip composts and agroforestry rather than grazing animals or animal inputs. The integration of crops, a systems approach to pest and disease management and biodiversity makes for a fascinating and durable agricultural system. Iain’s work with woodchip substrates for propagation has enabled growers to consider moving away from peat-based materials.

Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Humanity’s Herding Heritage: Perspectives on pastoralism from India to Spain
Ilse, a veterinarian by training, founded the League for Pastoral Peoples in 1992 after being confronted with the problems of the Raika camel pastoralists during fieldwork in Rajasthan, India. Since then, she has advocated in various UN fora for the recognition of pastoralists as guardians of livestock diversity.

Jade Bashford
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
Jade works on food justice for the Real Farming Trust. She has worked to change the food system for thirty years, for the Soil Association, in the community sector and in business, using a community development approach. She is also co-owner of Stroud Brewery, a fully organic microbrewery with a lively community centre which has had strong community financial support through Covid and other challenges.

Janeesha B
Future in the Hands of Young People: Moving from pesticides to agroecology in Asia
Janeesha B is from the Kurumba tribe, an indigenous community in Attappady, Kerala. Janeesha is 23 and has been involved since her childhood in indigenous knowledge systems. She has a degree in commerce. She is also a young farmer, skilled and knowledgeable in Kurumba traditional agriculture practices from working on her family’s land for the last two years.

Javier Carrera
Participatory Guarantee Systems as Social Strategy for Certification
Permacultor. Author, educator, and activist. Expert in regenerative systems, with an emphasis on food systems. Founder and Social Coordinator of the Seed Guardians Network of Ecuador. Editor of Allpa Magazine. Editor in chief, Madre Semilla Educational Platform, Radio Semilla podcast, and Tarpuna video series. Research Director of the first Inventory of Food Heritage of Ecuador.

Jayakumar Chelaton
Future in the Hands of Young People: Moving from pesticides to agroecology in Asia & From Sri Lanka to Mexico: Government failures and grassroots solutions to advancing agroecological policy
Jayakumar is Director of Pesticide Action Network (PAN) India. Since 1983 he has been a full time activist in the environment and wildlife sector. He is a member of several environmental groups in Kerala and founder of THANAL, a group of nature enthusiasts who became environmental activists in the face of rising pesticide use and pesticide-related illness, increasing deforestation and improper handling of urban waste. He has been active in environmental research and education for three decades.

Jean-Marc Albisetti
Living Bread: The way of the peasant baker
I grew up on a farm and ran a Biodynamic collaborative mixed farm in the Pyrénées for many years where I grew, stonemilled and baked grains as a “paysan boulanger”. I started the bakery /mill at tablehurst Farm – Sussex and gave workshops in England, Wales and Scotland. I’m now in France in the Cévennes working on a project for a new farm!

Jean Matthieu Thévenot
Young Farmers and Food Systems’ Transformations: Struggles and opportunities towards a globalised youth response
Jean Matthieu is a young farmer producing organic seedlings in the Basque Country. He belongs to Confédération Paysanne, in France, and he is an active member of the Youth Articulation of the European Coordination of Via Campesina. He is working with ECVC Youth on various issues from labour conditions in European agriculture to defence of LGBTQIA+ rights, as well as the promotion of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP).

Jerry Alford
Finding Solutions to the Fertiliser Crisis: Practical on farm innovation for home grown fertility
Jerry has experience in arable and mixed farming having run the family farm in Devon for 25 years. The farm was initially a dairy farm eventually converting to organic and being run as a beef, sheep and arable unit. At the same time he converted a range of farm buildings into a holiday cottage complex, was chairman of a local farmer owned co-op grain store and became involved in the grain supply chain nationally. Jerry is interested in a systems approach to farming, and looks at farms as a whole system rather than a just a mix of enterprises or a series of crops in rotation. He is also looking at options to reduce cultivations within organic rotations and the adoption of more agroecological and organic type systems in non-organic farms.

Jesse Noon
How do Prisons and Policing Impact and Intersect with Our Struggles for Land Justice?
Jesse is a prison abolitionist who was a founding member of Books Beyond Bars, an organisation that sends books and other resources to queer and trans incarcerated people in the UK. They have a history of being active in struggles against state violence and prison expansion. They are also a member of Myco, a Manchester based urban mushroom farm. Their work at Myco involves leading educational programmes on ecology, mycology, and land justice.

Jessica Hutchings
Reclaiming Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Aoteorea New Zealand
Jessica Hutchings (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Huirapa, Gujarati) is nationally and internationally recognised as a leader in Indigenous food systems and Māori food and soil sovereignty. She is a founding Trustee of the Papawhakaritorito Charitable Trust that works to uplift Māori kai and soil sovereignty and Hua Parakore through research, development and community practice. She lives on 12 acres and is a Hua Parakore verified whānau food grower. Jessica’s books include Te Mahi Oneone Hua Parakore: A Māori Soil Sovereignty and Wellbeing Handbook (Freerange Press 2020) and Te Mahi Māra Hua Parakore: A Māori Food Sovereignty Handbook (Te Tākupu, 2015).

Jessie MacInnis
Young Farmers and Food Systems’ Transformations: Struggles and opportunities towards a globalised youth response
Jessie is a small-scale, first-generation farmer and scholar-activist based in Kesputwitk, Mi’kma’ki in so-called Canada (aka Lunenburg, Nova Scotia). Jessie owns and operates a market garden with her sister and is a PhD student in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba. She is currently the Youth President of the National Farmers Union of Canada and actively participates in La Via Campesina, especially the Peasants’ Rights Declaration process and regional Youth Articulation.
@jessiemacinnis

Jill Vaughan
Peat-Free Growing Media in Commercial Horticulture
Together with her husband John Overvooorde, Jill runs Delfland Nurseries Limited, the leading organic propagator since 1997. They produce a very wide range of vegetable and salad plants for wholesale delivery within GB. They also sell plants by the tray for smaller growers. Jill studied physical geography and geology at London University followed by an MSc in Soil Science at Aberdeen.  For sixteen years she was employed as a consultant soil scientist by ADAS (Agricultural Development and Advisory Service) before joining Delfland in 1996. She served on the Soil Association Horticulture Standards and Certification Scrutiny Committees between 1999 and 2020.
@organicplantsuk

Jim Goodman
GM’s False Promises: Could the UK be next?
Jim and his wife Rebecca ran a 45-cow organic dairy/direct market beef farm in Wisconsin for 40 years. He is the current board chair of the National Family Farm Coalition. Jim feels that food, like health care or education is not a commodity, but rather a basic human right.
@familyfarmcoalition

Jo Kamal
Cultivating Belonging: Exploring diasporic relationships to land
Jo (they/them) is a food grower, folk herbalist and racial justice activist. They have a background in research on the colonial production of knowledge and the racism inherent in environmental NGOs and the policing system. They currently work on food sovereignty movement building with the Landworkers’ Alliance, and they also work at Black Rootz, an anti-racist market garden in North London. 

John Wilson
Planting Water with a Water School Africa
John is a Zimbabwean free range facilitator and activist working with organisations across Africa. These range from community-based organisations to large regional and continental networks such as the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). Having worked in the agroecology field for over 40 years, his focus is on strategic and collaborative initiatives that can help grow the agroecology and food sovereignty movement in Africa and globally. He sees great potential for Water School Africa to add significant impetus and connectedness to water-harvesting work already happening in communities across the continent to recharge Africa’s Water Bank.

Jordan Treakle
Nyéléni Global Process: Working together on people’s solutions to transform the global food system and achieve food sovereignty
He is the National Programs and Policy Coordinator for the National Family Farm Coalition. He has worked with farmers and rural communities at the local and international levels on social and economic justice issues in agriculture since 2008. His work has focused on policy advocacy for farmer land rights, agroecology, and strengthening smallholder producer organisations. Jordan holds a Master of Science degree in International Rural Development from Wageningen University (Netherlands), and is currently based in Washington, D.C. (United States).

José Abel Ramírez
Agroforestry and Inga Alley Cropping
José is the field coordinator for the UK-based charity Rainforest Saver and its partner, Juan Jimenez College in Sucumbios, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. José coordinates the colleges and local farmers in the method of inga alley cropping. He has been working in agroforestry systems since 2006, both for local government and various NGOs.

José Manuel Benitez Castaño
SOS GMOs! The need for a citizen-peasant alliance to protect the right to seeds in Europe

Josephine Akia Luyimbazi
Women as Custodians of Land and Agriculture in the African Context: For resilient and sustainable food systems
Josephine is the Country Coordinator of Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Uganda, a social scientist with over 15 years of experience working in the sustainable agricultural sector. She is passionate about influencing policy and practice, and an advocate for sustainable, nutritious and healthy food systems and consumption. As an agroecologist, Josephine is zealous about empowering farming communities, women, and the youth to transform their livelihoods.

Joshua Konkankoh
Conscious Food Systems: Cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems
Joshua is the Director of Better World Cameroon and founder of the Bafut Ecovillage in Cameroon. He is a respected indigenous elder, a permaculture educator, who has guided the transition to a more resilient way of life in many African villages, in collaboration with the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). Joshua is currently based in Portugal.

Josie Cohen
The Dirty Truth about Pesticides and What We Can Do About It
Josie joined PAN UK in 2017 to head up the organisation’s UK campaigning, policy and communications work. For the past 15 years she has focused on tackling social, environmental, and human rights issues associated with large-scale agriculture, including leading ActionAid UK’s biofuels campaign and working on land rights for Global Witness.

Judy Kipkenda
Sharing Youth Experiences in Practicing Agroecology for Climate Adaptation in Africa
Judy is a member of the Ogiek Community in Koibatek in Baringo County-Kenya. She is a human rights defender, a feminist and an environmentalist with ten years’ experience fighting for the recognition of  various rights  of her community. Judy is the founder and Executive Director of Koibatek Ogiek Women and Youth Network (KOWYN), an organisation championing for empowering of Ogiek women and youth through inclusion in gender equality, food security, agroecology and restoration discussions. KOWYN is also a big advocator for forest protection.

