Future of Water and Agriculture

Supporting Local Farmers - Future of Water and Agriculture

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Hi, I'm Amelia [?], and thank you for all of your points. I'm most interested in your final point about supporting local farmers, and creating jobs at a local level. You know, there's a number of great initiatives out there, but I was hoping you could provide an example. I mean, admittedly we're all interested in trying to improve the quality of life in local communities that are often poverty-stricken, and you spoke of many of these community members moving to the cities but many of them also continue to remain in local farming communities without access to some of the urban resources. Can you speak of one or two excellent models that did just what you said, supported permaculture and agro-ecosystems and biodiversity as well as creating local jobs?

One example that comes to my mind, I was working on, before I joined the water council, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, the District of San Marcos in Guatemala where ICN ?, together with CARE, have been setting up projects on restoration of watersheds with the local communities, at the same time implementing small fish production schemes in different villages, that actually created some of the jobs, but also some garbage collection jobs on the beaches of the poor community that were living there, while at the same time working on a much more participatory approach on how do you actually do basin-wide or watershed-wide planning, so it's not only the government that decides what are the priorities, but it is very much put together with the communities, and the elected officials at a local level. Now it sounds all wonderful, but I can tell you, it's an enormous challenge to put that together. To interest the people, to raise the awareness, to have people to make time available for doing these things. You're sitting in a meeting, doesn't give you any income. So we can sort of say yes, we want to empower the people and have them participate, but not necessarily all the people are that available for participating in those investments that might be good, not necessarily result in a forest within two years, a thirty-year-old forest takes thirty years to grow. So it's quite a challenge for some of those people, particularly the poorest, to really engage fully in those processes. But I would be happy to talk to you a bit later about some other examples.

Ger, thank you very much.

My pleasure.