D5.3 – Draft road map and EU agroecology strategy

This document describes the initial progress and development of a roadmap to build a European network on agroecology that will help to accelerate the transformation to sustainable agriculture in the wider food system. To build such network, agroecology grassroots and farmer representative organisations were consulted after which an initial group of participants was established to co-create such network. This is what is referred to in the task description as a European living lab (LL) for agroecology (ELL4AE).
This network is meant to complement, and support the collaborative effort of a range of already existing groups, initiatives, and programmes working on the development of agroecology. Therefore, this network has initially been designated as a European agroecology (NofN). This network will strive to enhance the collective efficacy of initiatives which are labelled differently, but have much in common in relation to subscribing to agroecological principles and practices.

After an initial process of outlining ideas for the intended European network by AE4EU partners, a transition to more intensive co-development took place early 2022 by asking envisaged participants in the network what they thought about those ideas, and asking them whether they would be interested in co-creating a NofN so that it would become something that could be ‘owned’ by many, thus supporting the potential for playing a role in accelerating the transition to sustainable agriculture and development of the wider food system. Since then, over 30 organisations and initiatives are now part of this co-creation process. The shape and form that the European agroecology NofN will take still needs to be established, since it will evolve from an organic development process which is currently taking place through a variety of working groups. These will determine specific aspects of the NofN.

The efforts of the ELL4AE revolve around a series of co-design workshops. Initially, this was envisaged to take place through three of such co-design workshops. Effectively, we found a need to adapt this approach to a larger number of co-design workshops, complemented by working group meetings that take place in-between the co-design workshop. So far, there has been an initial getting-to-know-each-other workshop, one co-design workshop, and the second co-design workshop is scheduled for September 2022. AE4EU work packages are represented in these co-design workshop, which allows for continuous fine-tuning rather than having – an initially planned – one-time workshop to connect related processes.

The NofN is intended to cater to both conventional farmers who want to make steps in applying a subset of the 13 agroecology principles and to those who embrace the full scope of these principles.