Jutta Kill
The New Business of Carbon Farming and other ‘Nature Based Solutions’: Panacea or disaster?
Jutta is a researcher and writer focused on social movements and environmental networks in the global South. She has studied biology and combines research with solidarity work alongside forest communities, whose traditional economies and ways of life are threatened by deforestation and false solutions to the climate crisis. Jutta has published extensively on carbon markets, and how the new economy of nature maintains ecologically unequal trade and the associated violation of human rights.

Jyoti Fernandes
Farms across Four Nations: Towards a more inclusive UK subsidy system & In the Name of the Farmer: Vandana Shiva recalls a lifetime of campaigning for small-scale farmers
Jyoti Fernandes is an agroecological smallholder farmer based in Dorset. Jyoti is a co-founder of the LWA and coordinates the policy and campaigns work of the organisation. For the past 4 years she has been working closely with Defra to be a voice for small-scale agroecological farms in the agricultural transition and has been instrumental in contributing to England’s ELMS scheme.

Karen Nekesa
What did COP27 mean for Africa and Agroecology?
Born in an indigenous community in Western Kenya, Karen is naturally passionate about culture and nature. She is a human rights, climate and gender activist, a campaigner, a social justice defender, a change-maker and a result-oriented communicator, with recognized skills and knowledge to support advocacy and communication in development, People describe me as, friendly, assertive, caring and likeable outgoing character; a person who loves to promote social, cultural and environmental actions among women and youth. Karen served as Board of PELUM Kenya Association and currently a Board member of Biosafety and Biodiversity Association of Kenya (BIBA-K), Institute for Culture and Ecology (ICE) and Forest Action Network (FAN).

Kate Hughes
Future Nut Production in the UK
Kate Hughes is an award-winning broadsheet journalist specialising in sustainability, author of Going Zero: One Family’s journey to Zero Waste and a Greener Lifestyle, and a regenerative organic farmer on Exmoor. Together with her husband, David Brewer, the couple is busy transforming what was once a conventional mixed operation over 450 acres into a holistic system incorporating a range of strategies including 150 acres of agroforestry – one of the largest such projects in the UK – and 150 acres of new broadleaf woodland creation.

Kavya Chowdhry
“Precision” Farming: Digitalised Nirvana or corporate-controlled nightmare?
Kavya is from India and works as a researcher with ETC, a small, international research and action collective committed to social and environmental justice, human rights and the defence of just and ecological agri-food systems. She has studied development and environmental governance, and has worked on reviving traditional agriculture practices and forest foods in Odisha, India, and on the right to food and nutrition. She is co-author of ETC’s recent Food Barons report.

Kaye-Maree Dunn
Reclaiming Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Aoteorea New Zealand
Kaye-Maree is the Director of Making Everything Achievable, Ahau NZ Limited, and Indigital Blockchain Limited. She is currently on the Interim Māori Spectrum Trust Board, North Hokianga Development Trust, Āhau Tātai Hono Trust, and is a Sir Edmund Hillary Fellow and a Senior Atlantic Fellow through the University of Melbourne. She has worked in the realm of Māori and community development for over 21 years and loves being involved in lifting the transformative capability of whānau, hapū, and iwi to actively contribute to the growth of New Zealand’s economic potential.

Kayode Kadara
Turning a Small Farm into a Catalyst for Community Development
Kayode has a been member of the community of Allensworth, CA since the late 1970s when his mother-in-law moved to the community. After retirement in 2010, he and his wife, Denise, moved to the community to support his mother-in-law’s community advocacy efforts and his brother-in-law’s farming operation. He and his wife advocate, coordinate and participate in efforts/programs to enhance the quality of life in Allensworth and other disadvantaged and under-served communities in the Central Valley. Their advocacy has been in water quality, sanitation, safe & affordable housing, food security, affordable energy, youth leadership development and environmental stewardship.

Kelsey and Chelsea
How do Prisons and Policing Impact and Intersect with Our Struggles for Land Justice?
Cradle is a collective of facilitators, organisers, educators and artists finding ways to make space for curiosity, compassion and creativity. In our mission to build a world with transformative justice responses to violence, we believe we all need to develop the skills to support radical approaches to collective care and healing in our communities. As a collective of individuals with complex identities and ancestries, we hope to reach beyond borders and binaries with this work and the legacies we follow as we pursue it.

Kelvin Nicolas
Intersectional Struggles for Justice in Food Systems
He is a militant in the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) and in the National LGBT Landless Collective.

KESAN
Defending Indigenous Territories and Food Systems
Karen Environmental and Social Action Network or KESAN is a community-based, non-governmental, non-profit organisation that works to improve livelihood security and to gain respect for indigenous people’s knowledge and rights in Karen State of Burma, where the violence and inequities of more than 60 years of civil war have created one of the most impoverished regions in the world.

Kim Brooks
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
My education and early career focused on business and finance, working as a financial auditor for 8 years for PricewaterhouseCoopers. I left the finance world for food and farming; inspired by a local organic veg box then propelled by the knowledge and passion shared by organic farmers whilst WWOOFING in Australia. Following my return to the UK, I pursued an MSc in Sustainable Agriculture. It was during these studies that I started volunteering at The Community Farm, a Community Supported Agriculture project in Chew Magna. I became bookkeeper in January 2018, and Managing Director in the midst of the pandemic in August 2020.

Kim Graham
Creating a Future of Collective Land Ownership and Responsibilities
Kim is the Lead Research Coordinator at Shared Assets, a think-and-do-tank, working to create a socially just future through practical projects that build new relationships between people and the land. They’re interested in using participatory research to build collective knowledge about the impacts of stewarding land for the common good.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran
The New Business of Carbon Farming and other ‘Nature Based Solutions’: Panacea or Disaster?
Kirtana is an International Programme Coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest environmental justice federation uniting 73 national and over 5,000 community groups. She has spent over a decade fighting for environmental justice with a focus on food sovereignty, agroecology, land rights, fighting corporate power and the global governance of food systems. She works with global movements of peasants, family farmers, landless people, fisher folks, indigenous peoples and rural workers’ organisations.
@kirtanaSekaran

Laurie Mompelat
Seeding Reparations: Making the UK’s food corporations pay
Lauriem (they/them) works as a food justice group coordinator in Tower Hamlets for the climate justice charities Platform London and the Women’s Environmental Network. They are passionate about collectively researching and building alternative food systems both in the Global North and in places that have suffered long term colonial exploitation, such as their home islands Guadeloupe and Martinique. They have a background in data research, campaigning and advocacy on issues ranging from race and class inequality, fossil fuel divestment and queer liberation. They have also worked as an organiser and facilitator for various grassroots political projects focusing on anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial justice. Beyond Platform, Lauriem  is a committed musician and sound-maker,  working to make space for us to heal our relationship to Earth, to ourselves and each other, as we carve out better worlds into our doing.

Leonida Odongo
Sharing Youth Experiences in Practising Agroecology for Climate Adaptation in Africa
Leonida Odongo is a social justice activist and community organiser from Kenya. She organises community action through an initiative called Haki Nawiri Afrika which focuses on food justice, climate justice, gender justice and youth engagement. Leonida Odongo is a freelance writer and contributor to World Pulse, an online network representing women in 190 countries. She is co-Chair of the Seed Working Group and a member of the Climate Action Group at the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), and sits on the board of A Growing Culture.

Lim Li Ching
Agroecology as a Climate Solution: Grassroots advocacy strategies at COP and beyond
Lim Li Ching is a Senior Researcher at Third World Network (TWN). TWN is an independent non-profit international research and advocacy organisation involved in bringing about a greater articulation of the needs, aspirations and rights of the peoples in the South and in promoting just, equitable and ecological development. Li Ching coordinates its biodiversity, biosafety and sustainable agriculture work. She is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and has contributed to various international publications on sustainable agriculture.

Liz Carlisle
Healing Grounds and Cultivating Diversity (above and below the soil)
Liz is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on food and farming. She got hooked on agriculture while working as an aide to organic farmer and US Senator Jon Tester, which led to a decade of research and writing collaborations with farmers in Montana. She has written books about regenerative farming and agroecology, including Healing Grounds. Prior to her career as a writer and academic, she spent several years touring rural America as a country singer.
@lizwcarlisle

Lizzie Rowe
A Good Life: How animal welfare and sustainability go hoof-in-hand
Dr Lizzie Rowe has always had a passion for the natural world, which led her to read Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Zoology. She completed a PhD in Clinical Veterinary Sciences in the Animal Welfare and Behaviour research group at the University of Bristol and has worked for a number of animal welfare charities, before returning to academia, briefly at the University of Oxford and then back at Bristol Veterinary School, and now Reading University where she is a Research Assistant on the Pathways Project. Lizzie also previously worked for the Sustainable Food Trust coordinating their work on the harmonisation of on-farm sustainability assessment, as well as contributing to research and communications activities.

Lynn Cassells
Our Wild Farming Life
Lynn Cassells is the owner of Lynbreck Croft alongside partner Sandra Baer. With a background in conservation and rewilding, she is passionate about nature and loves nothing more than spending time outdoors, planting trees, running, meditating, foraging, hiking, writing and cooking.

Madhuvanti Murphy
From the Caribbean to the Pacific: On the sharp end of food insecurity and climate change
Maddy is a senior lecturer in qualitative research methods at the University of the West Indies, Barbados. Her research focuses on the implementation and evaluation of interventions to increase food and nutrition security in Small Island States using all-of-society approaches, with the aim of reducing obesity and noncommunicable diseases.

