Solutions that work for farmers

At the Global Food Safety Partnership 2nd annual meeting I’m learning more about the major private and public initiatives for improving food security and food safety. Juergen Voegele from the World Bank, serving as lead convener, wrote a nice blog post summarizing the ambitions of the partnership. Many of the successful “PPP” examples are major projects such as the Mars cocoa initiative which improved the lives of 500,000 family farmers and the USAID PFID project led by Michigan State University which permanently strengthened the local and export mango market in India.

What I don’t hear, however, are examples of solutions at the grass-roots level.  For an industry where market globalization tends to lead to consolidation and “attrition” of small farmers due to the high-cost of regulation compliance, it seems like “by farmers; for farmers” and sustainable solutions at the community level would be important to discover and scale up. So, I wonder…what’s possible? I’ve started a Storify with my first two examples: iCow and Digital Green.