Fruitful Project Workshop in Colombia

In January 2022, Future Food Together could finally hold a project workshop for the project components Paraguay and Colombia. The team members met in Bogotá to jointly discuss the project work so far and to update and share strategies.

One highlight was a field trip to the cooperative “Cooperativa de Campo y Cocina” and all participants valued the opportunity to get to know each other in person.

 

The South American project components were launched in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, and a kick-off workshop, intended as the “starting signal” to provide  public attention and the chance for all project members to meet, could not take place. The first coordination workshop for the South American project was held in January 2022. The workshop was combined with a mid-term evaluation.

Part of the workshop was a review of the results chain to identify gaps in our project approach, and to think of additional levers to use to ensure project success. The team member shared their strategies that have been successful with the key stakehlders, and assessed what worked well and what could be improved.

During the workshop, the team had the opportunity to visit the Cooperativa de Campo y Cocina, an educational initiative run by chef Laura Jaramillo in Gachantivá in and near Villa de Leyva in Colombia. Her aim is to create experiences that connect people with food and its production. WWF staff from Paraguay, Germany and Colombia gathered different local ingredients and prepared them in a local soup called sancocho. The team learned about the regenerative livestock initiative that the restaurants work with and that is using all the parts of the anminal to reduce food waste. The project team members were also able to taste a jam made from tomato de árbol (“tree tomato”), a fruit that has been largely forgotten in modern societies and that the initiative wants to bring back.

Laura herself started the journey towards sustainability about 10 years ago with the creation of the Mercado Municipal, a delicatessen store and restaurant in Villa de Leyva. As she proceeded, she learned more and more about the various connections between food, the environment and health. In her restaurant she chose to use only local products to create a menu that honors the cultural heritage and landscape of this region. The Cooperativa became a culinary garden for the restaurant, a kind of laboratory where new ways of producing, consuming and adding value around food can be tried out.

Laura’s experiences from all these years have been summarized in a video that is part of an online course on sustainable gastronomy launched last year by WWF Colombia. The course is targeted at people working in restaurants or the hospitality industry. It explains, in understandable language and mainly through videos how food production and consumption are key to solving the global crisis and how this sector can be part of this change by applying different principles and practices.

Our work in Colombia began in 2020 and focuses on building partnerships with global charities like WRAP to develop two pilot models to reduce food loss and waste. Future Food Together is developing policy recommendations through participating in multi-stakeholder alliances and agreements and with local governments to improve national strategies for SCP focused on the agri-food sector. Working with major companies, such as Èxito Group, our team supports them in implementing commitments to avoid deforestation.

 

In Paraguay, Future Food Together works with Eco Agro and APRO, the main organizations involved in agroecological production, as well as with farmers’ associations. We have also strengthened and expanded agroecological and organic farming practices through seed breeding, training, and capacity building so that multipliers will advance project goals in the future. Our team is also working with supermarkets such as Los Jardines to help farmers access new market channels.