Manish Jain
Reconnecting to Food: Healing our Planet and Ourselves
Manish is co-founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Re-thinking Education and Development in Udaipur, India. Manish is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse knowledge systems and is the co-founder of Swaraj University and the Creativity Adda, convenor of the Ecoversities Network and a founding member of Giftival Network, Vikalp Sangam, Learning Societies Unconference and Berkana Exchange. He worked as a principal architect of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers transnational initiative and as a consultant for UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank and USAID, and as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley. He has spent numerous years unlearning and relearning. 

Marcia Ishii
From Sri Lanka to Mexico: Government Failures and Grassroots Solutions to Advancing Agroecological Policy
Marcia is a Co-Director of the Grassroots Science Program and a Senior Scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). She is also PANNA’s Regional Coordinator in the PAN International network. Marcia’s work at PAN includes supporting and strengthening agroecology movements and policies in the U.S. and globally; challenging corporate power and influence over agriculture and public institutions; and international policy advocacy to advance equitable, climate-resilient and ecologically sound food systems within a human rights-based framework. She was a lead author of the UN-sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development.

Margaret Gray
Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections: The human impacts of animal agriculture
Margaret is an associate professor of political science at Adelphi University, whose work on New York farmworkers lies at the intersection of labour, immigration, and food studies. She authored Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic about the workers behind New York local food economies (University of California Press 2014).

Margi Lennartsson Turner
Peat-Free Growing Media in Commercial Horticulture
Dr Margi Lennartsson Turner is Associate Professor in Organic Horticulture and Public Health at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), Coventry University and Senior Research Associate with Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), UK.  For more than 30 years, Margi has been actively involved in the campaign to phase out the use of peat in horticulture; leading research to develop peat alternatives for organic production systems as well as working with the industry on policy related to the transition to peat-free horticulture. Margi has been a member of the UK Responsible Sourcing of Growing Media initiative since 2013.

Marion Nestle
Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics with Marion Nestle and Raj Patel
Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, emerita, and author most recently of Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics, of Food, Nutrition, and Health.

Mark Thomas
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
Mark joined FCN in 2019 following a career spent working with a national agronomy firm. As Head of Services, Mark’s role in FCN is to ensure that its volunteer groups are supported to carry out their work within their local farming communities. He also has responsibility for the FCN Helpline.

Marthe Kiley-Worthington
A Good Life: How animal welfare and sustainability go hoof-in-hand
Marthe is a farmer who has developed 5 ecological farms (self-sustaining, diversified, high net yielding, where the whole farm is also a nature reserve). She is also an ethologist and ecologist focused on animal welfare. Marthe has spent the last 20 years studying the epistemology of cattle, horses, elephants and rhino. She has published 8 books & over 100 papers. She runs a small ecological farm on Exmoor, anyone interested is welcome to visit.

Martin Lines
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
Martin Lines is a third-generation farmer and contractor who grows mainly arable crops on his family farm and rented land in Cambridgeshire. Martin is also Chair of the Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN) a farmer-led, grassroots organisation which profiles a way of farming that puts nature and the environment at its heart.

Martin Lukac
Agroforestry and Inga Alley Cropping
Martin is Professor of Ecosystem Science at Reading University, with more than 10 years of experience in research on the ecology of forest and agricultural ecosystems, agroforestry and soil science. His main area of expertise is terrestrial ecosystem productivity and functioning, the role of diversity in ecosystem stability, and carbon cycling in ecosystems.

Maruthan K
Building Community Resilience in Indigenous Communities from India to Benin to the Philippines
Maruthan K has been farming for the last 32 years on his own farm, using his skills and knowledge in the traditional tribal agriculture practices of Attappady. He is also known as the “MANNUKKARAN”, a local leader who is the head of all traditional tribal agriculture in the area and responsible for traditional celebrations. For the last four years he has also been the main mentor for “VEDHE VALLA”, which is a tribal youth group supported by Thanal, an organisation promoting the conservation of tribal agriculture in Kerala.

Mathew John
Participatory Guarantee Systems as Social Strategy for Certification
Mathew is the co-founder and director of the Keystone Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation based in the Nilgiris, South India. He is also the co-founder of Last Forest, a social enterprise that provides a market platform for products from local communities. Mathew was on the World Board of IFOAM Organics International for two terms (2011-2017). He was part of the team to initiate Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) in India and served as a member of the Executive Committee of the PGS Organic Council (India), and as a member of the IFOAM International PGS Committee.

Matthew Izod
Finding Solutions to the Fertiliser Crisis: Practical on farm innovation for home grown fertility
Matthew farms with his dad on Priory Farm in the Cotswolds. Together they grow 500 acres of combinable crops, including milling wheat, malting barley, peas and OSR. They have also recently added a small Shropshire pedigree flock of sheep to the farm. After taking part in research into no till and cover crops with Innovative Farmers, Matthew has been convinced by the merits of cover crops and has plans to extend them across the farm in the next five years. Matthew believes the benefits from these practices will make the business more resilient in tougher years and is key to protecting soil health and biodiversity on the farm. Amongst a host of other conservation agriculture practices, he has recently joined the living mulch field lab and has been experimenting establishing clover as a permanent cover crop underneath his cash crops.
@MatthewIzod

Melanie Allen
Community Wealth Building For a Racially Just Food System
Melanie serves as the Program Director for the Black Farmer Fund. She is passionate about pushing forward efforts that create a future where black farmers and residents take control of local food systems, and have access to healthy, affordable and sustainable food. Melanie has worked on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, human rights, and international policy for nearly a decade, specifically through her work with Conservation International, Amnesty International, and Les Jardins Chez Marlene.

Mercy Mbatiah
Sharing Youth Experiences in Practising Agroecology for Climate Adaptation in Africa
Mercy is a sexual and reproductive health rights advocate and law student at the University of Nairobi. She is a legal researcher and writer, youth mobiliser and coordinator at Haki Nawiri Afrika. Mercy blogs about social justice, hosts a literature discussion series on Twitter (Andishi Africa), and hosts and moderates social justice dialogues.

Merlin Sheldrake
Mycelium’s Moment — Understanding the Growing Fascination With Fungi
Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the VU Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation.

Michael Michaud
Diversifying UK Fruit and Veg Produce: Perceptions, opportunities, and collaboration bringing ‘exotic’ crops to market
In the 1980s, Michael Michaud and his wife Joy started Peppers by Post, a market gardening enterprise that grew and sold chillies through the post. From that venture evolved Sea Spring Seeds, a web-based company selling seeds of quality vegetables, including those found in Britain’s immigrant communities. Since many of the seeds are generally unavailable through normal channels, they are produced on the Michaud’s nursery in West Dorset

Michel Pimbert
Living Bread: The way of the peasant baker
Professor Michel Pimbert is the head at the Center for Agroecology, Water & Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University. His research interests include: enabling policies and practices for agroecology and food sovereignty; the governance and adaptive management of biodiversity and natural resources; participatory action research methodologies; and deliberative democratic processes. Over the last 30 years he has published extensively in these areas, linking theory and practice to inform policy making on food, agriculture, environment, and human wellbeing.

Micherline Islanda Aduel
Young Farmers and Food Systems’ Transformations: Struggles and opportunities towards a globalised youth response
Micherline is a young peasant who grows yams to make a living. She is part of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, member of CLOC/La Via Campesina (LVC) in Haiti. She coordinated the youth section of her community to then become general coordinator at national level. Between 2017 and 2019 she was part of the CLOC/LVC youth coordination for the Caribbean Region. Since 2020, she has been representing the youth of the American continent in the International Coordination Committee (ICC) of LVC. She is writing her dissertation on the participation of peasant women of her community in the political economy of Haiti.
@micherlineislanda

Mika Tsutsumi
Reconnecting to Food: Healing our planet and ourselves
Mika is an award-winning author known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalisation. She’s written more than 35 books, including the international bestseller Corporate Poor Superstate America, The Government Always Tells Lies, and Digital Fascism. She has been active in the local food movement in Japan.

Milka Chepkorir
Defending Indigenous Territories and Food Systems
Milka is a young indigenous woman from the Sengwer peoples in Cherang’any Hills, Kenya. For the last six years she has been working with her community to address land tenure issues in their ancestral lands, the Embobut and Kabolet forests. The community has faced human rights violations through evictions by the government, in the name of forest conservation. Milka has been working with women and elders to ensure they are included in the land rights struggles. Together with the women in Embobut forest, she helped develop a cultural centre where the community hopes to carry out educational classes in Sengwer indigenous knowledge and systems.

Minni Jain
Planting Water with a Water School Africa
For over 25 years, Minni has worked with communities to regenerate their landscapes and lives. As Operations Director of the Flow Partnership, she works on community-led management of floods and droughts using simple, successful, low-cost, traditional methods. She coordinates Waterways World, a practical water school of landscape regeneration skills and methods to achieve replenishment of the world’s water bank. She also helped set up the One Pond Fund to enable communities worldwide to resource their water projects.

Miranda Geelhoed
SOS GMOs! The need for a citizen-peasant alliance to protect the right to seeds in Europe
Dr Miranda Geelhoed is a legal researcher, consultant and activist. Her work has focused on the interactions between agroecology and law and the potential for supporting transitions towards agroecology at the nexus between international human rights and biodiversity law. Miranda has also done extensive research on the protection of ecosystem functioning and social equity under EU risk regulations on GMOs and pesticides. She has previously worked for the Landworkers’ Alliance where, among others, she led the campaign against the deregulation of gene editing in the UK. Miranda is based on a mixed farm on the Scottish East coast and she is currently employed as policy coordinator for the Scottish Crofting Federation.

Moayyad Bsharat
Eating in a Time of War: Food crisis or distribution crisis? Analysis and proposals by La Via Campesina
Moayyad is the lobbying and advocacy director of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Palestine. He has a Masters in Sustainable Development and more than 11 years of experience in humanitarian and developmental work. He is the regional coordinator for La Via Campesina in the Arab and North Africa region. @UAWC1986

Mohammed Ruzzi
Farming under Fire: Cultivating land and life in occupied Palestine
Mohammed works with the Palestine Fair Trade Association as administrative manager. He has been leading the organic and fair trade certification program in PFTA since 2011, offers training for farmers in organic, fair trade, regenerative farming, environmental awareness and biodiversity, and is a beekeeper managing his own apiary.

