Workshops

Workshop 1 (in french, english and spanish)

Origin-linked Products and Sustainable Rural Tourism

Coordinated by Marcelo Champredonde, INTA Argentina, Emilie Vandecandelaere, FAO, Silvia Scaramuzzi, Universitá degli Studi di Firenze Italy, with the collaboration of Isabel Marin Torres, INRA Corte France, and Maryam Seedi, consultant in Iran.

Rural tourism can be an important trigger for economic, cultural and social development, particularly by offering a growing demand for services (accommodation, food, leisure activities) in rural areas creating jobs, boosting social and cultural life, and increasing the need for infrastructure.

However, according to the modalities of its growth and development, tourism can disrupt social life, divert the commons to privatization, endanger the cultural expressions, among which local cuisine, increase the cost of living for the local population, and jeopardize ecological balances. These negative impacts can cause conflicts for the use of resources between the inhabitants and the visitors.

The objective of the workshop will be to discuss these contrasting effects based on concrete case studies that highlight the value of local cultural elements, such as food and craft products whose quality is linked to origin.

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Workshop 2 (in french and spanish)

Strategies and tools to plan and manage territorial transitions

Coordinated by François Casabianca, INRA GIS-SYAL France, Guilhem Calvo, Diversity and Development France, Tobias Eisenring, FiBL Switzerland and Florence Arsonneau, Diversity and Development France

Planning is an exercise at the heart of every territory in transition. Whether to respond to issues related to regional planning or to face the application of public policies in the context of decentralization, the planning of territories is often thought and organized by local authorities and institutional actors. In theory, these planning and foresight exercises must involve all the actors and active forces of a territory. In addition, the question to be addressed is the implementation and the necessary consultation and articulation between multiple actors to support this territorial project. The territorial transitions will feed on i) incremental and short-term changes based on existing systems and their optimization as well as ii) changes of rupture where systems experience major bifurcations and longer rebalancing phases.

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Workshop 3 (in english)

Adding value and promoting origin-linked products by tools as Geographical Indications, Mountain labelling, territorial brands, and territorial initiatives like UNESCO-World Heritage or GIAHS (Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems)

Coordinated by Tamara Zivadinovic, MENA Group Serbia, Giovanni Belletti and Andrea Marescotti, Universitá degli Studi di Firenze Italy and Olivier Beucherie, Beucherie Conseil & Master “Food Identity” France.

Along the different pathways of rural transition towards more sustainable and resilient rural communities, there are needs to explore, understand and analyse how different labels on origin-based products are built (collective action, specifications, human and financial resources, etc.), and to what extent links to local specific resources are real. Indeed, under certain conditions, these labels may open to producers – especially small-scale farmers – the possibility to improve their position in value chains, achieving better and fairer distribution of the benefits.

This workshop will consider all these complex issues, with special emphasis on the promotion of the labelling among the consumers. In fact, promotion of the origin-based products is a must to raise awareness among consumers and citizens. Certainly, consumers’ willingness to buy and to pay for specific quality is a key to add value to sustain farming systems that ensure food security, food quality, high diversity of the diets, based on small-scale farmers and protection of sensitive natural milieux. Producers face huge challenges to efficiently engage in the promotion, as it requires much skill and money.

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Workshop 4 (in english)

Tools and innovations to build the resilience of farmers and territories

Coordinated by D. Barjolle, ETHZ Switzerland, Martijn Sonnevelt WFSC ETHZ Switzerland, Johan Six, ETHZ Switzerland, Anne-Sophie Poisot, FAO Italy and Barbara Gemmill-Herren ICRAF Kenya/USA.

Resilience of farming systems increases with the ability of farmers and their farms to cope and adapt to changes. Most pressures for change are due to environmental impacts such as climate, but market conditions, assets base, trade and changes in policies play a determining role.

As for holistically assessing the degree of resilience of complex farming systems, the FAO has developed tools and methods, such as the SHARP and RIMA tool. Universities have created complementary approaches for evaluating and building the resilience of value chains or food systems. Although, the scope, scale, context and approaches are diverse, they may be complementary.

The workshop should serve as a platform of sharing information but also experience and knowledge about the development, implementation, and the use of resilience assessment tools. The perspective is to search for promising ways to share data in order to get a worldwide baseline assessment of resilience, causes of vulnerability, and pathways to build resilience.

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Workshop 5 (in english and french)

Foodways and Food-related Intangible Cultural Heritage as drivers for sustainable development in rural areas 

Coordinated by Cassiano Luminati and Polo Poschiavo , AlpFoodWay Switzerland, Renata Meazza, Regione Lombardia Italy, Laura Saudin, Regione Valle d’Aosta Italy, Elena Turetti, Comunità Montana Valle Camonica Italy, Diego Rinallo, Kedge Business School France, Valentina Zingari, Parc naturel régional du Massif des Bauges France, Sasa Poljak Istenic, and Špela Ladinek Lozej, ZRC SAZU Slovenia, Hiroyuki Ono and Aurélie Fernandez, GIAHS Secretariat FAO HQ

Foodways are socioeconomic and cultural practices related to food production and consumption. Food heritage is a strong identity source for rural communities. It goes beyond products to include productive landscapes and traditional knowledge on production techniques, consumption customs and rituals, and the transmission of ancient wisdom. In many rural areas, factors such as depopulation, the ageing of population, migration, climate change, globalization and the industrialization and concentration of agriculture and food production are putting food heritage at risk of disappearing. This can result in the loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity, not to mention the threat to local cultural knowledge and practices that could form the base for alternative and more sustainable models of local development.

The workshop builds on the insights on the links between food-related intangible cultural heritage and sustainable development matured in the context of the Interreg Alpine Space AlpFoodway project (http://www.alpine-space.eu/projects/alpfoodway/), which aims to contribute to sustainable development policies in peripheral mountain areas by developing and testing new participatory community-based strategies connecting economic, agro-forestal, socio-cultural sectors at the Alpine scale.

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Workshop 6 (in french, english and spanish)

Nutritional and Food Transitions

Coordinated by Florence Tartanac, FAO Italy, and Capucine Musard, Origin for Sustainability-Switzerland

The expected contributions will address the following questions: What are the motivations for producers to produce a healthy and sustainable diet? What do public policies do in the areas of food environment and food education of the population to encourage a sustainable and healthy diet?

Click here for detailed description and program (PDF)