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Building agreocological knowledge
(Construção do conhecimento agreocológico)

Paulo Petersen - AS-PTA

Between the 9th and the 12th of November, 2009, the city of Curitiba in southern Brazil, hosted the 6th Brazilian Congress of Agroecology, and at the same time the 2nd Latin American Congress. In total, more than 4000 persons got together, including farmers, extension agents, researchers and policy makers - most of them from within Brazil, but also from many other Latin American countries. Hundreds of papers and posters were presented.

One of the most interesting meetings during this congress was the III Seminário Nacional sobre Construção de Conhecimento Agroecologico - a special meeting meant to look at the way in which agroecological knowledge is built. This was organised by ABA, the Associação Brasileira de Agroecologia, as part of itsd efforts in ifluencing the development of public policies that promote "the dissemination of an agroecological perspective in all institutions involved in researchm, education and extension". This seminar was organised following the ideqa that there are already many interesting initiatives being carried out, or being tried, by different organisations - be them public or private. The problem is that most of these are taking place in isolation, or without being widely known or disseminated. The objective of ABA was to facilitate a borader exchange of lessons learnt, and to motivate all those involved in these activities to share and learn from each other.

The November seminar was therefore the last of a series of meetings and workshops which took place during the year. Organisations from all over Brazil got together according to the area where they operate (on the basis of Brazil's six broad regions ), and each of these groups was asked to to select 12 experiences, as "work in development", that would show interesting results in terms of co-operation between the work of research / extension organisations and one or more groups of farmers. One representative of each of these cases (72 in total) participated in a national workshop in Brasilia, in July, where they all looked at a documentation process in detail. By then, all participants had already started documenting his or her work, and was expected to continue doing so until the November congress. The main objective of this workshop was to share some general ideas as to how to document, when to do it, why, etc. All participants looked at the major steps to follow in every documentation process (regardless of the methodology), and also discussed their plans for the near future. "The main idea was not to teach how to document, but rather to go through a collective reflection processs on the basis of the experience we all have."

These "reflection processes" continued with regional workshops, where 2 of the 12 cases from each region were chosen to shown in Curitiba. These were not only presented, but also discussed in detail there.

Read about the Ecocitrus case in Rio Grande do Sul

More information?
Please write to Paulo Petersen , AS-PTA
Rua candelaria, no. 9, 6 andar
Centro, Rio de Janeri, Brasil 20091-904