For the Group Project, my group of five worked with the NGO Landesa which strives to work with farmers in poor countries to help them know and hold their land rights. What we were tasked with doing is creating infographics to put onto Landesa’s social media to better inform people, especially young adults, of what they do. This was a very interesting experience for me because what my group got to works on is heavily tied to what we have discussed in our class throughout the year especially regarding systems thinking.
How Landesa tries to make a difference in the world directly ties with concepts brought up specifically in two of our classes. The first is that of food sovereignty and more specifically land sovereignty, which Marc Edleman discusses in his essay. He mentions that access to land rights helps provide even distribution of land and provide greater access to resources (923). Landesa is working directly with communities to better raise them up from the bottom because it will help them create their own economic opportunities for themselves. The next concept the ties Landesa directly to our class is their fight for land rights specifically for women. Julia Whitling mentions in her article, “When women are provided with the same inputs, assets, and technical assistance as men, their yields could increase by as much as 20-30 percent, which translates to a reduction in the number of undernourished people in the world by 12-17 percent” (2019). This shows the importance of Landesa’s work in because it can make such a big impact in poor and unequal communities.
It truly was a pleasure to work with Landesa especially because we got to see the approach that they took. In my contribution to Landesa’s social media I focus on their belief in better education as a solution to addressing land rights issues. This goes directly along with systems thinking because better education often means better understanding of land rights which that will lead to greater economic growth of the communities. It was great to learn just how much Landesa’s work described what us as a class often hoped for to bring change to poor communities without access to food.
Sources
Marc Edelman et al. “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Peasant Studies: Global Agrarian Transformations 41, 6, 2014, pp. 911–931.
Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Hungry for Equality: Examining the Gender Gap in Food Security
Photo credit: thechicagocouncil.org/blog/global-food-thought/hungry-equality-examining-gender-gap-food-security