2021 Family Farming Barometer

For the past four years, the Family Farming Barometer has been focusing on issues that affect family farming and how these are being addressed. It investigates the transition to sustainable food systems to ensure food security for all, for now, and the future.

The 2021 Family Farming Barometer focuses on knowledge and research. Building sustainable food systems requires the creation and exchange of knowledge and information that address today’s challenges, and meet the needs of farmers as well as those specific to each region. On this barometer, we can ask ourselves if the creation of knowledge and the science is neutral. We will discover that agro-food research is still very oriented to industrial agriculture and the status quo, and that it can be instrumentalised, and even manipulated to benefit certain interest.

During our discussions, we plan to explore with Fernando Lopez, how research can meet the requirements of family farming; we will learn with Charlotte Pavageau how to increase international research to take into account agro-ecological transition; and we will discover with Pierre Stassart that, in spite of numerous initiatives taken on by universities, there is still a long way to go before agro-ecology is taken seriously.