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There was one area of divergence where participants had opposing views on "Fortifying Staples" under Action Track 1. Two perspective, one is that to allow fortifying staple to ensure healthier intake of food. However, another perspective disagrees on fortifying, arguing that the vitamins and minerals needed by our body should be grown naturally. These needs further debate and exploration but time was limited. The participants agreed to continue the discussion within their constituents and will be a topic in the succeeding Independent Dialogues.

In this first Independent Dialogue on FSS of Philippine farmers and Fishers, a number of propositions were put forward. All Action Tracks (AT 1-5) along with corresponding game changing solutions have been affirmed by the group except in AT 1 regarding fortifying staples that needs further discussion. He presented the key point shared. In terms of policy proposals, there are many suggestions to look into: (a) marine ecosystem protection (AT3); (b) global environmental facilities which would lead to the preservation of resources under the sea (AT2.); and (c) Adopt diversified organic farming sy... Read morestem. There are also policy proposals on Asset Reforms such as the enactment of the National Land Use Act (NLUA), to push for the completion of CARP/ER and the delineation of Municipal waters. There is need to increase social awareness on food systems and some proposals for the creation of grievance and redress committees with compensation as well as, to seek equal treatment for farmers/fishers, agrarian reform (AT4). At the same time, there are policy proposals for the diversification on resilience to food systems, that is, preventive and promoting participatory approaches (AT5) Read less

In terms of priorities, the groups have identified AT3 (3.2), AT2, AT1. prioritize number 1. A lot of discussions on AT4. Land reform – access to land (farmers as beneficiary), access to capacity building, capital, fair market (especially women), direct funds to FOs not via LGU, representation of farmers/fishers in policy making bodies, reduction of control of market especially on prices. For policy/programme, the group proposed the following: Under AT 3, the institutional global environmental policy at each province, monitoring system, community involvement, education and campaign. It also ... Read moreproposed for the creation of monitoring team involving fisherfolks and farmers that will supervise and observe good agricultural practices per municipal/provincial level. Under AT 2, organic way of farming, information drive promoting local products/food safety, review trade policies on importation (rice tarrification) including food packaging. Under AT 4. strengthen micro entrepreneurs (talipapa) oversight committee. Under AT 5, the curator mentioned the active participation of multi-stakeholders in budgeting and monitoring disasters programs and environmental projects. In terms of actions to follow through, first is to continue this independent dialogue regularly with a system to follow-up post NID activities. Secondly, to look into the establishment of monitoring teams at the provincial level. There are also concrete suggestions from the group like the need to craft Magna Carta for Small Scale producers, extend food assistance for the babies and senior citizens during disasters and even the proper use of funds like the PCIC funds which should not be diverted to other uses (i.e., COVID operations) Read less

Based on the group discussions, almost all Action Tracks (AT 1-5) with corresponding game changing solutions have been affirmed by the group as applicable and actionable in different local settings except AT 1 regarding fortifying staples that needs further discussion. In terms of policy proposals, there are many suggestions to look into: (a) marine ecosystem protection (AT3); (b) global environmental facilities which would lead to the preservation and protection of resources under the sea (AT2.) by consistent monitoring and implementing the use of safe fishing methods. It will also promote to... Read moretal prevention of hazardous fishing equipment and chemical inputs; and (c) adopting diversified organic farming system. It was also agreed during the breakout session/focus group discussion that the 3 identified game changing solutions for AT2 (Protect natural and marine ecosystems, manage sustainably existing food production systems and restoration of degraded ecosystems and soil functions are interrelated but the 2nd AT2 proposition which includes agroecology, must be prioritized as it will have a direct impact to both 1st and 3rd identified game changing solutions. There are also policy proposals on Asset Reforms such as the enactment of the National Land Use Act (NLUA), to push for the completion of CARP/ER and the delineation of Municipal waters. There is need to increase social awareness on food systems while some proposals seek the creation of grievance and redress committees with compensation as well as, promote the equal treatment for farmers/fishers (AT4). At the same time, there are policy proposals for the diversification on resilience to food systems, that is, preventive and promoting participatory approaches (AT5). Read less

