New opportunities for community driven rural development
Sachs, Ignacy
ICARRDDs Meeting in Porto Alegre is profoundly symbolic. Sixty years ago, the Brazilian physician and social scientist Josuu de Castro published his seminal Geography of hunger which left a durable imprint on FAOOs thinking and action. The book was influential for two reasons: it vigorously denounced the scandal of endemic hunger amidst plenty and, at the same time, it showed that all social problems need to be mapped, pointing out in this way the importance of territorial and ecological dimensions in the development debate. ICCARD is revisiting the agrarian reform agenda more than a quarter century after the last FAO conference on the subject and meeting in Brazil, a country that maintains land reforms high on its political agenda1. The venue is Porto Alegre, a city internationally known as the site of World Social Forums which have been helping to shape new ideas and practices of participatory democracy. Moreover, the conference is being convened at a moment when new opportunities for rural development are emerging with the coming of age of biofuels in response to the sharp increase in oil prices. As will be argued in this paper, the end of the oil age has begun. The challenge of the forthcoming decades will be to use the expanding production of ethanol and biodiesel as a lever to promote socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable, community driven rural development.
Event: A vision for the future : International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development
Only personal, non-commercial use of this document is allowed.