Morgan Ody
Eating in a Time of War: Food crisis or distribution crisis? Analysis and proposals by La Via Campesina
Morgan is General Coordinator of La Via Campesina. She is a small-scale farmer from Brittany in France, where she produces vegetables to be sold in local markets. She has a Masters in international relationships and is an active member of the French peasant union Confédération Paysanne.
@OdyMorgan

Mugove Walter Nyika
Planting Water with a Water School Africa
Mugove is a natural farmer, sustainability practitioner and community development facilitator focused on building resilience and food sovereignty in African communities. Over the last three decades he has contributed as a key player in SCOPE/ ReSCOPE to the development of the Integrated Land-Use Design (ILUD) process as a tool for inclusive and participatory whole school land design and community engagement. He is also an Eco-village development facilitator and a member of the Global Eco-village Network (GEN) Africa Advisory Council.

Mutamba Mackline
Sharing Youth Experiences in Practising Agroecology for Climate Adaptation in Africa
Mackline is a 15-year-old high school student from the central (Buganda) region of Uganda, in a district called Lwengo. She has been an outstanding young student in her region where SCOPE Uganda, member of ReSCOPE operates. She is passionate about agroecology and natural farming methods. She comes from a farming background.

Nana Woo
Conscious Food Systems: Cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems
Nana Woo is the Programme Manager of the SEKEM Economy of Love Education Programme (EoL EDU), which focuses on offering cultural and educational activities to farmers in order to support their personal development. She is originally from South Korea and joined SEKEM in 2018 as a part of an internship programme. Nana is a creative facilitator for inner development and leadership, and is passionate about providing a learning platform where individuals can create new stories from their old narratives. She is based in Egypt.

Nasira Habib
Future in the Hands of Young People: Moving from pesticides to agroecology in Asia
Nasira is an educationist, environmentalist and organic gardener. She is the founder of Khoj, the Society for People’s Education and Organica Pakistan. She champions the inclusion of growing food, based on the laws of nature, in the school curriculum. She is the author of گھریلو باغبانی (a manual on organic home gardening), بچوں کی باغبانی  (a handbook for children on ecological gardening) and Invisible Farmers. She won an FAO award for her services in the field of agricultural extension.

Natalie Lartey
Seeding Reparations: Making the UK’s food corporations pay
Natalie is leading International Institute for Environment and Development’s work to address racism in internal discourses, and external narratives about sustainable development. This work is built from her experience designing and delivering strategies that engage Black people, and people of colour, in environmental and development lobbying and campaigning. Natalie is an advocate and communicator, who leads agenda setting and policy influencing initiatives that bring social justice and anti-racist approaches to her specialist areas of child and maternal nutrition, food systems, farming, and fisheries. Her previous work at IIED focuses on advocacy and communications skills building, mentoring and peer learning.

Nathan Einbinder
Sharing Experiences of Drought and Resilience Between Indigenous Farmers
Nathan leads the MSc in Regenerative Food, Farming, and Enterprise at Schumacher College, in Devon. He has carried out agroecology research and accompaniment work in the Maya-Achí territory for fifteen years.

Nick Lunch
Struggles for Land Justice: Sharing strategies from the UK, Brazil, and East Africa
Nick Lunch is a co-founder of InsightShare; an organisation working with Indigenous Peoples to help them protect their territories, languages and cultures through the use of participatory video. His focus is currently on honing the organisation’s capacity building skills, working with community-based Indigenous facilitators to support a growing grassroots participatory video movement -The Living Cultures Alliance.

Nicola Peel
Agroforestry and Inga Alley Cropping
Nicola is an environmentalist and solutionist who has been working in the Ecuadorian Amazon for over 20 years. In 2016 she was asked by the charity Rainforest Saver to initiate agroforestry using the inga alley cropping technique in the Amazon. Since then Nicola has been coordinating this work in partnership with local agricultural colleges and NGOs.

Nicola Renison
Feeding Britain from the Ground Up: Why we should align our future diets with regenerative farming systems
Nicola Renison farms with her husband Reno in Cumbria, Northern England. The daughter of dairy farmers, Nic grew up within the conventional, high production ag environment, growing food with little thought of the environment, ‘it just wasn’t on our radar’. It wasn’t until in 2012 when the Renison’s started farming their own land they started to think more regeneratively, this wasn’t because they wanted to save the world it was because they needed to pay the bills! The last ten years have been a journey of both practical ‘re-learning’ and a total change in mindset, they now farm 80 beef cattle who are 100% grass fed, with laying hens following the cows around in an ‘egg mobile’, also a handful of woodland pigs. No artificial fertilisers and sprays have been used for seven years, this along with extended rest periods for the grasslands, planting of hedges and tree the farm’s eco-system is well and truly thriving. Nicola and Reno are also founding members of ‘Carbon Calling’ a regenerative farming conference in the North of England.

Nikar Yen-ling Tsai
Intersectional Struggles for Justice in Food Systems
Nikar Yen-ling Tsai from Yilan is a 46-year-old cisgender, bisexual woman and a member of Landdyke Feminist Farm. This gender non-binary farm was founded in 2012 with the aim of serving as a model, providing women with skills and the strength to become environmentally friendly farmers. On this farm lesbian women produce rice, apples, persimmons and citrus fruits.

Nikki Yoxall
A Good Life: How animal welfare and sustainability go hoof-in-hand
Nikki Yoxall is an educator and first generation farmer based in NE Scotland, where she and her husband run Grampian Graziers – working with local landowners to graze cattle for ecological and biodiversity benefit, whilst selling 100% pasture and tree fed beef to the local community. She is currently undertaking an PhD in Agroecological Transitions, and has interests in Holistic Management, agroforestry, native breed cattle and connecting folk with their food. She works with Pasture for Life to support the links between academic research and knowledge exchange and farmers and members. Nikki sits on the Nature Friendly Farming Network Scotland Steering Group and the board of NatureScot.

Nina Moeller
Participatory Guarantee Systems as Social Strategy for Certification
Nina is currently Associate Professor at the Coventry University Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), and works on how to enable agroecological transitions. She has worked in Latin America and Europe as an academic and consultant to indigenous federations, NGOs and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Noor Fatima
Future in the Hands of Young People: Moving from pesticides to agroecology in Asia
Noor is 16 and a resident of Thathi Bhanguaan village, Sheikhupura, Punjab-Pakistan. Her parents are farmers; however, her mother is also responsible for cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her children and animals. Her family owns one buffalo, four cows, and seven acres of land. She is the eldest among the siblings – one sister and two brothers – who are studying at Khoj School for Community Education. Noor also studied at Khoj School. In addition to other subjects, she learnt about health, nutrition and agroecology. She now teaches agroecology at Khoj, with a focus on growing vegetables.

Samuel Nyanzi
Andhra Pradesh to Africa: Taking agroecology to scale through farmer-to-farmer online exchanges
Samuel Nyanzi is the founder and chairman of the National Organic Movement of Uganda (NOGAMU). He is also the founder and Executive Director of Rural Community in Development (RUCID), an institution implementing Uganda’s Healthy Soil Healthy Food initiative. He participated in the establishment of the PELUM-Uganda and Advocacy Coalition for Sustainable Agriculture (ACSA) and has been involved in training farmers in agroecology/natural farming.

Ofoegbu Donald Ikenna
The Dirty Truth about Pesticides and What We Can Do About It
Ofoegbu Donald Ikenna manages the Sustainable Nigeria program with the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Nigeria office. He supports partners and sector stakeholders in advocating for improved access to clean energy technologies, pressing for climate change policy actions, and fostering the adoption of agroecology and other safer farm systems. He is an initiator and lead coordinator of the Alliance for Action on Pesticide in Nigeria (AAPN). As a result of AAPN campaigning, eight Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) have recently been banned by the Nigerian government.

Olena Borodina
Eating in a Time of War: food crisis or distribution crisis? Analysis and proposals by La Via Campesina
Olena is Professor of Agriculture and Rural Development and Head of the Department of Economy and Policy of Agrarian Transformations at the Institute for Economics and Forecasting of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IEF). Over the last 20 years she has played a key role in the dialogue between civil society and the authorities, particularly as Head of the Coordination Council of the Ukrainian Rural Development Network (URDN).

Oli Rodker
Struggles for Land Justice: Sharing strategies from the UK, Brazil, and East Africa
Oli Rodker is an experienced environmental and land justice campaigner. He sits on the Co-ordinating Group of the LandWorkers Alliance, and is a co-founder of the Ecological Land Co-operative. ELC is dedicated to giving ‘access to land’ opportunities by setting up new small farms. He has set up, and lived and worked in various land-related co-operatives over the last 25 years.

Olivia Watkins
Community Wealth Building For a Racially Just Food System
Olivia is a social entrepreneur and impact investor. For the past seven years, she has financed, developed, and operated environmental and social projects across the US. She currently serves as a co-founder and President of Black Farmer Fund, and as a board member for Soul Fire Farm Institute. Prior to founding Black Farmer Fund in 2017, Olivia worked in several production roles at Soul Fire Farm Institute and Kahumana Organic Farms, leveraging her environmental biology background to manage and grow environmentally regenerative and socially impactful business operations. She was recognized on the 2021 Forbes 30 under 30 Social Impact list and The Grist 50.

Oluwafémi Kochoni
Seed Battles in Africa: Farmer’s rights and greedy corporates
Oluwafémi has eight years of experience in agroecology. A small-scale agroecology producer in Benin, he is a social entrepreneur, manager of the startup Ecocity and the Executive Director of the organisation Les Jardins de l’Espoir. He is active in several sub-regional networks such as COASP (Comité Ouest-Africain des Semences Paysannes – the West African Committee for Peasants’ Seed Systems) and continental networks such as the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA).

