The Network of Municipalities for Agroecology: how to design inclusive and accessible food systems

For the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, it is a joy to know that the Network of Municipalities for Agroecology, an initiative that we accompany, has won the NAOS Strategy Award for helping administrations to build sustainable and safe food systems. This award, granted by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and the Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN), recognises the Network’s commitment to designing resilient and environmentally friendly food systems. One of the objectives of the Network is for food systems to be inclusive, safe and diversified to ensure healthy, sustainable and accessible food for the entire population and to promote local employment, that is, to cover all the dimensions of sustainable food: social, environmental, economic and health. We spoke to the heads of the Network about the challenges they face in placing agroecology on the political agenda and about their pedagogical work to bring their work closer to the public.

The Network of Municipalities for Agroecology emerged from the LIFE Km0 Gardens project between 2013 and 2016 with a European vocation, although from 2017 a dynamic focused on Spain was imposed. Throughout these years it has had the financial support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, the Zaragoza City Council and the Entretantos Foundation. The III Meeting of the Milan Pact in Valencia (2017) was an important milestone for the consolidation of food policies in Spain and after the official constitution of the Network in October 2018, the fundamental axes of work for the following years were decided: health and the right to food, food and climate change and food policies, rural municipalities and depopulation.

The outbreak of the pandemic in the early stages of 2020 accelerated work on the climate emergency and in October of that year more than 20 municipalities in the state committed to the Valladolid Declaration, which included proposals for action presented in the report ‘Local Food Systems Facing Global Risks, from the COVID19 to the Climate Crisis’. . Since then, the RMAe has continued to strengthen municipal food policies for climate action, leading the international process of the Barcelona Food and Climate Challenge launched in October 2021 at the VII Milan Pact Forum in Barcelona and which has managed to commit more than 20 cities around the world to transform local agri-food systems to ensure access to sufficient diets, sustainable, healthy and nutritious for all people, thus avoiding food vulnerability and enhancing food justice and mitigating the climate emergency.

The RMAe has also promoted the Glasgow Declaration on Food and Climate presented at COP26 in 2021 and which proposes the need to involve subnational governments in mitigating and adapting to the climate emergency from the construction of integrated food systems. We are currently looking forward to the VIII MUFPP Global Forum (Rio de Janeiro, 17-19 October 2022) and COP27 (Sharm El Sheikh, 6-18 November 2022).

During 2022, the Network is incorporating work with small and medium-sized municipalities to promote the development of food policies in this area and has participated in the process of “The 2030 Agenda in the design of strategic industrial projects” in the Agroecology section, together with the UPM RTD and the Secretary of State 2030.

The Network tries to contribute to all these global agreements and commitments based on work to strengthen the local by providing tools and spaces to materialize real and tangible good practices in the territory.

All this effort has been recognised with the 2021 NAOS Strategy Award of Special Recognition. We spoke with the heads of the Network about the challenges they have in placing agroecology on the political agenda and their pedagogical work to bring their work closer to the public.

Who is part of this association and what are the requirements to be part of it?

The Network of Municipalities for Agroecology is an association that currently brings together 25 local entities in Spain and collaborates with 16 others. From the beginning, the target audience of the Network has been elected officials and municipal technical staff. In addition, there is the collaboration of local social organisations involved in food policies in the municipalities of the Network and the consulting entities of the cities. The entities that are part of the entity must be committed to the right to sustainable and healthy food, they have to work on local food policies based on the principles of agroecology, as well as have a holistic and transformative vision of food systems.

In addition, they need to work to integrate all territorial actors promoting local food systems and fostering cooperation and knowledge sharing for food policy innovation and improved governance.

The Network seeks to strengthen the capacity for reflection, action and exchange of learning. What activities does the Network implement to achieve this?

Although most of the Network’s activities take these capacities into account, the “Exchange Spaces” account for the bulk of this activity. The objective is to contribute to the strengthening of the individual and collective processes of the cities that are part of the Network and are specified in exchange itineraries, working groups and face-to-face spaces, all of them designed around three axes: Governance and Participation, Accompaniment of agroecological productive initiatives and Logistics and distribution. In this way, face-to-face and online spaces have been set up from the beginning. These spaces are mainly intended for municipal staff and social and economic entities that accompany local governments in the construction and implementation of their food policies.

The itineraries are almost monthly online meetings for the exchange of information, experiences, technical resources and collective reflection on specific and innovative tools of local food policies with an agroecological approach

Working groups arise to develop a specific task and in a specific period of time, although they can lead to prolonged work commissions. They are made up of a coordinating entity and at least two other organisations (either local entities or social organisations), representing at least two member entities.

Finally, the face-to-face seminars and webinars complement the action of the Network and are promoted and organised in collaboration with the member entities or the entities of the Council of Social Organisations, bringing together different actors around the topics of priority interest for the Network as a whole.

Agroecology brings together concepts such as healthy and sustainable food, sustainable food policies and the fight against climate change. However, it seems that it is difficult to achieve the recognition of agroecology as an approach to define proposals to achieve a more sustainable food system. In this sense, how has the Network managed to incorporate this concept into the field of public policies?

From the Entretantos Foundation, and thanks to the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, we were able to carry out the study “Communication strategies to facilitate leaps of scale in Agroecology” which allowed us to interview and hold discussion groups with various actors of the “agroecological” food chain of some of the cities that are part of the Network. taking into account one of the principles of agroecology, which is to work with a system vision.

