ORFC 2025 9 – 10 Jan
We are witnessing the increasing financialisation of land and territories as land and natural resources are sold off to financial actors such as banks, pension funds, and insurance companies. These actors often make use of complex investment webs involving any number of intermediaries, brokers, tax avoidance loopholes and off-shore schemes. All of these are attempts to distance themselves from public scrutiny, regulation, taxation and accountability. This is hugely disempowering for communities as it means that…
Global corporations claim their new technologies will benefit us all, but they could threaten us, particularly small-scale food producers and consumers. Even before COVID-19, the arrival of big data, synthetic biology, robotics and other tech were being hailed as the answers to hunger, climate change and even infectious disease. In the summer of 2020, ETC Group began convening conversations with, and among, civil society organisations, social movement allies and communities with whom we work. “Which…
Most soils across Africa are degrading and being lost to erosion. The conventional approach has been to push chemicals to ensure production. Research increasingly reveals that these chemicals contribute to killing soils, as well as causing harm to human health. Unfortunately, corporate and academic interests ensure a continuation of this ‘chemical life support system’.
During the last 50 years an increasing number of alternatives to the mainstream chemical approach have been emerging around the…
Small-scale farmers in the 16 countries of the Sahel in West Africa face a dual crisis to their livelihoods: climate change and land degradation.
For many generations, farmers had lived and farmed in equilibrium with the natural environment. They maintained soil fertility, water holding capacity and crop production through fallowing and other practices.
Today, population pressure, climate change, soil erosion, misuse of agrochemicals have reduced the resiliency and sustainability of the farming system.…
Is it possible to change the world domination of a profit-driven industrial-style economy that respects neither people nor planet? This session aims to explore viable, social and fair economic models for farming and supporting short-chain local food systems from the ground up. The possibility of getting closer to true-cost accounting and really equitable and transparent ‘farm to fork’ systems.
Right Livelihood Award winner and president of the Biodynamic Federation, Helmy Abouleish, presents a radical…
There are many efforts made to promote better nutrition in Africa, with the hope that it will improve health concerns ranging from chronic malnutrition that causes mental and physical impairment, to non-communicable diseases to cancer. However the focus of these efforts is often very narrow and addresses the symptoms rather than the cause. They do not look at the underlying problems in industrial farming and the widespread use of chemicals to grow food and then…
Agriculture and the food system accounts for nearly one third of all greenhouse gases, but the vast majority of this is from the energy intensive production and distribution of a few internationally traded commodities. Whereas farmers operating agro-ecological systems around the world produce food and resources for their communities while reducing cO2 emissions from agriculture and sequestering carbon at the same time.
Many governments now accept the need for net zero but there is…
Please join the ORFC Global team and UK folksinger, Sam Lee, for a brief closing plenary (15 minutes)
For those who would like to sing along with the final song here are the lyrics.
One May morning early I chanced for to roam
And strolled through the field by the side of the grove.
It was there I did hear the harmless birds sing,
And you never heard so sweet,
and…