Pablo Garcia
What role can philanthropy play to catalyse change in food systems?
Pablo has more than 6 years of experience managing companies related to the agricultural sector and food industry in Spain and is currently the CEO of Almendrehesa, a farmer driven trading company that aims, together with Commonland Foundation and AlVelAl association, to promote regeneration of a threatened ecosystem in South Eastern Spain through marketing high quality almond and pistachio products, among others, since 2016 all over Europe.

Pandora Thomas
Transforming Food Culture to Transform our World
Pandora is the Founder and Land Steward at EARTHseed Farm, the first Afro Indigenous permaculture farm in Sonoma County, California. She’s a passionate global citizen who works as a caregiver for her mother and globally as a teacher, writer, designer, and speaker with over 25 years of experience. Her work emphasises the benefits of applying ecological principles to social design.

Patricia Clavin
Eating to Extinction with Dan Saladino
Patricia Clavin is Professor of Modern History in the History Faculty at Oxford University, and a Fellow of Worcester College. She writes and teaches the history of international relations, with a special interest in the history of food security from around 1850. She is project director of a new Oxford Martin School research programme related to managing future shocks related to ‘Changing Global Orders’.

Patrick Holden
Feeding Britain from the Ground Up: Why we should align our future diets with regenerative farming systems & Why All Health Issues Come Back to How We Treat the Soil
Patrick founded the Sustainable Food Trust in 2011 with the mission of accelerating the global transition towards more sustainable food systems. His extensive advocacy work centres on the importance of transforming our food and farming systems in the face of climate change, biodiversity loss, and poor public health and includes regular broadcasts as well as talks at public events. After studying biodynamic agriculture at Emerson College, Patrick established a mixed community farm in Wales in 1973. His farm is now the longest established mixed organic dairy holding in Wales and produces an-award winning raw milk cheddar-style cheese, Hafod, from the milk of 90 Ayrshire dairy cows. Patrick was the founding chairman of British Organic Farmers in 1982, and director of the Soil Association from 1995 to 2010.

Paula Gioia
Nyéléni Global Process: Working together on people’s solutions to transform the global food system and achieve food sovereignty
Paula is a beekeeper and peasant farmer in a community-run agroecological farm near Berlin, Germany. Together they plant a variety of vegetable crops, reviving old local varieties. They plough the land with horses and value local animal breeds. Their farm markets directly to local consumers and small organic shops. Paula is a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (AbL), the German Via Campesina member organisation.

Paula Scherer
What Role can Philanthropy Play to Catalyze Change in Food Systems?
Paula Scherer is an Impact Entrepreneur. She has  more than eight years of career in development and operational management of products, technologies, and businesses in the food, health and climate sector. She is an active member of the development and fundraising ecosystem of early-stage startups in the Brazilian food sector. She’s a mentor in startups and entrepreneurship ecosystems and innovation communities. Paula is former COO of The Question Mark Company and Ateha Climate Hub, the founder of House of Ideas and Great Hustlers and creator and CEO Ekuia amazônia Food Lab.

Pavel Cenkl
Conscious Food Systems: Cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems
Pavel is Head of Schumacher College and Director of Learning and Land at Dartington Trust in Devon, England, where he has worked since 2019 to support an evolving learning community founded at the intersection of arts, ecology and social justice. Pavel has written and presented widely in the areas of curriculum design, pedagogy, environmental humanities and ecology.

Pawanka Fund
Defending Indigenous Territories and Food Systems
The Pawanka Fund is an Indigenous-led fund making efforts to support indigenous peoples initiatives engaged in promoting and protecting traditional knowledge, wellbeing, rights and self–determined development.

Peleke Flores
Honouring Indigenous Aquaculture and the Struggle for Sovereignty from Hawaii to Alaska
Peleke Flores was born in Hilo, Hawai‘i, and raised in Waimea, Kaua‘i. He studied Hawaiian Language and Hawaiian Studies with a special focus on Mālama ‘Āina (caring for traditional Hawaiian food systems) at UH Manoa. He has dedicated over 20 years to working and volunteering for ‘Āina Based NGOs and family farms. Peleke currently works for Mālama Hulēʻia where his ʻike and expertise are integral in restoring this wahi pana, including the 40-acre, 600-year-old Alakoko fishpond. He is experienced in traditional hale building, Uhau Humu Pohaku (Hawaiian dry set), and restoring traditional Hawaiian food systems such as lo’i kalo, lo’i pa’akai, and loko i’a.

Perla Álvarez
Nyéléni Global Process: Working together on people’s solutions to transform the global food system and achieve food sovereignty
Militant, feminist and peasant leader of the Organisation of Peasant and Indigenous Women (CONAMURI) in Paraguay, which is part of CLOC (Latin American Coordination of Rural Organisations), the World March of Women, ALBA of Social Movements and Via Campesina. In 2020, it brought the voice of the international rural movement to the United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

Peter Leblanc
Strategies for Farmers’ Markets to Connect Disparate Communities: Building bridges beyond the rural/urban gap
Peter manages the Nutrition Coupon Program for the British Columbia Association of Farmers’ Markets in Canada. His first connection to farming began when he was 12 years old, as a potato picker in Northern Maine. Peter is a founder of the Surrey Urban Farmers’ Market, which created a locally-funded nutrition coupon program that has since become the national model.

Peter Samsom
Local Food Economies: How do we join the dots?
Peter Samsom works for the LWA on the Resilient Local Food Systems project and the Wesh Food Hubs projects. Most recently he worked as one of the coordinators for Food Durham, the County Durham Food Partnership and before that, in the nature conservation sector. He was also one of the founding members of the North Pennines Wool Group and the North Pennines Smallholders Association.

Petra Tas
Creating a Future of Collective Land Ownership and Responsibilities
Petra is coordinator of De Landgenoten (cooperative and foundation), which is active in Flanders (Belgium). De Landgenoten buys farmland with the financial support of many citizens in order to protect the land as farmland and to rent it out to organic farmers through a career-long agreement. This is particularly needed, as farmland in Flanders is some of the most expensive in Europe, and farmland can easily be used for purposes other than agriculture.

Phil Haughton
Can Farming and Food Traders Weather the Economic Storm?
Phil Haughton is the founder of award-winning organic retailer Better Food, as well as a farmer, campaigner and author. Better Food now has three sites across Bristol, all proud to stock local, organic and ethically-sourced products, and to be a force for good in the communities they serve.

Pranom Somwong
A Care Income to Protect the Land, the People and the Natural World
Protection International, Thailand, and Global Women’s Strike. Founder of Community Women Human Rights Defenders Collective, which represents 19 sectors of struggles, and demands a care income to strengthen the movement against environmental destruction and corporate land grabbing, and for land regeneration and climate justice.

Precious Phiri
How Other Species Regulate the Climate, and How Humans Can Help

Qammar Abbas
Young Farmers and Food Systems’ Transformations: Struggles and opportunities towards a globalised youth response
Qammar is an organiser and Youth representative of the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee – PKRC (Pakistan Farmers Coordination Committee). He is a part of La Via Campesina South Asia. He is a part of the Youth Articulation of LVC in South Asia and Asia. He is also a member of the Youth Working Group of the Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism.

Rachel Solnick
Cultivating Belonging: Exploring diasporic relationships to land
Rachel is a land worker, artist, researcher, mother, Ashkenazi/Sephardi Jew. She is a PhD candidate investigating the intersections of Black and Jewish political radicalism on land. Her work focuses on how discourses of racial justice and Diasporism provide a means for a radical politics of co-liberation and anti-racist, decolonial land practices.

Raj Patel
Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics with Marion Nestle and Raj Patel
Raj Patel is a Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the University’s department of nutrition, and a Research Associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, and co-author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A James Beard Leadership Award winner, he is completing a film on the global food system, and is a leading thinker and organizer around the Green New Deal. He serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and has advised governments on causes and solutions to crises of sustainability worldwide.

Rasmus Willig
Creating a Future of Collective Land Ownership and Responsibilities
Rasmus is a sociologist, scientist and writer. He co-founded Andelsgaarde in 2018. This association is a membership model, currently with 2,700 members who each pay 20€ every month to be able to buy farmland in the community. The association is currently looking to buy its fourth farm in Denmark, all stewarded with regenerative principles.

Rebecca Fuentes
Dangerous Jobs, Few Protections: The human impacts of animal agriculture
Rebecca is an immigrant farmworker advocate based in Syracuse, New York. As a Workers’ Center of Central New York leader from 2009 to 2020, she conducted health and safety outreach to immigrant dairy workers, helped author the 2017 Milked report on New York dairy workers, and advocated for the passage of an OSHA-run Local Emphasis Program for the New York dairy industry. Currently, she serves as an immigrant worker advocate and co-owner of the Friends of Farmworkers House in Syracuse.

Rebecca Laughton
Farms across Four Nations: Towards a more inclusive UK subsidy system
Rebecca manages the Peri-Urban Practitioners’ Forums for the Fringe Farming project, which is an open platform for peri-urban growers and resource people to share their experiences and knowledge, so that they can build collective strength. She also has many years of experience in organic market gardening, farming and research relating to small scale agriculture and low impact planning, and is the author of “Surviving and Thriving on the Land” (Green Books 2008). She currently works part-time at a glasshouse in Somerset, growing salad crops, while focussing on advocacy and research in the LWA Horticulture Campaign.  She also facilitates the LWA horticulture ELMS Test and Trial, Growing the Goods.

Rebecca Mayhew
A Good Life: How animal welfare and sustainability go hoof-in-hand
Rebecca farms with her husband Stuart and two children, Isobel and Jack in South Norfolk, where they’re converting the once intensively farmed 500 acres into a regenerative oasis. Enterprises include a 60 head raw Jersey dairy keeping calves and cows together, a suckler herd, sheep, pigs, goats, laying hens, and a farm shop, cafe, butchery and vineyard. Holistic Management training in 2020 has provided an invaluable framework for healing the farm, and helping to run a diverse business, whilst engaging with other farmers, the public and local schools about climate change, farming practices and nutrient dense food.

