Climate change poses a severe and worsening threat to global food security and farmers livelihoods, particularly in the Global South. But agroecology offers a solution not only in terms of reducing the impact that the food system has on the environment, but also enhancing its resilience in the face of extreme and unpredictable weather events.
Investment in agroecological training programmes is urgently needed to prepare a new generation of farmers and landworkers to address the intersecting challenges of food system resilience, global warming, climate-related migration and poverty, and biodiversity loss. By putting pressure on these funds and their boards, you can help us to stop investment being poured into ‘false solutions’ that are promoted by multinational corporations, and increase the amount of funding allocated to agroecological solutions led by farmers at the grassroots which truly adapt our food system to climate change.
These training networks already exist and are held by grassroots social movements in different countries across the world; but they lack funding to expand their reach and develop their programmes to the extent that is needed. The money is already there too; ring fenced in various international funds to tackle the climate crisis.
By engaging with country negotiators and UN officials, LWA and ECVC are trying to influence funds like the Climate Adaptation Fund and Loss and Damages Funds set up by the UNFCCC, to ensure that this investment is channelled directly to the grassroots, to build agroecology from the bottom-up.
That is why we have produced an activist guide (available in English, French and Spanish) to equip climate and food justice activists with the key context, information, and leverage points to take action themselves.