2014 opens prospects for FAO and Slow Food collaboration

The naming of 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming offers many potential opportunities for the collaboration between FAO and Slow Food, made official by the memorandum of agreement signed in May this year by José Graziano da Silva, the director-general of the FAO, and Carlo Petrini, the president of Slow Food.
 
Carlo Petrini recently participated in the conference Family farming: a dialogue towards more sustainable and resilient farming in Europe and in the world, organized in Brussels by the European Commission and the Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development. The FAO’s director-general was also one of its key speakers, declaring that family farming should be seen as an opportunity to be promoted, not a marginal element, and that there is a need to shift from the paradigm based on the fast-food model, with commercial production on a huge scale, to the new Slow Food paradigm, based on local distribution and traditional foods. A video recording of the conference is available here. 
  
Carlo Petrini stated that both organizations share a vision “of a sustainable world free from hunger that safeguards biodiversity for future generations. Slow Food will make a great contribution to family farming. In 2014, we will continue with renewed energy our work to support the Terra Madre food communities, organizing local markets and school and community food gardens, encouraging small-scale producers’ access to the market and cataloguing the food biodiversity at risk of extinction. At the center of the process is gastronomy and the idea that this multidisciplinary science, which includes everything, from agriculture to history, from economics to anthropology, from botany to the culinary arts, can be a liberating force for communities suffering from malnutrition.” More information is available from Slow Food.