Steve, a co-founder of EkoRural is an organic farmer and food activist based in Ecuador as well as a lecturer and research fellow with the Communication and Innovation Group at Wageningen University. This talk uses Ecuador´s food sovereignty movement as a way to inform the Wageningen community and their transition towards ¨greener¨living. Steve says that, ¨the work with the movement has taught us that Science can better serve society’s long-term interests when it poses insightful questions and helps people to discover hidden opportunities in local practices. Science can help people to identify and understand local potential and strengthen or improve it. It can also help to precipitate principals and translate them for new contexts – such as child/maternal health, food production, and environmental management.¨
In his proposal for the talk Steve points out that ¨faced with the challenge of enabling the people of Wageningen to effectively transition their community towards more sustainable living, as per the experience in Ecuador, we propose a rigorous look at local experiences in producing, procuring and consuming food. Consumer wealth represents an existing, largely untapped resource for fueling change. This must happen family-by-family, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood across the community. Thus, people’s empowerment must be central to any alternative. Fortunately, Wageningen is a highly diverse community with much social heterogeneity on which to drawl. We see unlimited potential and great promise!¨
The presentation is available here:
Building Communities Around Sustainable Food Systems
Watch Steve talk about Self-Organization and his involvement here:
EkoRural 