Agriculture

The food that we eat plays a big role in the search for solutions to climate change. Agriculture is one of the major contributors of greenhouse gases. But the way we farm our land can also be a big part of the solution. This external content requires your consent. Please note our privacy policy. Open external content on original site This external content requires your consent. Please note our privacy policy.

At the moment regulations for the trade with genetic material help to safeguard the rights of providers of genetic resources. This could change with the use of digital gene sequences.

In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great improvements in agriculture could be achieved by reducing barriers to knowledge exchange.

During the autumn semester 2015 expert lecturers from Tanzania, Netherlands, Germany and South Africa join a series of discussions about the right to food with students at partner universities within the scope of the project EcoFairTrade.

The multimedia scroll documentation "Ackerbunt" by Jakob Fuhr, Christine Anas and Elisabeth Weydt is one of six winning projects presented at "EcoFair Media – Good food for all!" that artistically and substantively tackle the issue of the human right to food.

Healthy soils are crucial to human nutrition and the fight against hunger. But worldwide 24 billion tons of fertile soil is lost annually. Barbara Unmüßig calls attention to the growing threat to one of Earth’s most important resources.

Film and media students were invited to submit a media project for „Ecofair Media – Good Food for All!“ on the subject of The Human Right to Food. Five winners were awarded fellowships to realize their ideas.

The coming set of Sustainable Development Goals will seek to protect ecosystems, conserve resources, and, as with the Millennium Development Goals, lift millions of people out of poverty. Now that solid legal ground must be developed further.

Factory-style livestock production is a critical driver of agricultural industrialization. Its remorseless expansion is contributing to climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and human-rights violations – all to satisfy Western societies’ unhealthy appetite for cheap meat.

Green technologies in themselves will not bring about the change we need. Growth at any price must no longer be the paramount goal. Agriculture is one of the sectors in which reform is most urgent – and, at the same time, most difficult.