The theme: Building towards the food system we want

Issues:

The overall goal of the Forum is to gather views of farmers on the agriculture and food systems they want for the advancement of agriculture and food sector.  The general objective is to enable farmers discuss challenges and opportunities in Agriculture and Food Systems in Lesotho and to develop joint resolutions on factors hindering its development. Specifically, the objectives of the dialogue will be to:

1. Enhance the understanding and appreciation of farmers of the 2021 UNFSS
2. Highlight the key issues at stake for farmers
3. Develop/generate common positions/responses and key messages on food systems transformation pathways from the perspectives of farmers.

The Process:

To ensure efficiency and effectiveness, the dialogue will be structured into three segments.

• The first being an information session designed to inform/educate and update participants on the background to the UNFSS, its structures and processes, and the progress made so far.
• The second segment will be a facilitated physical discussion of participants on issues emerging from the presentation with the view to establish and agree key positions or statements on the identified areas.
• The third segment will take the form of gender-mixed breakaway groups clustered along commodity lines as follows: Livestock intensive and extensive farming; Cereal crop farming; and horticulture farming. The group discussion will be facilitated by research assistants appointed by the consulting firm and will, in addition to issues extracted from segment two, cover the following thematic areas;
• Advancing equity, openness, and fairness in the governance of value chains, including in international trade
• Enhancing availability and equitable access to factors of production
• Technological innovations and adaptations
• Investing in the next generation of farmers
• Shifting to sustainable and nature positive production
• Priorities for public and development investments

Expected outcome:

A farmers’ position paper/ statement on the Food system they want covering the following issues:

• Externalization of production processes, to ensure profit maximization by the farmers and bearing the consequences for humans and the environment. In these output, we shall seek to design systems’ structures and functions as they occur in the current real world as the basis on which a positive concept then identifies points of entry for desirable systems’ changes (Positive Approach)
• A normative statement for a Lesotho Food System that farmers want. The statement shall indicate capacity to deliver immediate benefits to farmers and provide a vision for other value chain players.  At this level, we shall seek to  postulate a set of objectives and aims to shape the systems to serve the stated objectives of a desired food system.
• A participatory, systems-oriented innovation concept statement emphasizing capacity strengthening of farmers with particular attention to women and youth empowerment.  Here we seek to take a positive approach to improve the existing system structure.
• Formation of a loosely structured coalition of farmers and other local stakeholders that facilitate and manage the agricultural innovation process. The objective here is to explore complementarity of the positive and normative approaches in the theory of food systems.