On 14th March 2020, our member organisation Umbrella from Georgia organised the second local visit planned among the activities of MIJARC Europe’s annual work plan “Rock, Paper, Participation“. The work plan focuses on seeing-judging-acting on how young people get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies and on how they take part to sustainable agricultural practices.

The Rock, paper, participation” annual work plan is co-funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the European Union.

Umbrella gathered 13 of their young members and took them on a visit to Asureti Village and to Tetritskaro Youth Center. Firstly, they visited a farm and a greenhouses that belonged to the young farmer Gocha Apciauri, located in Asureti village. He presented his farm, the technologies he used and engaged he participants in an experiential learning activity inviting them to harvest vegetables. The discussion with the farmers focused on the challenges that he faced in his daily live as a farmer and the agricultural works.

The second half of the day was spent at Tetritskaro Youth Center, where the participants explored the “ladder of Participation”, the “triangle of cooperation”, worked in groups and used non-formal learning methods to identify challenges/barriers young people face if they want to get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies.

They based their work on the study on youth involvement in agriculture – the case of Georgia – published by MIJARC Europe especially for this visit and the Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in Local and Regional Life (the Charter)

Revised Charter

According to participants their involvement in agricultural policy at local level is extremely low. They were not aware of the possibilities and mechanisms of participation in decision-making process at local level. None of them had ever taken part in discussions on farming issue or had been invited to the local Sakrebulo (local legislative body) meetings. In addition to this, despite the fact that representatives of two local municipalities (Tetrsitskaro and Marneuli) were invited to the meeting, none of them sent representatives.

The young participants decided that the priorities they should focus on at local level should be:

  • Information – access to information is the top priority as quite often the information is on websites but it is not proactively published or spread in the municipality. It also considers the accessibility to internet as it is not developed in rural area.
  • Motivation – low level of motivation or nihilism among youth and non-responsive local authorities. The priority is to raise the level of motivation among young people.
  • Language barrier – in the communities with ethnic minorities (Armenians, Azerbaijanis) in some cases they face language barriers as they lack of knowledge of state language. Translation of information into native languages.
  • Political will – promoting (advocating) political will among local authorities and awareness about the positive sides of involvement of young farmers in agricultural policy development process.


Early April, about two weeks after the start of the quarantine measures taken all over the world, MIJARC Europe made the most of the fact that everybody was confined at home to launch its new social network campaign: Grow It Yourself.

The goal of this campaign: to offer a fun challenge, through the publication of photos on social networks, to encourage people to grow their own fruit and vegetables or herbs.

The aim, of course, is not to downplay the fantastic work done by farmers, nor is it to lead people to believe that everyone can become self-sufficient with a snap of the fingers. On the contrary, it is precisely because the theme of the year for MIJARC Europe is agriculture, that the Agri-Commission wanted to highlight one of the key elements of this subject, that is the food system, from the production of food to its arrival on our plates.

This is the reason why each post is associated with a caption or a link to an article that we publish on our website, in which we discuss topics related to these issues. These can be light-hearted topics such as tips on growing beans or a list of the easiest vegetables to grow, or even poems!

But we also try to think about more serious issues: what does the covid-19 crisis and its impact on the production, transport and sale of food say about our food system and our consumption habits? Why is it that by consuming locally, we are taking care of our health in addition to the environment? Why do we need to support young people who want to enter agriculture?

You can find our posts on our Facebook page or on our Instagram account. And above all, you can join us in this challenge! Grow yourself a tomato stand on your balcony and publish the picture by tagging MIJARC Europe. You can even send us texts about topics you would like us to talk about!

The Grow It Yourself Challenge is an experience we want to live with you!


On 7th March 2020, our member organisation Federation of Youth Clubs of Armenia (FYCA), organised the first local visit planned within the activities of MIJARC Europe’s annual work plan “Rock, Paper, Participation“. The work plan focuses on seeing-judging-acting on how young people get involved in the dialogue on agricultural policies and on how they take part to sustainable agricultural practices.

The Rock, paper, participation” annual work plan is co-funded by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe and the European Union.

FYCA took the young participants to visit several agricultural farms in Nor Geghi (Kotayk province), Armenia.

The visits started with several meetings with local youth representatives and local & regional authorities. At first, the attendees discussed the current situation and existing challenges facing the youth in the region and explored the facts and issues raised by the study on youth involvement in agriculture done by MIJARC Europe.