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How do our systems need to change to better support workers? - We must reform land tenure and land ownership models. - We need to account for externalities within value chains and not pass them off to the workers, communities, and ecosystems that are negatively impacted - There need to be regulations to support living wages for workers as well as meaningful penalties for employers who exploit workers - Women must be guaranteed equal pay and equal protections. Invest in education for children and rural communities about the importance of soil, crop diversification, and kitchen gardens - We have... Read more to break the narrative that food is an economic activity. It is culture. It is who we are. It is spiritual. - Food systems must prioritize the needs of the communities who supply the food. - Cooperative, unions, and collectives can help break the imbalance built into the food system - We must shorten value chains so that people have a closer relationship to the food they are consuming. - We must create safety nets to account for shocks. These safety nets should be funded by governments, agro-corporations, and built into trade deals to protect the workers. - Eradicate child labor -Food systems are mainly run by women yet they are deeply disempowered. We must shift social norms and worker regulations to protect and empower women in the workforce Read less

How is climate change impacting workers? - From the highlands of Guatemala to the island of Puerto Rico, increased storms and droughts and floods devastate crops. There must be increased safety nets for farm and food workers when-and-if their crops fail - Collectives and cooperatives need be expanded to provide support structures to provide resilience in the face of climate disasters - Protect and preserve and regenerate soil - Plant indigenous and bioregionally appropriate foods to encourage ecosystem health, resilience, and the regeneration of flora and fauna key to local ecosystem vitality

How can faith, religious, spiritual, or Indigenous traditions support farm and food workers? - Revive traditional agriculture and cultural practices around land management and farming to help inform modern practices - Engage spiritual traditions to recover earth and worker honoring rituals to repair the relationship between land and workers. - Emphasize spirituality over religion. Religion too often has been used as a tool of division. Spirituality, however, is deeply personal as well as communal and can be used as a tool to build community bonding based on personal experience - Utilize eco-fe... Read moreminism and eco-theology to empower women and educate men in order to break power structures used to oppress women - Leverage spiritual and Indigenous wisdom about the sanctity of the earth and what we harvest from it. - Use religious and spiritual and Indigenous traditions to break from the Cartesian relationship between humans and non-humans - Provide education in religious institutions to show the integral relationship between human health and environmental health - Leverage religious institutions and power structures to advocate for workers and promote egalitarian ways of farming, working, and being together in community - Spiritually is a major diver for individuals and communities in our food systems. We need to emphasize spiritually more in our systems - Religious, faith, Indigenous and spiritual leaders need to call arbiters of power in our food systems to account for failing food and farm workers due to systemic imbalances that oppress people and planet alike Read less

How can we advance equitable livelihoods for farm and food workers? - Provide protections for farm and food workers through policy. - Reorient the value-chain to bring protections and living wages to workers - Provide incentive and protection structures for smallholder farmers. - Regulate the land and the people who protect the environment and the people in leadership who need to help secure the livelihoods of those who work - Establish cooperatives and collectives to give workers ownership of the lands they work - Engage and empower women. Women compose a majority of the farming workforce and... Read more yet have a limited voice due to cultural and religious mores. - Install mechanisms to redistribute the monopoly of power held by major agro-corporations and other big businesses to workers and smallholders - Provide education and opportunities to young people so that they can farm their own land or land help by co-ops to encourage a new generation of healthy, community farms Read less