One of the main conclusions of the study was that the concept of agroecology is complex to transmit due to its intrinsic characteristics (set of practices, science and movement-politics) despite the fact that it is part of our usual lexicon. Although there is an international consensus that agroecology is the key to building sustainable and healthy food systems, in our country there is still the perception that it continues to be polarized towards certain political visions. However, the Network shows the opposite by being part of it consistories of all political colors.

On the other hand, we know that although these concepts are used assiduously, it does not mean that they are understood in their entirety. It is part of our responsibility to educate about them, especially to people who are not specialized in this field. In this way, and based on the objectives of the Network, we cut up the proposals of agroecology and the objectives of food sovereignty, making them more understandable for most people, associating them with terms such as the right to healthy and sustainable food, the fight against the climate emergency or the protection of biodiversity, which are widely known and generate, in addition, a broad consensus of most political forces and national, European and international bodies. The basis of the Network is union and collective work and for this we have to start from proposals and lines of work capable of generating broad consensus and motivation for common work.

In 2020 you published the report Local Food Systems in the Face of Global Risks, which delved into a current issue such as how to act in the face of crises such as the one caused by Covid-19 or the climate emergency. As a result of this writing, you promoted the Declaration of Valladolid. What does this statement consist of?

The virulence of the pandemic and the historical moment we have lived through has linked climate change with other global risks, such as zoonosis and the massive loss of natural ecosystems. In this way, it was necessary to make a quantitative leap in the work carried out by the Network and the Valladolid Declaration, a compilation of commitments that were approved at the Network’s annual meeting in 2020 based on the measures proposed in that report. It is a battery of 14 actions articulated around 5 priority objectives to adapt local agri-food systems to the impacts of global emergencies and mitigate their causes. Since its launch, we have started to work on the possibility of carrying out a larger-scale advocacy in the Milan Pact for Urban Food Policies, the UN Summit on Food Systems and finally COP 26 in Glasgow.

In addition, the Network has promoted an action that will reduce several tonnes of C02 per year in which several Spanish cities are participating. How did this initiative come about and what are the main actions that are going to be carried out?

The Barcelona Challenge is an action to promote and make visible sustainable and healthy food policies for climate action. It aims to generate an international moment that makes visible the nexus between food policies and the climate emergency, as well as the need for collaboration of/with municipalities: enabling spaces for meeting, exchange and dialogue between cities and positioning city networks as essential actors in the international sphere.

The two fundamental objectives proposed are the mitigation of climate change through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems to limit global warming and the adaptation of local food systems to be more resilient to extreme weather events.

Obviously, in order to achieve these two ambitious goals, it is necessary to plan a series of actions until 2030, categorised into five large groups: ensuring a facilitating context for effective action (governance), sustainable diets and nutrition, integrating the Planetary Health Diet and sustainable food supply, producing and processing sustainable, socially just and equitable food based on appropriate territorial planning and management, relocate and restructure the supply and distribution of food, from wholesale, municipal and direct sales markets and short marketing channels and reduce food shrinkage and waste by up to 50% based on 2015 and reuse and recycle food and other food-related waste.

The pandemic, in fact, exacerbated some problems such as food insecurity and we saw how many families went to the so-called ‘hunger queues’. How does the Network of Municipalities for Agroecology address this situation?

These issues were already being worked on in some way within the Right to healthy and sustainable food. An example is the support and participation of the Network in the “Proposal for an information system on food insecurity in Spain” of the Observatory for the Guarantee of the Right to Food of the Community of Madrid and Charter against Hunger.

In 2020, the outbreak of covid-19 and the inequality in access to healthy and sustainable food led to an acceleration of certain work by the Network, such as the mapping of the enormous diversity of actions that were carried out during the state of alarm in school canteens, soup kitchens, food banks, access to non-sedentary sales markets, home delivery, consumer groups, community gardens for self-consumption and social. In addition, we launched the dissemination of the communiqué “Local, quality and sustainable food: security in the face of global health risks“, the Valladolid Declaration and the Local Food Systems Report in the face of global risks.

The Council of Social Organizations and the DASS WG also began to work on this issue, generating a work dynamic aimed at learning more about food aid and other related issues, which led to the organization of a series of webinars.

Currently, and from the DASS WG, which is the one that coordinates these issues, we are prioritizing the work on the involvement of key actors of the food system (production, processing, distribution) in the DASS, knowing the situation of the agroecological production sector, citizen pantries and alternative food banks, adaptation of food guarantee projects (including the Food Banks of the territory) to comply with the DASS and overcome welfare, inspiring initiatives in municipalities and indicators and evaluation of DASS initiatives in the municipalities of the Network and the promotion of data collection to know the situation.

Looking to the immediate future, what are the next actions you are working on?

With the incorporation of new members and the work that the municipalities are developing, we have more and more proposals from our members, so in the Network we have planned a lot of actions and projects for the coming years. But although we are slowly growing, we are still a small network and everything will depend on the resources available for it.

In terms of projects, the near future is marked by the continuation of the Barcelona Challenge for Good Food and Climate (also funded by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation), the RURBACT-Ae initiative to strengthen the role of the agroecological production sector in local food policies, the Liveseeding research project on plant breeding in organic production systems in Europe and the AESOP4FOOD project to respond to the need for sustainable urban food planning by creating a joint interdisciplinary European learning activity.

We will continue with our actions to incorporate new entities, networking and with the different public administrations and we will continue with the awards for best practices in local food policy. From a thematic point of view, in addition to continuing to work on the climate emergency and the right to healthy and sustainable food, this year and next will focus on small municipalities, local food policies and depopulation. Although the 2023 elections may condition part of next year, we will take the opportunity to launch good proposals so that, regardless of who governs in the different municipalities, we continue to transform the food system from the local level.