Ahmedabad gathering Jan. 2025 (India)

Building on the first GIA gathering in Italy held in October 2023, the second international meeting will take place in Ahmedabad, India, from January 24 to 27, 2025 hosted by the Gujarat Grassroots Innovation and Augmentation Network (GIAN) and HoneyBee Network. This four-day event will deepen the discussions and collaborations initiated in Italy, focusing on strengthening the global network for technological sovereignty and agroecology.

The topics that will be adressed will cover the following issues:

Gallese gathering Oct. 2023 (Italy)

The Grassroots Innovations for Agroecology Assembly took place in the Biodistrict della Via Amerina e delle Forre, Italy, from October 18 to 21, 2023. It was a gathering where organizations of various backgrounds from around the world came together to be part of a broader movement focused on technology sovereignty and to share their challenges and paths forward.

One key takeaway from the assembly was the recognition of the need for collaboration among diverse actors, including smallholder organizations, researchers, IT developers, and experts. Together, they aimed to advance smallholder-driven technological and digital innovations.

The Grassroots Innovations for Agroecology Assembly concluded with a shared commitment to working together in the future. The goal is to increase the visibility of technology sovereignty, expand our collective efforts and activities, and foster strong collaborations with various stakeholders in the societal transformation towards agroecology, particularly researchers and experts.

SEE THE REPORT HERE

Below some reflections that emerged from the 2023 gathering:

Why does innovation even matter? Does the word innovation encourage creating new things when they aren’t necessary? By the definitions of grassroots innovations surfaced the gathering,

      Innovation is inherent, constant and unstoppable.

      Innovation is a necessity to live differently.

      Innovation is the power to choose the way we live.

Our innovations grow from ancestral knowledge. Innovation does not have to be new. What is common in one place, or at one time, is an innovation in another context. It may be something which worked and that we forgot.

Our innovations solve real problems. An innovation starts with users’ needs and offers a benefit. New inventions that make users’ lives worse in the long-term are not innovations.

Our innovations come from the grassroots and are tested in the grassroots. Agricultural innovations always rely on the generational knowledge of agroecological farmers. Even GMO seeds require an ancestral peasant-created seed to modify. They are a result of farmers’ inherent, continuous experimentation that is a necessity just to survive. There has never been stability, or a “way it’s always been.”

Our innovations encompass the complexity of agroecology, including the social, political and ecological dimensions. Our innovations address ecosystem health and the wellbeing of our communities, not only food production. Our innovations may be mechanical, technological, or social; they may be a method or practice rather than an object. We may innovate the innovation process itself.

Our innovations use local solutions to solve local problems, relying on the resources we have at our disposal.

Our innovations are embedded into community governance and feedback systems in order to make sure they do not create new problems. We recognize the governance requires increasing our communities’ capacity to critically discuss technology.

We discussed many innovation questions that agroecological farmers must tackle. How do we farm without fossil fuels? Without plastic? How do we survive the effects of climate change? How do we make tools accessible to all bodies? How do we advocate for our needs as smallholder farmers? How do we ethically engage with digital tools for our own empowerment?

….

Grassroots innovations sustain autonomy in direct opposition to the learned helplessness of capitalism.

Capitalism causes us to be paralyzed, waiting for a solution to be sold to us.

Capitalism tells us that innovations come from academics, trained scientists, and engineers, not peasant farmers.

Capitalism tries to turn farmers into consumers that purchase softwares, seeds, tools and chemicals made by these trained scientists and engineers.

Capitalism sells us complex and difficult to repair tools to do simple tasks.

As a direct antidote, grassroots innovations for agroecology create autonomy. Autonomy does not mean individual independence, it is the choice of your dependence. The choice of who you want to work with and how. Autonomy is built into the way we innovate using horizontal and bottom-up innovation that is always evolving in response to feedback. Whereas top-down innovation is driven by profits, bottom-up innovation is driven by shared values. Autonomy is also built into the tools themselves, by creating simple tools that are easy to repair.

Innovation provides a common ground for our movements for autonomy to expand. For Tzoumakers, their makerspace is becoming a hub for a multisectoral cooperative. Fabriek Paysan shared that conservative farmers “talk really easy with us because we talk only machinery or innovation and it’s really a topic that doesn’t have political view for them. So it’s very technical, to befriend. Once we say that we are some activism in climate change they say, ah “but I thought that all the climate activists were against us.” And once we begin to talk and we say no we are not against you, we are against the system and…They begin to understand everything.”