Later, it was time to start the meetings with the farmers located in the region. The local visit to several agricultural farms in Armenia gathered 25 young volunteers and members from the organization, and also representatives from local and regional authorities from Kotayk province, Armenia.

Prior to the visit, the organization contacted the provincial administration representatives of Kotayk region through FYCA regional coordinator, Mari Hovakimyan. The visit was co-organized by the head of Nor Geghi community, Vardan Papyan and his administrative team.

The field visit started from “Green” intensive apple orchards, where farmers’ staff presented the basics of the fruit cultivation. The participants explored all the stages of producing apples: starting from the basic steps of orchard establishment and development to packing the ready-steady fruits for consumption. The apple orchards have been established in Nor Geghi community in 2016 and currently cover nearly 30 hectares, with the goal of expanding the area by 20 hectares in the nearest future. In addition to apple trees, pear, plum and cherry trees will also be planted there.

It is also interesting to know that the intensive orchards are harvested earlier than traditional orchards. In case of intensive orchards, up to ten times more seedlings are planted on 1 hectare of land. The farm grows a huge variety of apples and each of them is different in its own way.

Having explored the techniques and logistics of the production, it was time to carry out the second visit in the region. The next farm was a fishpond, belonging to “Ninel” LLC and providing employment opportunities to locals.

Afterwards, the team headed to the third well-known farm, “Lusakert” poultry factory. During the visit, the team got acquainted with the bird breeding conditions and technical equipment of the cultivation. As the factory staff informed, the chickens are kept in exclusively natural and ecological conditions, thus providing ecologically pure and nutritious products.

Revised Charter

The information gained during the visits were later on used to discuss about how young people could get involved in agricultural policies and firstly if they should get involved. The participants explored the Revised European Charter on the Participation of Young People in Local and Regional Life (the Charter) and its six step implementation model. The participants came to the conclusion that agricultural development is crucially important for developing rural areas. Hence, the strategies and policies promoting the development of rural areas are considered to be a high priority in the country.

In order to reach sustainable agricultural development, it is necessary to provide rural youth with sufficient access to knowledge and information, through incorporating agricultural skills in the education.
According to the discussions, it became obvious that youth’s involvement in policy dialogue is still an existing challenge in the country. Thus, young people need to have access to integrated trainings in agricultural sector and get coherent response from policy-makers and development practitioners so as to overcome those challenges.


Overall, the following conclusion was drawn in result of the local visit: agricultural development is an extremely important asset for fostering sustainable development of rural communities’ livelihood and increasing the standards of living in those areas.

Our partners from the European Cooperation “La Via Campesina” have published a useful publication on food sovereignty, that can be use by every organisation, group or person interested in rural development and empowering people to take control of the way their food is being produced, delivered and consumed.


In this publication, ECVC delivers a thorough account of the concept of Food Sovereignty, an approach and process developed by the people most threatened by the processes of the consolidation of power in food and agricultural systems: peasant farmers. Instead of being destroyed by the forces of history they are offering a proposal to solve the multiple crises which humanity is facing.

Food Sovereignty offers itself as a process of building social movements and empowering peoples to organise their societies in ways that transcend the neoliberal vision of a world of commodities, markets and selfish economic actors. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the myriad of complex problems we face in today’s world. Instead, Food Sovereignty is a process that adapts to the people and places where it is put in practice. Food Sovereignty means solidarity, not competition, and building a fairer world from the bottom up.

Food Sovereignty emerged as a response and alternative to the model of corporate globalization. As such, it is Internationalist in character, and provides a framework for understanding and transforming international governance around food and agriculture.

You can find the complete publication here.

 

Thanks to the support of the Council of Europe through the European Youth Foundation and The Arkleton Trust Fellowship, MIJARC Europe organized a seminar from the 28th July to the 2nd August 2014 on the topic of sustainable agriculture.

This project is entitled: “Eating, Producing and Deciding: our choice and our voice for the future agriculture in Europe” and it took place in Marconne in the North of France.

Why this topic? 

Agriculture is historically one of the main topics within MIJARC. A few decades ago, in France’s, Germany’s, Belgium’s, Spain’s, and surely in many other countries’ rural areas, some priests have put their faith into action by going to meet the farmers, and especially the young ones, to “improve” their social condition. For many of them, the situation was the same as for many centuries backwards: hard work, small wage and poorness.