Sanctity of human - land relationship -In order to create change within our food systems our food systems must pivot away from a purely consumptive model of production and distribution towards one that take into account the intrinsic value of nature and the people who produce and distribute food. - Land must be recognized as essential and in its own way sanctified and full of meaning beyond that which the markets give it - Land and soil must be protected - The people who work the land and serve food must be treated with dignity and respect, and not as industrialized things to be used and abuse... Read mored. Worker justice - - People and the land cannot be see an objects to be exploited for profit - Workers will not treat the land with dignity if they are not treated with dignity - Farm and food workers need to be provided a living wage. Too many farmers don’t earn enough to adequately provide for their families - Support place based, cultural and ecologically appropriate food growing that empowers local growers to provide for themselves and their communities - Incentivize development funders to invest in community based food systems - Incentive growing models that produce diverse crops that are bioregionally appropriate - For communities reliant on tourism, create ties between tourist boards and indigenous foods and cuisine - Encourage cooperatives and farm collectives to support local growers. - End neocolonial practices of land grabs and worker exploitation that are are tacitly given license though international trade agreements - End practices that cause people to disassociate from the land; - End practices that extracts without replenishing; - End practices that exploit without regard for people or planet -Put an end to the violence of the food system that exploits people and the planet - Put an end to child labor - Even out systemic imbalances built into food systems that disempower smallholder farmers, - workers, women - Move development money away from mega-growers - Create and enforce international regulations to discourage the exploitation of farm workers - Mandate living wages for farm workers - Change worker conditions and pay structures that incentive a reliance on migratory workers and working conditions that allow for abuse and exploitation - Break down socio-cultural mores that disempower and exploits women’s labor - Provide education and early support for women and mothers who are the first to introduce and educate the young about food. - Provide education and support to mothers and families about the benefits of breastfeeding. - Women empowerment and women farmers are discriminated against. Gender based violence. - Social norms that don’t recognize their work or rights. Food systems are mainly run by women yet they are deeply disempowered. - Women are often paid less and are more likely to be farm workers. Must create egalitarian working structures Read less

There were three primary focus areas for this dialogue: The first focus area was the human relationship to land and farming, and why that relationship has become strained. The majority of the speakers in our session were from countries that had been colonized by Europeans who exploited the land and people of the colonized territories for the benefit of the colonizing nation. In the words of one of the presenters, Dr. Louis Petersen, “After so many years of colonization and slavery, they look at the land as the scene of the crime.“ This sentiment was shared strongly by the speakers from Sen... Read moreegal, Dr. Aliou Niang, and Dr. Meera Baindur from India, both of whom spoke to the exploitation of land and people alike by colonizing agents. Prior to colonization by the French, the Diola people of Senegal held a sacred relationship with the land and especially with the rice. They did not produce more than they needed and relied upon bartering and generosity to meet the community's needs. When the French introduced peanuts and currency the traditional farming and societal structure of the Diola was broken and led to inequality and oppression from internal and external agents. Much like the practices of modern day agro-corporations, workers and the land are needlessly exploited and the benefit of their outcomes are funneled away from the community into the agents who exploit them. The Second focus area was the role of spirituality, religion, and ritual in reorienting people to the land. There was a point of emphasis put on how we value and objectify the land (and the people who work it ) which causes our relationship to food production to be impersonal and inhumane. Increasingly global supply/value chains are extremely long so that consumers have no relationship with the producers other than a transactional one. Farm and food workers have very little say in what they farm or produce or make or sell which further dehumanizes the relationship between people and the land. An antidote to this broad objectification is to re-engage our spiritual connectedness to the land and recognize the sanctity of the relationship. Dr. Baindur found that her Hindu faith and the practice of praying and giving offerings to the local gods helped center her relationship to the food and land. A Third focus area was on smallholders and localization. Our food systems have become overly commodified and industrialized placing major emphasis, reliance, and money in large argo-corporate producers. This model is driven by profit and metrics on a spreadsheet that give little accord to the health of the land that produces the food nor to the workers who harvest it nor to community based farmers and food workers. The system is unbalanced and this imbalance systematically disadvantages smallholders. Read less