Rebecca Swinn
Experts in their Field: Exploring the benefits and challenges of farmer-led research
Rebecca Swinn manages the Innovative Farmers programme, run by the Soil Association. She works with farmers, researchers and the wider industry to run practical, farmer-led trials known as ‘field labs’ and showcase innovative farming practices that improve environmental and financial resilience. Her background includes organic certification, environmental reporting, social housing food programmes and an MSc in Environment and Development with a focus on life-cycle analysis of cut flowers.

Renata Minerbo
What Role Can Philanthropy Play to Catalyze Change in Food Systems?
Renata is Head of Philanthropy at Be The Earth Foundation. She designs programmes and partnerships with people and organisations aligned with Be The Earth’s vision. She graduated in architecture and has taken numerous trainings in social change, including Warriors Without Weapons with Elos Institute and Leadership in Complex Systems with Schumacher College. Renata has worked in community engagement and participatory processes for the past twelve years.

Richard Bewley
Strategies for Farmers’ Markets to Connect Disparate Communities: Building bridges beyond the rural/urban gap
Rich is a co-founder of Grønt Marked. He is a miller during the week and a farmers’ market logistician and propagandist at the weekend. He has a background in food and economics, and his interest is (unsurprisingly) the political economy of food systems.
Credit Rich Picture: Charly Rose Bjørn Frisk

Richard McCarthy
Strategies for Farmers’ Markets to Connect Disparate Communities: Building bridges beyond the rural/urban gap
Richard is an author, speaker, and community development specialist who sees food as a pivotal organising tool. Long before helping to co-found the Rome-based World Farmers Markets Coalition, he founded the public market think- and do-tank in New Orleans, Market Umbrella. He also serves on the board of Slow Food International.

Rickey Bryan
Diversifying UK Fruit and Veg Produce: Perceptions, opportunities, and collaboration bringing ‘exotic’ crops to market
Rickey has begun a journey at Woodoaks Farm growing a new horticultural enterprise from scratch in under a year. His Caribbean heritage and rich knowledge of growing techniques inspired him to set up Rickey’s Alkaline Market Garden and Fruit Forest. Opening its doors in late Sept 2022 this new venture now accepts customers, visitors and volunteers. He is passionate about growing organically, the way nature intended it.

Rob Small
Reclaiming Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Aoteorea New Zealand
Rob is related to the Ngāpuhi people of New Zealand’s northern region. He has a long career in parks and recreation as a Parks Director and is a former world President of the International Federation of Parks. Since his retirement he has been working for the central Auckland Tribe (Iwi), Ngati Whatua Orakei, in preparing a garden that exhibits the traditional use of both native and exotic plants by the Māori people in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Rose Lewis
Diversifying UK Fruit and Veg Produce: Perceptions, opportunities, and collaboration bringing ‘exotic’ crops to market
I recently joined The Soil Association working on an exciting project to develop a new food and farming hub. We are aiming to disrupt industrial-scale food systems one farm at a time. My journey here was defined by my recent Masters in Environmental Technology from Imperial College where I discovered the role agriculture has played in contributing to the climate crisis and how it can also contribute to help to solve not just climate injustice but social injustice that has been caused by industrial-scale food systems. My ambition is to bring my 25 years of commercial and startup experience to create new models for sustainable and local food systems.

Rosie Begg
Experts in their Field: Exploring the benefits and challenges of farmer-led research
Rosie Begg is a mid-Norfolk blackcurrant grower and Soil Food Web School graduate. She only has 4 seasons of full-time farming under her belt, professes to be no expert but eager to learn. With degraded soils and increasingly unpredictable weather she has been passionate about working with peers, innovators and scientists on exploring more resilient growing methods that make sense for both business and nature.

Rosinah Mbenya
Women as Custodians of Land and Agriculture in the African Context: For resilient and sustainable food systems
Rosinah is Country Coordinator of Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Kenya. She has over ten years of experience in development projects, approaches and techniques in the fields of agroecology, climate change, market development, advocacy, capacity development and networking. She is passionate about women and youth involvement in agriculture, and policy and legislative processes for agroecology.

Rosine Ndayishimiye
Andhra Pradesh to Africa: Taking agroecology to scale through farmer-to-farmer online exchanges
Rosine is a farmer and Rwandan social entrepreneur. She is Director of Agriculture Training at Bridge2Rwanda. She helps lead training for Rwandan farmers and mentorship and internship programmes for university graduates in Rwanda. Rosine is a certified Foundations for Farming trainer and holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a double concentration in Accounting and Global and Regional Studies from Babson College, Massachusetts, USA.

Rosy Benson
Living Bread: The way of the peasant baker
Rosy runs Field Bakery on Gothelney Farm in Somerset at the foothills of the Quantocks. A Baker and teacher for 10 years throughout the UK and US exploring connection through real bread. She is committed to creating meaningful work that nourishes her community and inspires agency as a baker. An advocate of sourdough fermentation using fresh stone milled flour on her 40 inch New American Stone Mill she works together with Fred the farmer at Gothelney to bring visibility to the emerging grain system which aims to diversify and relocalise grain. This acts to support the work of the South West Grain Network.

Roz Corbett
Struggles for Land Justice: Sharing strategies from the UK, Brazil, and East Africa
Roz Corbett is a grower, organiser and researcher. She is a member of the Coordinating Group of the Landworkers Alliance and previously worked as the Policy and Campaigns coordinator in Scotland and Coordinator of LWA presence at COP26. She is currently researching for a PhD looking at Land Reform and Agroecological transitions in Scotland while being a part time market gardener.

Rupert Dunn
Living Bread: The way of the peasant baker
Rupert grew up in the Gwaun valley in Pembrokeshire. After learning in France, he set up Torth y Tir peasant bakery, growing, milling and wood-fired baking with heritage wheat. He spent years immersed in the global social movements around food sovereignty and now works for Shipton Mill as their ‘Small scale farming and community engagement manager’, supporting farmers to grow heritage wheat and bakers to bake with it.

Ruth Nyambura
The New Business of Carbon Farming and other ‘Nature Based Solutions’: Panacea or disaster?
Ruth is a Kenyan feminist and organiser. She has worked as the head of advocacy for the African Biodiversity Network (ABN). Her work focuses on the ideological underpinnings of the ‘New Green Revolution in Africa’ and its ties to philanthro-capitalist organisations such as the Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). She is the founder and convenor of the African Ecofeminists Collective and the No REDD in Africa (NRAN) Collective, which challenges forest-related carbon markets and documents the impacts of these schemes on communities.

Morshed Sakiul Millat
Rehabilitation through Agroecology: Surviving the floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh
Morshed Sakiul Millat is the Executive Director of SHISUK, a CSO in Bangladesh, and Pioneer of the Community Enterprise Approach for Floodplain fisheries management. The pilot project was initiated in 1995, and was awarded National Gold Medal in 1999 by the Ministry of Fisheries and Livestock, Government of Bangladesh. Selected as Best Practice for Livelihood development by the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in 2007.  He is also the convenor of the Migration and Climate Change Taskforce of CARAM Asia, a regional Network on migrant rights based in Malaysia.

Sandra Salazar
Agroecology and Feminism: Transforming our economy and our society
I am a ComeUnity horticulturist/ farmer and founder of GoGrowWithLove C.I.C, an indigenous melanin rich women-led organisation. I teach food growing & land/ food sovereignty to children and families in nurseries, schools, home education groups and community projects and I am the facilitator of a project called Women Leading With The Land, which focuses on empowering Women of African & Caribbean heritage to become SOILSISTARS and develop skills in land cultivation, food production and enterprise.

Sarah Whaley
Finding Solutions to the Fertiliser Crisis: Practical on farm innovation for home grown fertility
Sarah has a diverse range of experience having worked in the UK, Africa and Australia. Since achieving her Masters degree in 2014 her focus has been on improving environmental, economic and social outcomes through agroecology and regenerative principles with a focus on whole systems thinking and the circular economy. Sarah joined FWAG SW in October 2021 and has since been leading the development of FWAG’s regenerative farming advice services, working with farmers to improve their whole farm planning through assessing their personal goals and motivations to direct their decision-making.

Sarojeni V. Rengam
Future in the Hands of Young People: Moving from pesticides to agroecology in Asia & Rehabilitation through Agroecology: Surviving the floods in Pakistan and Bangladesh
Sarojeni Rengam is the Executive Director of Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific (PANAP). A zoologist by training, she has 30 years of research and training experience at national, regional and international levels on environmental issues. She is the author of numerous books, published papers and articles on women in agriculture, pesticides and food sovereignty including Pesticides and YOU, which has been translated into 10 languages. Rengam received the ‘Gender Pioneers for a Future Detoxified’ award from the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions for distinguished advocates of advancing gender equality and mainstreaming gender issues in the area of chemicals and wastes.

Sasha Georgiades
Agroecology and Feminism: Transforming our economy and our society
After studying philosophy & international relations Sasha became disillusioned with the state of global politics. Their response was to dive into grass oots activism and start growing food in 2018. Since then they have been developing their skills in agroecological land management, expanding into hedgelaying and forestry, with a keen interest in land justice.

Sashi Kiran
From the Caribbean to the Pacific: On the sharp end of food insecurity and climate change
Sashi Kiran is a development practitioner and Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Foundation for Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development (FRIEND), a locally-grown organisation in the Fiji Islands focused on alleviation of poverty through three pillars – food security, economic growth and health. Sashi is chair of POETCom, Pacific Organic Ethical Trade Community and has been working with communities on reviving traditional food systems for the past decade.

