SEMINAR, Annisa Utami

Graduate Students, Department of Development Communication for

Rural and Agricultural Society
Bogor Agricultural University, Bogor, Indonesia
E-mail: seminar_annisa@apps.ipb.ac.id
Specialty: International communication

Agroecology Education within Farmer’s Community Towards Food

Sovereignty

Food sovereignty is an alternative approach attempting to resolve food crisis which the
world is facing today. Food sovereignty emphasizes small-scale farmers as main actors in a
food and agricultural system. It encourages small-scale farmers to fully participate in the
decision-making process of national or international agreement regarding food and agriculture
system, so it will benefit and empower small-scale farmers.
Food sovereignty aspires to bring back the food and agriculture system to a domestic
level, which gives freedom to small-scale farmers in producing foods fitting to their
knowledge and experience that suited with local conditions. Agroecology is a management
approach to achieve a sustainable agriculture ecosystem utilizing local resources, local
wisdom and farmer’s local knowledge in producing foods. Thus, agroecology minimizes
production cost, increases the quality and quantity of foods, and gives small-scale farmers
more benefit.
Knowledge-sharing as an education theory for explaining farmer-to-farmer ways of
learning explained that there are three requirements for an effective learning process: (1) a
public space to share knowledge and experience, (2) provision of opportunities for every
participant to share and exchange their knowledge, views, and experience, and (3) the need to
enhance their compentencies. Agroecology approach has already been practiced, maintained,
and disseminated within farmer’s community in the grassroots level, and shows promising
results. It was proved that by practicing agroecology, farmers produced more foods and gain
more benefit, meaning agroecology could be one of the answers for food crisis.
Farmer’s knowledge and experience are very vital in food and agriculture policy
making. Thus, by recognizing their knowledge and their learning process, a fair participatory
food and agricultural system can be achieved, an idea that food sovereignty has strived for.
This paper focuses on describing the knowlede-sharing process about agroecology within
farmer’s community towards achieving food sovereignty.