Collectif Stratègies Alimentaires asbl
Institutional purchases to support family farming
by , 28 March 2014
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In the frame of the 2014- International Year of Family Farming campaign, CSA organized an interational agricultural seminar on "Institutional purchases to support family farming". It was organized in Brussels on April 23, 2014.
The seminar gathered farmers’ organizations from the South and the North, NGOs and agri-agencies as well as researchers and policy-makers. It gave the opportunity to consider the possibilities of supporting family farming through institutional purchases, the difficulties met by public-law bodies to get them, confronted to their bonds to their respect for the game of competition law, transparency and the risk of patronage. We discussed the constraints that arise to the producers and to their organizations in order for them to be able to answer the institutional demand. They are numerous, quite particularly in the countries where the family producers’ access to the markets brings up lots of difficulties. We also questioned ourselves on the political orientations and their possible incidences on the support to family farming, on the producers’ targeting and on the desirable support measures.