Toward a Small-farmer Forum

One of the outcomes of the Housing and Land Rights Network’s Land Forums for Members and civil society actors is a broad recognition of the plight of small farmers and agricultural workers across the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. Besides the consequences of climate change that uniquely affect this region, small farmers in MENA share many other dire challenges and common characteristics.

The forces of globalization are pressuring small farmers through both markets and governments to forfeit their lands and livelihood, often in tandem with land grabbing by political and military elites and their local and extraterritorial business associates. Common across the region is the growing need for innovative techniques for conserving agricultural inputs, especially water. In the meantime, crippling debt leads to various negative consequences that underscore the urgency of an alternative solution. Added to these common hurdles are the consequences of occupation and armed conflict, which coincide in countries from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic.

Amid these urgencies and hurdles, small farmers across the region face numerous obstacles to their human rights to freedom of association, organization and expression. Those accessory rights are indispensable for small farmers to survive and to thrive as the anchors of the MENA region’s national cultures, environmental preservation and its vital, indigenous food production.

Civil society organizations that work with small farmers are now brainstorming to formulate scenarios to support small farmers across MENA to network, form practical solidarity and give voice to their needs and rights. While small-scale efforts to realize small-farmer cooperation punctuate the region and its history, no regional vision for small-holder farmer collaboration has emerged until now.

Through the Land Forum, however, civil society has consolidated a regional diagnosis of land and natural resources issues and formed a cadre of organizational and individual partners using the human rights framework for land and natural resource monitoring and analysis. Their ongoing efforts will continue to inform the MENA research and advocacy agenda.

This effort now coincides with MENA governments through the FAO’s Regional Priority Framework [إطار الأولويات الإقليمية], which now is pursuing three principle initiatives in the region: water scarcity, resilience (to climate change) and support for small farmers. This occlusion of priorities forms a strategic opportunity for complementary efforts of multiple parties intersecting to address some of the grave threats and challenges to MENA small farmers.

The CSO vision supports a permanent forum maintained by and for small farmers, in which they exchange experiences and set the agenda for further cooperation. This vision faces several complications and challenges, in part because it has never before been tried.

Among these is the need for a definition of small farmers, which differs from country to country. In some countries, these include agricultural workers as well. Another basic question remains the modalities of governance, representation and administration of such a forum. Less ambiguous, but yet to be determined by the constituents themselves, is the program of activities to support small farmers, including through self-help initiatives.

Nonetheless, the contours of an unprecedented effort to support small farmers is coming into view, especially in the light of numerous ongoing normative processes affecting small farmers in the global development agenda. This networking initiative will take clearer form also in the course of technical meetings between FAO and CSOs in November 2015, and proposes to be a subject of discussion at the Near East Regional Conference of FAO at Beirut in April 2016.

For inquiries and further information, contact hic-mena@hic-mena.org

Photo credit: Middle East Online