Satish Kumar
Meditation with Satish Kumar

Saúl Vicente Vázquez
Nyéléni Global Process: Working together on people’s solutions to transform the global food system and achieve food sovereignty
Saúl is originally from the Zapotec village of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Isthmus region, Oaxaca State, Mexico. Currently covering important roles in both institutional and civil society spaces including the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC); the Secretariat of La Unidad de la Fuerza Indígena y Campesina (UFiC); the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) of the Government of Mexico; the Coordinating Committee of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) and the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples for Food Sovereignty in Mexico. Until 2021 he was also part of the Coordinating Committee of the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism for the Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

Save PNG
Agroecology as a Climate Solution: Grassroots advocacy strategies at COP and beyond
Save PNG encourages native Papua New Guineans to maintain a Melanesian way of life that promotes sustainable land practices, cultural identity and our unique gastronomic heritage. We strengthen traditional, spiritual and ecological knowledge systems for building better health, human rights advocacy and climate resiliency in the Pacific Region.

Saverio Krätli
Humanity’s Herding Heritage: Perspectives on pastoralism from India to Spain
Saverio is a freelance researcher and consultant, who serves as honorary editor of the peer reviewed journal Nomadic Peoples (since 2010). Saverio has a background in philosophy and anthropology of development and, after extensive field work among the Peul Wodaabe in Niger, he wrote his Ph.D. on their cattle breeding practices.

Sean Barrett
Seaweed Is Already Saving the World
Sean is a lifelong fisherman, environmental conservationist, and restaurateur. He founded the Dock to Dish movement in Montauk in 2012 after establishing the original harbour-based Community Supported Fishery (CSF) program of New York State. In 2021, he founded the Montauk Seaweed Supply Company, with an aim to develop regenerative kelp farming and seaweed harvesting for use as fertiliser in farms.

Selma James
A Care Income to Protect the Land, the People and the Natural World & Agroecology and Feminism: Transforming our economy and our society
Selma is founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and co-ordinator of Global Women’s Strike, which campaigns for a care income for all those caring for people, the land and the natural world.

Selorm Akaba
Strategies for Farmers’ Markets to Connect Disparate Communities: Building bridges beyond the rural/urban gap
Selorm is a lecturer in agricultural economics at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) in Ghana. He has a PhD and MPhil in agricultural economics, and a BSc in agriculture. He works with thousands of small landholders in Ghana, many of them women, and prepares them for personal and commercial success.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Seaweed Is Already Saving the World
Severine is a farmer, activist, and organiser based in Downeast Maine. Along with her husband Terran, she runs Smithereen Farm, a MOFGA certified organic diverse agroforestry operation and fruit orchard. She is a founder and director of the Greenhorns, a grassroots organisation best known for The New Farmer’s Almanac. One of the organisation’s current projects is Seaweed Commons, an international learning and advocacy network for conservation-minded seaweed farmers, wild harvesters, marine biologists and researchers.

Shalmali Guttal
The New Business of Carbon Farming and other ‘Nature Based Solutions’: Panacea or disaster?
Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, Shalmali has been working on trade, investment, debt, the commons, and land, resource and food rights for over 30 years, with emphasis on community and women’s rights, and democratisation of governance. She works with several grassroots movements on the creation and governance of natural, social and knowledge commons, strengthening food sovereignty and public goods and services.

shane bernardo
Transforming Food Culture to Transform Our World
shane is co-founder of Food As Healing, a social movement based on ancestral, Earth-based traditions that are critical for maintaining our identities, sense of belonging, health and wholeness. shane is also a grower, anti-oppression facilitator, storyteller and food justice organizer based in Detroit, Michigan that uses food and the stories embedded within them as mediums for healing and decolonizing.

Simon Fairlie
Feeding Britain from the Ground Up: Why we should align our future diets with regenerative farming systems
Simon Fairlie is a farmer, author and founding editor of The Land magazine. Simon Fairlie worked for twenty years variously as an agricultural labourer, vine worker, shepherd, fisherman, builder and stonemason before being ensnared by the computer in 1990. He was a coeditor of The Ecologist magazine for four years until he joined a farming community in 1994 where he managed the cows, pigs and a working horse. He now runs a micro dairy at Monkton Wyld Court, a charity and cooperative in rural Dorset. Simon is a founding editor of The Land magazine, and he earns a living by selling scythes. He is the author of Low Impact Development: Planning and People in a Sustainable Countryside (1996), Meat: A Benign Extravagance (2010), and Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir (2022).

Simplice Davo Vodouhe
Building Community Resilience in Indigenous Communities from India to Benin to the Philippines
Davo is a professor at the University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin. He coordinates L’Organisation Béninoise pour la Promotion de l’Agriculture Biologique (OBEPAB), which has promoted organic agriculture since 1994. Through OBEPAB, he works with farmers to reduce the use of pesticides by promoting organic cotton, organic shea nut butter, and organic soja. OBEPAB works with 6,000 farmers, including 2,000 women. Davo has been asked by the Benin government to help develop a national strategic plan for the promotion of organic agriculture. He is currently researching the effects of chemical pesticide use on bees and pollination.

Sophia Doyle
How do Prisons and Policing Impact and Intersect with Our Struggles for Land Justice?
Sophia Doyle (she/her) currently lives and works in Berlin, combining her background in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, activist experiences and practical training in regenerative agriculture to build internationalist solidarities across movements and geographies for food and land justice. At the moment she is doing a PhD at the University of Potsdam researching the role of agriculture for historical and continuing projects of colonial exploitation and the liberatory futures opened up by radical landworkers’ organising and community action against extraction and environmental racism. She understands the abolition of the agro-industrial food system as an inherent and necessary part of broader and global struggles for abolition. She is a co-director of the grassroots seed saver network London Freedom Seed Bank and is organised in various learning and activist collectives in Berlin and online. @catastrophia3.

Sophie Paterson
Local Food Economies: How do we join the dots?
Sophie Paterson is a Project Coordinator for the Food Data Collaboration, and has a passion for local food systems. She is particularly excited by the governance aspects of the Food Data Collaboration project on its journey to strengthen short supply chains in the agroecological sector.

Souad Mahmoud
Intersectional Struggles for Justice in Food Systems
Souad Mahmoud is a member of the World March of Women Tunisia, the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates—ATFD), and the Tunisian General Labour Union (Union Générale du Travail Tunisien—UGTT).

Stacy Malkan
The Dirty Truth about Pesticides and What We Can Do About It
Stacy is co-founder and managing editor of U.S. Right to Know, a non-profit investigative research group focused on promoting transparency for public health. She reports on pesticide industry disinformation campaigns, environmental health science and market developments for safer products. She is the author of the award-winning book, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry.

Stina Herberg
From the Caribbean to the Pacific: On the sharp end of food insecurity and climate change
Stina has more than 30 years of experience working in education and community mobilisation in Africa, the US and the Caribbean. She is Director of Richmond Vale Academy, St Vincent and the Grenadines. The Academy runs the St. Vincent Climate Compliance Conference which spearheads food, water and energy security. Hundreds of students are being trained on how to meet the climate emergency head on.

Stephanie Lew
Transforming Food Culture to Transform Our World
Stephanie is the Network Weaver with Food Culture Collective, bringing full-hearted engagement, inquisitiveness, and  unabashedly warm and generous presence to deepening and growing relationships within and beyond the Food Culture Collective community.

Steven U. Mansaray
Agroforestry and Inga Alley Cropping
Steven was born in Barrie chiefdom, Pujehun District, southern Sierra Leone. He is a country director for People’s Agenda For Development Sierra Leone ( PAD-SL) which partners with the UK-based charity, Rory’s Well. He is a student in the school of Natural Resources Management at Njala University, Sierra Leone, in the department of Forestry.

Swati Renduchintala
Andhra Pradesh to Africa: Taking agroecology to scale through farmer-to-farmer online exchanges & A Care Income to Protect the Land, the People and the Natural World
Swati is a development professional working in sustainable food systems, climate change and systems and scale thinking. She works as an Associate Scientist with World Agroforestry Centre, and is deployed with the Andhra Pradesh community-managed natural farming (APCNF) programme. She works with the APCNF leadership in managing national and international partnerships. She has worked closely with rural communities in India, spending 500 days with them to understand the community, women and marginalised perspectives.

Tallulah Brennan
How do Prisons and Policing Impact and Intersect with Our Struggles for Land Justice?
Tallulah Brennan (she/her) is a writer based in Sussex,  interested in exploring the complexity of political ecology, abolition feminism, transformative environmental justice and decolonisation, and how all ecological crises intersect. Her writing attempts to convey the irresistibility of revolution (in Toni Cade Bambara’s words), and the beauty of Jackie Wang’s imagining of flowers that blossom and grow from the cracks in prison walls. She has written for Abolitionist Futures, SHADO magazine, It’s Freezing in LA and other independent journals, websites and zines. Tallulah is committed to ‘eco-media’ as a form of environmental justice, and finding ways to communicate within the framework of slow, radical and community-led knowledge and skills sharing.

Tammi Jonas
Fire, Farming and Food Sovereignty in Australia
Tammi Jonas is a settler farmer on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country, and leader in the food sovereignty movement in Australia. She has been growing the agroecology movement at farm, ecosystem, and movement levels for the past decade, and is working towards a decolonial praxis at the level of land custodianship and engagement with First Peoples and their knowledge.

Tara Wight
Experts in their Field: Exploring the benefits and challenges of farmer-led research & Farms Across Four Nations: Towards a more inclusive subsidy system
Tara Wight is the Scotland Policy and Campaigns coordinator for the Landworkers’ Alliance. Her background is in agricultural research, and she has previously worked on climate campaigning and developing policy for local grain systems. In her current role, she is focused on improving equity and strengthening diversity in farming in Scotland.

Taysir Arbasi
Farming under Fire: Cultivating land and life in occupied Palestine
Taysir is a Director on the board of Zaytoun and coordinates the ethical food company’s advocacy and liaison work in Palestine. He is an advocate of the power of fair trade in supporting community resilience. Taysir grew up in the Salfeet district, an area highly dependent on olive cultivation, which has seen much of its rich agricultural resources confiscated through the construction of illegal Israeli settlements. In addition to his work with Zaytoun, he has worked with an international NGO on advocacy and development projects in Palestine for over 15 years.