Nowadays, the agricultural landscape has totally changed. Not especially in the hard work and the small wage, but in the place it takes: the number of farmers exponentially decreased, merging lot of small farms into few big ones, and thus making it even more difficult – especially for young people – to take over a farm or settle as farmer.

Parallel to this, due to many factors, the work in itself changed: First, the use of chemicals along with the intensification and mechanisation of the cultures brought the consumers into the debate: what do I eat? Is it healthy, hazardous? Is it sustainably produced, environment-friendly speaking?

Besides this, the globalisation of the economy brought the concern to the policy-makers: how can we regulate this world-scaled marketing of food? In Europe, the choice has been done through the long process of creation of the European Union, investing public money into this vital sector (the so-called Common Agricultural Policy – CAP).

This topic is today’s reality of agriculture in Europe.

What was discussed during this seminar?

In this context, we spent the 4 days seminar among a diversity-full European youth group to:

1) observe this context: namely the place of the youth in farming, training facilities, consumption behaviour and taking into account young people’s mind in the process of policy making; (SEE)

2) judge it, through field visits and expertises; (JUDGE)

3) propose actions and remedies to what we will find out (ACT)

During the SEE part the participants worked in two groups:

Group 1: The production and consumption behaviours

Today’s agriculture is part of the global market and at the two endings of the branch, the producers and the consumers, impact on it a lot. By considering the behaviours of these 2 major actors, the group was trying to specify what is the agriculture model of tomorrow. This axe led to three subtopics:

– the production behaviour: what are the possibilities, constraints and challenges for the producer who is at the very start of the chain? How should the agriculture of tomorrow look like to feed the planet by ensuring a sustainable development?

– the consumption behaviour: which choices is the consumer faced with when buying? What are the solutions to deal with the problematic of local food in a global market? We will discuss about the influence of the consumers: by your decisions during the shopping you are able to change things. Also you will learn about new alternative ways of selling agricultural products. We will lastly speak about the advantages and disadvantages of the different forms of selling.

– the food sovereignty: how can a people be at the decision-making of its food-related issues? How should the agriculture of tomorrow be organised at the world level to ensure quality and quantity of food in a sustainable way?

Group 2: The place of Youth in Agriculture

In every sector, in every project, young ideas and new power are essential to avoid conducting to death. But in agriculture, the place of youth doesn’t always go without saying! The group focused on the access to farming for young people, tackling 3 subtopics:

– the image of agriculture among young people (the “psychological barrier” to farming) : especially in the growing Eastern Europe, but also in the rest of the continent, youth are often relating agriculture to dark rurality and absence of horizons in life. But may know that it is something else in fact! How can we change this?

– the access to land for young people (the “financial and social barrier” to farming) : the property of land has become a big challenge, and youth especially suffer from this reality. Because they come from a non-farming family, or because they are at the beginning of their life and do not have enough financial resources to purchase land. Moreover, the farming model of big farms leads to more and more concentration of land and hardly allows someone to start a new farm. Even if this is to ponder for each region, the question is : is it possible to settle as a young farmer today, and if yes what are the factors that lead to a successful settling?

– the training facilities for young people (the “educational barrier” to farming) : lack of facilities for training may also be a obstacle for young people to settle as a farmer. Moreover, the training content is maybe not diversified enough to allow every kind of farming model to develop. How is the situation and how can we move on?

Coordinating Team of the Seminar:

Think Tank (group of volunteers who engaged in research about the topics and facilitation of the working groups):

Severin Kessler (Germany), Marina Grigorova (Bulgaria) , François Bausson (France), Jeroen Decorte (Belgium), Jan Vanwijnsberghe(Belgium), Olivier Dugrain (France).

Publications and outcomes

The Think Tank members and the Secretariat of MIJARC Europe were also responsible for the creation of a complete Report of the seminar, featuring the description of the activities, links to videos, games and presentations and illustrated with photos from the event.

You can find the videos on MIJARC Europe You Tube channel:

News              Access to Land

Each day the participants were asked to describe the activities and share their feelings about them. The MIJARC Europe Secretariat has collected the opinions in the Report written by the participants.

By the end of the seminar the participants have created a Newspaper with press releases on the topics discussed during the seminar.

Daily posts were published on MIJARC Europe Facebook Page.

The participants were encouraged to publish articles in their local/regional/national media. We will post hereby the links as soon as they’ll be available.