ACF STRATEGY FOR AGRICULTURAL INTERVENTIONS

This document results from the organization’s will to bring a new impulse to agricultural programs by on sustainable agriculture which reintegrates communities at the heart of decision-making. It favours the communities’ autonomy and improves food and nutrition security in emergency situations as well as in the long term. Advocacy becomes a tool serving farmers organizations to encourage smallholder farming and its contribution to nutrition security. Moving towards a sustainable agriculture based on agroecology requires important changes in our field practices, if not a cultural revolution for our field workers and partners. This strategy aims at supporting these changes by identifying the challenges and priority actions that we think essential from now to 2020.

ACF strategy for agricultural interventions aims to increase populations’ resilience to food crises and to prevent under-nutrition during and after emergency interventions. It aims at improving food security and livelihoods of populations in rural and urban areas. It takes into account the basic needs of populations affected by chronic and/or seasonal undernutrition after a temporary shock. This strategy provides answers for emergency situations and proposes ways to push towards a sustainable and profitable agriculture that allows farmers to maintain their activity. It also focuses on building the capacities of communities in order to minimize the negative impacts of climate change and disasters on their livelihoods. This strategy is built around four objectives:

1. Ensuring agriculture rehabilitation after acute crises;
2. Increasing the resilience of small producers and agro-sylvo-pastoral systems;
3. Allowing access to a diversified diet;
4. Developing advocacy in favour of family farming.

These goals include priority activities and action plan to be implemented along with other ACF areas of intervention (Nutrition, WASH, MHCP, Research, and Advocacy). The implementation of the specific activities will come through projects focusing both on smallholders and communities most vulnerable to food insecurity.