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Highlights


The people living in the desert borderlands of southern New Mexico face plenty of serious struggles: water is limited, living wages are scarce, and many live in unincorporated communities, which often lack basic infrastructure. This might cause one to presume that the residents are wondering whether or not they’ll have enough food. Not so, argues Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard.

Wiggins-Reinhard and two colleagues founded Semilla (“Seed” in Spanish), with plans to start a youth food policy council, a youth farm, and multiple produce stands.

Tracy McMillan interviewed Wiggins about her path to food work, her plan to grow 500 foods in a desert, and what it’s like to promote local food in the country’s fifth-poorest state.

"You didn’t start out as a food person. How did you end up doing work that lured Mark Bittman to the desert?"

"[Before La Semilla] I was a grad student in political science, and I have a history of being involved in human rights movements on the border. I was working at Colonias Development Center, and I came in after a USDA Community food projects grant was [going] to start community gardens, and I realized I had a passion for working with youth and growing food. [Before that], if you’d asked me about food, I probably would have said, What’s the big deal, you go to the grocery store and you buy it. Once I saw that [only some] eaters have access to food and income to buy healthy food, how that’s a human rights issue, it was a natural fit for me. It was, 'How did I miss this?'"

Interested?
Read the whole interview!

Wiggins-Reinhard is the director of the Farm Fresh program for La Semilla Food Center in Las Cruces, the largest city south of Albuquerque, USA.

Tracie McMillan, a freelance journalist whose work centers on food and class, is a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

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The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development - ICIMOD’s Asia Pacific Mountain Network (APMN) have started and is enthousiastically implementing Youth for Sustainable Mountain Development (Y4SMD) initiative.

The objective is to improve youth engagement in advocating Mountain Agenda with a strong vocal in the context of Rio+20 and UNFCCC and CBD processes, with financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC).

The implemented activities have Asia Pacific geographic scope as APMN also acts as Asia Pacific coordinating unit (platform- Node/Hub) of the Mountain Forum (MF) and the Mountain Partnership (MP) – two global initiatives advocating for sustainable mountain development (SMD).

Started in May 2011 in partnership with global and regional youth initiatives, Y4SMD has made significant progress in achieving this objective, as they have established Asia Pacific Youth on Rio +20 (Earth Summit 2012) as the largest Asia Pacific Youth Group on Rio+20:


We are pleased to announce the names of the 15 finalists for the YoBloCo Awards – individual category, resulting from the voting process that took place from 5 to 31 December 2011.

For the individual category, 2214 votes were submitted, from 2080 people (voting for two blogs was possible) and more than 600 comments for the institutional category. 


Online journal New Agriculturist published an article discussing the future of agricultural extension.

They visited two conferences [the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services symposium 2011, Accra, Ghana and International Conference on Innovations in Extension and Advisory Services, Nairobi, Kenya] to find out whether the optimism on the future of agricultural extension is justified, and how it needs to evolve in the 21st Century if it is to avoid a sad end.They selected a variety of viewpoints from the delegates. Here's a first:

"The challenge for me is the mindset. Instead of considering the extension service as a public good, Africa should now consider the extension services as a public-private initiative or partnership, meaning inviting more and more private companies to join with the public sector for strengthening the extension services right from national level to the rural community." - Azmul Huda, Helvetas, Bangladesh


On December 11, Agriterra published an article on the Zambian National Farmers Union, who have launched an e-transport system to reduce crop wastage.

Their projects range from rural-tourism, the improvement of potato production, and the establishment of farmers credit banks to the penetration of new products in the market or of existing products in new markets.

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