On Friday October 17th, the SCALAGRO project team gathered experts from hashtag Ethiopia, India, and Switzerland to exchange ideas on how to support transitions to agroecology.

It was very inspiring to host this group of practitioners and researchers - part of the SCALAGRO project under the SOR4D Solution-oriented Research for Development programme - who shared their perspectives on scaling up agroecology. Among the participants were representatives from Jimma University (Ethiopia) and the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (India), as well as colleagues from the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the University of Bern, and representatives of the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF, SDC and SuisseDev.

Some of the key takeaways included:

• First things first: Agroecology cannot be implemented if farmers lack access to water.
• Agroecology ripens slowly: sometimes the first priority is to restore the soil fertility of depleted lands - results are not always immediate.
• Training sessions and farmers-to-farmers exchange are not only essential for enhancing knowledge and skills, but also for building trust among farmers.
• Moving towards agroecology consists of experimenting, which requires risk-taking - a crucial challenge for the huge majority of small producers whose resources do not exceed subsistence level   .
• Action should not focus only on production; processing and commercialization must also be part of the picture.

Many thanks to all attendees for their pertinent contributions and for the inspiring discussions we had.

More on the SCALAGRO: Scaling Agroecology in India, Bolivia and Burkina Faso project.