HUGE WIN FOR CLEAN FOOD IN THE ANDES!!!! GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS!

Ekorural and partners win grant to advance sustainable food production and nutrition in the Andes Groundswell International | January 25, 2011 at 10:23 pm | Tags:

Ekorural, a Groundswell partner organization based in Ecuador, along with Wageningen University's Communication and Innovation Studies Group, and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences recently won a grant from WOTRO, a division of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research that supports scientific research on development issues, in particular poverty alleviation and sustainable development.
The project partners will explore how scientific insights can strengthen and complement the most promising positive deviance (i.e., uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies of farmers that enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite having no special resources or knowledge) in ways that address both people’s immediate and long term needs. Among other things, the work will seek to develop and test methodologies to identify and strengthen positive deviance in resource poor households that effectively respond to food security priorities. Building on earlier studies and recent stakeholder consultations, the project will focus on positive deviance in two strategic areas for enabling farming families to defeat poverty and hunger:

• Creative utilization of water for food production in the context of growing climate variability; and
• Strategic utilization of food production for family nutrition, in particular for assuring the health and well-being of vulnerable mothers and infants.

The re-positioning of agricultural science around endogenous potential in Ecuador holds global implications. The food crisis and growing international interest in local food as a means to addressing resource constraints and climate change guarantee that this project will be closely followed by serious foodies.
agro ecology, agro-ecological farming, climate change, climate variability, community led development, Ecuador, Ekorural, local food systems, positive deviance, water harvesting | Categories: Cooling the Planet (Climate Change), Ecuador, Healthy Women & Children, People-Centered Food Systems (Food Security), Sustainable Development, Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pG1dM-cl