On the sidelines of FAO's Science Days, GFAR is hosting a UNFSS Dialogue to discuss the ongoing national consultations for a Global Manifesto on Forgotten Foods. 

To register to participate, please visit: https://bit.ly/UNFSS_Forgotten_Foods

Preamble

Partners in GFAR are keenly aware that current trends towards transforming research and innovation need to be more inclusive of local and indigenous knowledge systems. This discussion will focus on the paradigm shift required towards democratizing research and innovation to produce transformative knowledge for agroecology, food sovereignty and biocultural diversity.

Concerned Partners in GFAR aim to highlight the depth of farmers' expertise in cultivating traditional crops—so called ‘forgotten foods’—as sources of a nutritious and stable food supply. Despite acting as custodians of this rich biodiversity for centuries and agricultural researchers in their own right, smallholder farmers and indigenous people have been left behind by formal agricultural research.

A new approach is needed to not only to put forgotten foods on-the-radar of research but also to fully unleash their potential. By marrying farmer-based insight with formal research, the way can be paved for a new paradigm built on co-research and co-innovation, rooted in the principles of fruitful exchanges between equally valid knowledge systems.

In the context of GFAR’s Collective Action on Forgotten Foods, rural communities in Africa and Asia have been consulted, together with a range of other stakeholders, to develop a Global Manifesto on Forgotten Foods. Recently completed continent-wide consultations promoted by GFAR in Africa (through FARA), Near East and North Africa (through AARINENA), and in Asia-Pacific (through APAARI), have confirmed a strong interest to engage research and innovation systems to reinvigorate these crops by identifying—with farmers themselves—the best solutions in seed selection, conservation and multiplication, value addition, marketing and culinary applications.

The Global Manifesto defines new avenues for supporting effectively and using appropriately traditional and indigenous peoples’ knowledge, facilitating smallholders’ co-innovation processes’ access and benefit sharing. The Manifesto will be transformed by a Community of Practices emerging from the consultations into a Global Plan of Action from which selected initiatives will be submitted to donors as investment opportunities.

Programme

https://bit.ly/UNFSS_Forgotten_Foods