BANGKOK, THAILAND – On July 5, 2022, thirty-seven participants, members, and partners of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA) and Southeast Asia Regional Initiatives on Community Empowerment (SEARICE), from 13 Asian countries, gathered in Bangkok, Thailand for a three-day workshop, with the theme “Transforming Asia’s Food Systems Through Rights Based Solutions: Capacity Building Workshop on UNDROP and Agroecology”. The participants represent 24 organizations in 13 countries in South, East, and Southeast Asia.
Climate-resilient approaches in farms, fisheries, pasturelands, mountains, and forests, through agro-ecology, is common advocacy of the participating organizations. The workshop provides a deeper understanding of Agroecology as well as the salient provisions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) and the UN Decade of Family Farming (UNDFFF). It aims to identify ways and processes to promote agro-ecology and peasant/farmers’ rights in various windows, spaces, and opportunities provided by key relevant global policy spaces such as the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the international treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGFRA), Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its upcoming COP15 as well as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its upcoming COP 27. As representatives of farmer organizations and NGOs gather in this workshop, this event hopes to result in concrete action plans at the national level that participants from the same country can formulate and jointly implement.
The workshop has invited external resource persons Mr. Cristophe Golay of Geneva Academy who is the Strategic Advisor of RAISE, Ms. Dada Bacudo of the ASEAN Climate Resilience Network, Mr. Pierre Ferrand who is Agroecology and UNDFF Officer of the FAO Regional Office in the Asia Pacific, and Dr. Ravi Khetarpal, who is the Executive Director of the Asia Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI).
The workshop is supported by Swede-Bio, TPP-AE, and GAFSP.
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