INTRODUCING AL-ARD
ACHIEVING FOOD SOVEREIGNTY UNDER OCCUPATION
Al-Ard is an independent agricultural development organization that works to improve the lives of Palestinian farmers and protect their land and rights. We believe that sovereignty over resources, especially those that deliver food, is a fundamental right for each community. As Palestinians, living under Israeli occupation, we are deprived from our rights. Our land and water are stolen from us, our trees are uprooted, our farmers expelled, and our societies endangered. This is the extreme context in which Al-Ard operates to provide practical solutions for food sovereignty.
Besides our domestic programs, Al-Ard works to protect the right to food through solidarity with social movements around the world. We are members of La Via Campesina, the International Peasants’ Movement in which 182 organizations join forces, representing over 200 million peasants in 81 countries.
We believe that combating poverty and hunger means building a food system that leads to sustainable self-sufficiency. A system that should therefore be based on local agricultural production, resilient to future challenges like climate change, practical to implement and contribute to people’s steadfastness.
Our strategy is to distribute know-how, skills and practical tools to local communities and farmers, providing them with solutions based on their specific circumstances. These include large-scale agricultural or water treatment projects and local community-projects in which we revitalize the land, re-introduce local crops and traditional farming methods, restore terraces, barriers and springs, and repair or build roads and water distribution systems. In towns and cities, we introduce rooftop gardening to deal with limited space and Israeli policies and walls that bar access to the lands surrounding them.
In all these efforts we rely on our Local Seed Bank, in which the seeds of 56 kinds of local agricultural species are stored and protected. By distributing them we not only provide a cheap resource for farmers, but also invest in Palestinian food sovereignty.
PRESERVING THE SEEDS OF PALESTINE
A local seed bank is a type of gene bank where local seeds are stored for short term use in agriculture, or for long term preservation. Al-Ard’s seed bank has been growing since 2003 and currently houses 56 Palestinian crops and cereals.
Preserving the seeds of Palestine is a vital part of our mission and one of our most valuable projects. Local seeds are considered a natural treasure for each community. They stem from crops that are adopted to the specific local circumstances and are best protected against negative influences such as diseases and climate change. In the field they constitute a cheap resource for farmers in local communities, and a resource that large numbers of impoverished people depend on
Moreover, local seeds stand for the sovereignty of a nation over its provisions – a notion that is eminently applicable to Palestine. Our seed bank not only protects our heritage, but also our prospective food sovereignty and independence. Since 2003, the seeds of 56 kinds of Palestinian crop vegetation, cereals and field crops have been reproduced and improved, while their hereditary sources are being preserved in accordance with the suitable preservation methods and standards.