About the Library for Food Sovereignty

The Library for Food Sovereignty (LFS) initiative is a community-led resource for exchanging, building upon, and safeguarding farmer, peasant and Indigenous innovations from around the world. Through shared technology and innovation, the food system can begin to move away from one that is industrial to one controlled by the ones who grow our food. We believe that this begins by igniting the wealth of knowledge alive in the world’s smallholders. The Library for Food Sovereignty, seeks to promote this knowledge exchange.

Comprised exclusively of farmer knowledge, the LFS knowledge base supports appropriate technologies and open frameworks to advance on-the-ground movements and leverage the potential of local knowledge. These innovations, placed alongside compelling stories, include socio-cultural, environmental, and technical solutions to farming and natural resource management.

Founding Story & Partners

From September 19 - 22, 2016, A Growing Culture partnered with the Kikandwa Environmental Association (KEA) to host a gathering of 45 invited participants in the remote central Ugandan farming village of Kasejjere. On a hillside surrounded by communities actively experimenting and taking charge of their own future, we discussed how we can best create a resource that supports our agrarian communities and represents our values of always putting producers first. Through conversations of values, information pathways, technology and scope of this evolving resource, what emerged was a demonstrated willingness to collaborate with each other and with AGC in supporting an initial pilot of the Library.

To support our mission, we are excited to partner with Prolinnova, Insight Share, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, The Rules, Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM), Rural Empowerment Network, Kikandwa Environmental Association, TEENS Uganda, and Arid Lands Information Network.

Founding Stakeholder Gathering, Kikandwa, Uganda

Founding Stakeholder Gathering in 2016 - Kikandwa, Uganda

Founding Partners

Goals

Not only peasant centered, but peasant driven, the LFS initiative aims to create the first smallholder-owned digital space in a world in which Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) play an increasingly important role in the work of farmers. LFS provides an opportunity for farmers to lead ICTs in ways that are relevant to their livelihoods, cultures, environments, and social conditions. As the this knowledge base grows, we hope it will unite a global community of innovators and allies to bring farmers back to the forefront of agriculture.

Together, we hope to build the LFS so that it:

  1. Supports the efforts of the movement by advancing and centralizing cross-cultural local knowledge and bottom-up information exchange.
  2. Provides services and support that accelerate farmer-to-farmer exchange, the reliability of those exchanges, and assist peasants in driving the agroecology movement with their innovations.
  3. Leads efforts to institutionalize peasant knowledge and incorporate it into formal knowledge systems primarily through the LFS platform but also on the ground.
  4. Leads good practices in culturally-sensitive open access, participatory documentation, and intellectual property rights management and support for smallholders.
  5. Advances peasants’ access to information and the right of those farmers to shape their own information systems.