Teresa Corção
Conscious Food Systems: Cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems
Teresa is a food activist and an eco chef. She is the Founder and President of Instituto Maniva, an organisation that protects and promotes sustainable food systems, traditional knowledge in food and supports the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro State and in Amazon Biome. Teresa is currently based in Brazil.

Thomas Legrand
Conscious Food Systems: Cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems
Thomas is the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) Lead Technical Advisor. He holds a PhD in Economics and has 20 years of experience working on sustainable land use, climate change, sustainable finance, and leadership. His inner journey began at the age of 23 through an encounter with native spirituality in Mexico. He now lives near Plum Village, the monastery of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the South West of France, his country. He is the author of Politics of Being. Wisdom and Science for a New Development Paradigm (2022).

Tiffani Patton
Healing Grounds and Cultivating Diversity (Above and below the soil)
A lifelong “foodie” turned activist, Tiffani has spent the better part of a decade advocating for just food systems and can be found talking about it with anyone who will listen. She leads several areas of educational programming, communications strategy, engagement, and internal operations at Real Food Media, and co-produces and co-hosts the Real Food Reads and Foodtopias podcasts with Tanya Kerssen. Tiffani brings years of active engagement in food policy discussions, event organising, storytelling for change, facilitating important discussions around food system transformation, and the connection of art, music, and culture to food in the Bay Area and beyond.

Tom Cannon
Future Nut Production in the UK
Tom Cannon from Roughway Farm is part of a farming family that has farmed in Kent for generations. He has helped to diversify the family farm and has appeared on the BBC’s Farmers Country Showdown and Marcus Wareing’s Tales from a kitchen garden. He is a Churchill Fellow and has travelled researching global hazelnut production in the US, Turkey, China and Australia. He is the Treasurer of the Kentish Cobnuts Association whose mission is to Conserve and promote British Hazelnuts.

Tom Gregory
Experts in their Field: Exploring the benefits and challenges of farmer-led research
Tom Gregory is an organic dairy farmer from the south west. He and his wife share farm 360 mainly Irish Frisian across 900 acres. Their business focuses on turning grass to milk in a socially and environmentally sustainable way. They supply Arla and are passionate about soil and its potential.

Tom Tame
Future Nut Production in the UK
Born on a small family farm in South Warwickshire, my passion is trees and walnut trees in particular.  We have a commercial walnut and cobnut orchard and grow and sell many other walnut and hickory cultivars. I now advise on starting walnut orchards and the commercial aspects of the business.

Tom Wakeford
Seeding Reparations: Making the UK’s food corporations pay
Tom is a participatory action researcher and writer based at ETC, an international civil society organisation working at the intersection of food sovereignty and the democratic control of technology. He has also used participatory approaches in other areas, such as climate justice, anti-racism and technology assessment in Europe, South Asia and Latin America. His books include Science for the Earth, Liaisons of Life and Participatory Action Research.

Tsakasile Dlamini
Women as Custodians of Land and Agriculture in the African Context: For resilient and sustainable food systems
Tsakasile is the first Country Coordinator at PELUM Eswatini, a network of NGOs, companies and individuals that work to promote Ecological Land Use Management across the country.  Since 2016 PELUM Eswatini has grown to comprise 18 member organisations that work together in a participatory and collaborative approach that promotes agro–environmental stewardship. Tsakasile is a well-known anti-GMO activist and throughout her career has continuously promoted alternative ways for all people in Eswatini to live a little greener.

Tsuamba Bourgou
Planting Water with a Water School Africa
Tsuamba is Groundswell’s Regional Coordinator for West Africa. He lives in Fada N’Gourma, Burkina Faso. Tsuamba’s areas of experience include adult education, action research, evaluation, impact assessment, strategic planning and facilitation and local capacity building. He holds a Masters degree in linguistics from the University of Ouagadougou.  Tsuamba is a keen and practising farmer, producing real food for his own household and local markets using agroecological practices.

Tyler Short
Young Farmers and Food Systems’ Transformations: Struggles and opportunities towards a globalised youth response
Tyler Short represents La Via Campesina on the Coordination Committee of the CSIPM, co-coordinating the Youth constituency. Tyler lives in Kentucky, USA, where he practices agroecology as an employee on a small-scale family farm that produces vegetables, meat, and flowers for local markets. He also works a small parcel of land to grow food for his own consumption and community sharing.

Vandana Shiva
In the Name of the Farmer: Vandana Shiva recalls a lifetime of campaigning for small-scale farmers & GM’s False Promises: Could the UK be next?
Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books, among them Terra Viva; Oneness vs. the 1%; Making Peace with the Earth; Soil Not Oil; Globalization’s New Wars; Seed Sovereignty, and Who Really Feeds the World? Shiva is the recipient of over twenty international awards, and was the Fukuoka Grand Prize Laureate in 2012.

Verónica Villa
“Precision” Farming: Digitalised Nirvana or corporate-controlled nightmare?
Verónica is a member of ETC and the Latin American Network for the Social Assessment of Technologies (TECLA), where her main tasks are the dissemination and translation of ETC research on emerging and disruptive technologies, communication and capacity-building, and the facilitation of processes in relation to popular and social movements, such as the defence of maize in Mexico. She was born in Mexico City and studied ethnology at the National School of Anthropology and History. She is part of the Editorial Committee of the journal Biodiversidad, Sustento y Culturas, which is published in 12 Latin American countries. She collaborates with the independent media Desinformémonos and La Voz Campesina.

Vicki Hird
Averting the Insect Apocalypse with Dave Goulson and Vicki Hird
Vicki Hird MSc FRES is an award winning expert, author, strategist and senior manager who has been working on environment, food and farming issues for over 30 years. As Head of Sustainable Farming at Sustain, Vicki manages the farm team, policy, research and related campaigning. Her new book: Rebugging the Planet, is a homage to insects and other invertebrates, why they are so essential to our ecosystem and what we can do to help them.

Vili Iese
From the Caribbean to the Pacific: On the sharp end of food insecurity and climate change
Lau Dr. Viliamu Iese (Vili) was a Senior Lecturer at the Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development, at the University of the South Pacific (USP), Fiji, and continues with an honorary position there from his new base at the University of Melbourne. He has conducted research and published widely in the field of risk resilience in agriculture, food security and climate change in Pacific Island Countries.

Viola Capriola
Strategies for Farmers’ Markets to Connect Disparate Communities: Building bridges beyond the rural/urban gap
Viola is a co-founder of Grønt Marked, a non-profit association developing farmers’ markets in Denmark. Originally from Italy, Viola has a bachelor’s degree in gastronomic science from the University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo, and is currently enrolled on a MSc program in Food Policy at the City University of London.

Wilberforce Laate
What did COP27 mean for Africa and Agroecology?
Wilberforce is a Ghanaian social scientist. He initially trained as an agriculturist at the Ejura Agricultural College and worked with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture as well as the Presbyterian Agricultural Station at Abokobi. In addition to his function as the Deputy Executive Director, Wilberforce is the Programmes Director of CIKOD in Southern Ghana. He has facilitated several trainings for Traditional Authorities on their role in local governance and the management of Natural Resources. He has also engaged extensively with Civil Society Organizations on how they can facilitate development that is based on the worldview of people. He currently leads CIKOD’s Agroecology work in Southern Ghana and coordinates the Ghana Agroecology Movement across the country.

Yodit Kebede
Adjusting to the New Normal: Building resilient food systems in the face of climate change, crisis, and rising energy costs
Yodit Kebede is a post-doctoral researcher at IRD (French Institute of Research for Development) on the perception of agroecology and priority areas of research as defined by end-users in the Global South. She’s worked for FAO’s agroecology unit where she was involved in the elaboration of the FAO 10 elements of agroecology, FAO’s 2nd symposium on agroecology and management of GEF projects.

Zach Bush
Why All Health Issues Come Back to How We Treat the Soil
Zach Bush, MD is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. Zach Bush, MD founded *Seraphic Group and the non-profit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and gut/brain health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega-industries to work together for a healthy future for people and planet.

Zachary Makanya
Planting Water with a Water School Africa
Zachary is the CEO of Rural Initiatives Development Programme (RIDEP), with a reach of over 1,200 local farmers in Tharaka, Eastern Kenya. He has over 30 years of hands-on-experience in community development, natural resource management, water and ecosystems management, biodiversity conservation and network management. He is passionate about mobilising, organising, training and working with grassroot community groups to enable them to improve their livelihoods and resilience against the impact of climate change.

Zainal Arifin Fuad
Eating in a Time of War: Food crisis or distribution crisis? Analysis and proposals by La Via Campesina
He is the Chair of Indonesian Peasant Union for Foreign Relation, Political and Ideological Formation and Agroecology. He has been active in the peasant movement – Indonesian Peasant Union and La Via Campesina since 2004. He is a member of International Coordination Committee of La Via Campesina -representative of South East and East Asia region, and a member of Collective work of La Via Campesina on the rights of peasant (UNDROP), the Seed, biodiversity and Agroecology – as well as a representative of La Via Campesina in the vice Presidency of Global Steering Committee of UN-Decade Family Farming.

Zuriñe Iglesias González
Humanity’s Herding Heritage: Perspectives on pastoralism from India to Spain
Zuriñe Iglesias González is a biologist and rural facilitator. Currently studying a masters in Sustainable International Agriculture in Germany and working as a shepherdess and cheese maker during the summer. Her interests focus on Spanish rural areas and extensive livestock systems. Together with her colleague Celia Martínez Aragón, Zuriñe created the project Pastoras Nomadas. ZagaLA y RabadaNA. This initiative aims at promoting herding practices among young people and claims for a feminist approach to livestock farming.