The Institute of Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC) is organizing an online conference on Food, Forests, and Farmers: Finding sustainable pathways for the future on 22 to 24 November 2021 that brings together the university partners and other collaborators of the five-year LUCID project, Social justice implications of land use change in the Philippines.
Various specialists will share their thoughts and experiences on the impact of corporate agriculture on smallholder farmers, and especially in the Philippine upland context, this relates to the increasing conversion of the uplands to high-yield variety (HYV) corn farms and which is both a socio-economic and a biophysical concern.
Ms Josianne Gauthier, Secretary-General of CIDSE (Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité), an umbrella organization for Catholic development agencies in Europe and North America, is the keynote speaker. Tackling the conference themes are three thematic speakers: Dr CTS Nair, former chief economist at the Forestry Department in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); Dr Artemio Salazar, former National Corn Coordinator at the Department of Agriculture in the Philippines; and Ms Lilian Mercado, Asia Pacific Regional Director of the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF)-Asia.
The conference themes are:
- Protecting natural resources and enhancing provisioning services
- Increasing productivity and value addition to regulating and supporting ecological services
- Improving livelihoods to foster inclusive economic growth to culture and socio-economic services.
Food, forests, and farmers touch every aspect of human existence and the state of each is integral to environmental sustainability, economic wellbeing, and cultural integrity and ensuring the balance amongst the three is critical. When one fails, the resulting imbalance threatens broader systems of education, health, and the economy, as well as human rights, peace, and security. The impact on those who are already poor and marginalized is the intensification of their prevailing vulnerabilities.
The LUCID conference hopes to share and contribute to the increasing body of knowledge and significant actions that respond to the broader challenges and goals on food security, livelihoods, and climate change.
The LUCID project is supported by the Académie de Recherche et d’Enseignement supérieur (ARES) in Belgium, with ESSC and Université de Namur as the key implementors. For more information, please go to the LUCID conference page. To register, please click on this link.