**Stakeholders whose interests should be prioritized.** The UN FSS claims to be an inclusive space where all voices will be heard; however, the active participation of large corporations in its agenda and the heavy involvement of the 'Green Revolution' questions the prioritization of civil society's efforts and perspective and, therefore, the possibility of changing power dynamics that perpetuate systems of oppression in the food systems. **Areas that need further exploration** - There was contention on how a capitalist economic model can be used to foster Food Systems Change. Some participant... Read mores believed that our system could shift the current power dynamics, which create inequity if utilized in the right way. Others believe that a radical transformation in our system is necessary for true, sustainable change. **Practices that are needed for food system sustainability** - Many participants agreed that we must revalue the role of food in our daily lives and create healthier relationships with the food system. However, there was divergence on which actors create the value we place on food. Some participants agreed that it is the way we price food that determines its value. They asked questions such as "which externalities are considered in the price of food?" and "can we start valuing food by its nutritional value?" Other participants believed it is the influence of chefs and food systems leaders that create the standards people use to value food in their daily lives and the global system **Practices that are needed for food system sustainability** - Restaurants can be a platform for food education and behavioral change by promoting local produce and culinary traditions, closing the gap between the producers and the final consumer. Still, some participants believe this is not enough to create radical change. Public policies that foster an agriculture of peace are essential to building a fair food system. Divergence over terms "Sustainable" and "Regenerative" - Regenerative is being co-opted by multinational corporations --- (agroecological? there is a social movement aspect to agroecology- where **food sovereignty is central**) comes down to the question of where power lies within the food system. - Indigenous food practices aren't adopted by society as a whole, because of incorporation of the food system - Over subsidized farming in the Global North has caused the loss of crop-based resources in the Global South. Modern agriculture has had a drastic impact on local economies and threatened age-old agricultural practices and family farming which, for the most part, is characterized by a symbiotic relationship between people and planet. Read less

Decolonizing our Plates What does decolonizing our plates mean? 1. preserving local farmer's and ancestral practices, beliefs, and more 2. breaking the rural/urban divide and making sure these ingredients become available to everyone, especially those who have lost accessibility along the lines of poverty and disaster, lost cultures 3. adopting a culture that values nutritious food, accountability for people who are complicit in action, asking how we can remove colonial practices from the workplace, what traditional foods can we provide that honors the people we are serving? calling out the 'b... Read moreullshit' of everyone and constantly asking how we can all do better. Qguring out how to coexist with indigenous cultures 4. the theft of land, opportunity, and traditions. thinking about competition in LATAM to consume colonized products as a sign of social progress 5. all the processed foods found in communities where indigenous communities work make traditional ingredients Questions that emerged: How do we bring traditions back that's not stealing/appropriation? What do we meanwhile while we are trying to keep systems accountable? How do we activate pride? 1. as chefs, creating nutritious dishes and empower the people who create the plate along the way 2. adding value to food through the way we interact/price it. what are we valuing? nutrition? externalities? how do we measure these things? 3. through the education process we can change the conversation Main Takeaways superfoods are being used as a marketing strategy while making products less accessible to indigenous populations. We must implement alternative systems that challenge our capitalist model by consulting local communities and creating resiliency to truly decolonize our plates. Create a system of accountability for appropriation and cultural theft that can make traditional foods accessible to everyone We can shift our narratives on food through education about our histories and by revaluing ingredients in a way that reflects the actual price of food. Communication that brings sensitivity to the consumer. How effective is the use of seals? How can the industry take advantage of this, even restaurants? Education in the industry, education for kids. How do we change our mindset from the way we consume to the industry. Action. Better networks between producers and chefs: Accessibility to local products and income to producers. Better traceability of the products. Governments that value more the work of producers. Read less

Engaging youth in farming, Embracing technology, & Preserving Culture: Farmers are aging, and it's a problem. In order to move forward with agriculture and allow for more innovation, we must engage youth in farming. In doing so we can embrace technology and promote cultural and ancestral knowledge- blending the old and the new. As a global society, we need more farmers' markets to close the gap between the producers and consumers. Doing so, we have to make nature-positive production something that is attractive for the younger generations. We need more chefs cooking in the farmer markets t... Read moreo create awareness of how we eat, farm, and celebrate the colors and biodiversity. We are also at a turning point where farmers are getting older, but at the same time the new generations are looking to escape cities. People are now recognizing the value of local produce and supporting small farmers, but prices are still a problem. It is essential that we democratize access to good, local food. By connecting farmers with youth entrepreneurs we can empower farmers in ways that we haven't done yet. By doing so, we simultaneously help the aging population of farmers who are often heavily impacted by the digital divide and we are engaging youth in agriculture and innovation. Ecological illiteracy is a huge mindset problem for a generation. Therefore, projects like rural agricultural schools to train future farmers are essential. Bringing value to the farm. Until the farmer only provides ingredients, we will never get out of this broken system. However, youth can engage in intelligent commercial relations and partnerships with farmers to disrupt the system. Regional Education - value what is local. Use technology to spark curiosity amongst youth and make it growing food cool again. Read less