ZIMBABWE SMALLHOLDER ORGANIC FARMERS FORUM - ZIMSOFF

Zimbabwe is facing increasing pressure to provide sufficient, affordable and nutritious food for a growing population, to cope with effects of climate change (droughts, very heavy storms at times, the degradation of natural resources, including water scarcity, soil depletion and biodiversity loss). Based on these visible indicators likeminded family farmers have developed strategies to build some form of resilience through developing local safety nets. ZIMSOFF is a grassroot movement working to come to a better understanding of indigenous knowledge and its relevance to sustainable climate mitigation and adaptation. They envision biocultural diversity management and integrated ecological farming methods as solutions to nurturing Mother Earth whilst producing diverse nutritious foods. ZIMSOFF aims to influence policy to upscale food sovereignty and family farming, while connecting, documenting and spreading the good practices of Agroecology. It will further deepen its struggles by strengthening actions on family farms and farmers’ structures, and by connecting to stakeholders and allies. All this will be toward national movement building. ZIMSOFF believes that agroecology will address these food and climate crises and is convinced that an urgent and radical shift in our food systems policy direction is needed. It is possible to feed the growing population in an all-inclusive holistically developed and sustainably implemented policy framework. To be effective in that struggle for food sovereignty, transformative actions must be employed to address a complex set of interconnected objectives encompassing economic, social and environmental dimensions. Within ZIMSOFF, at the grassroots are family farmers who connect to each other around a common vision vision to form micro communities of practice. The organization applies a bottom-up planning methodology in order to get input directly from family farmers to define new strategic objectives and ways to achieve them.