The Peruvian Center for Social Studies ( Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales -CEPES) is a private Civil Society Organization ( not for profit) institution based in Peru, founded in 1976. CEPES specializes in agrarian and rural development issues. It is headquartered in the city of Lima and, since 1998, and also has a regional office in Huancavelica.
CEPES objective is to improve the conditions of rural access to land and other natural resources, contribute to social economic sustainability and continued roles as guarantors of the country's food security and support their effective adaptation to climate change.
CEPES actions are geared towards capacity building, research and advocacy, and influencing changes in national and regional agricultural and rural policies in favour of family farmers. These actions take into account gender, intercultural and rights-based approaches.
Programs
Access to natural resources
Peru faces a serious problem of inequality in access, control and distribution of land and other natural resources. The situation is exacerbated by the existence of a regulatory framework and public policies that promote private investment in any type of economic activity on land, affecting indigenous peoples and family farmers in the country. In response to this, CEPES produces reliable and accessible research and information that contributes to their well-being and the defense of their rights over the land and territory they occupy, their main means of livelihood and the basis of their identity.
Food security
A significant portion of the Peruvian population does not have guaranteed food security, and chronic malnutrition is particularly serious in rural areas, where high poverty rate is most evident. While the government of Peru continues to promote export of agricultural products, anemia continues to affect children and pregnant women. In response to this situation, CEPES seeks to work with organizations and schools in Huancavelica to incorporate healthy diets into their agenda, as well as to advocate for diet related policies at the national and regional levels to benefit the indigenous Peruvians.
Climate change
The impacts of global warming are clearly perceptible on the production and quality of life of rural families and constitute a new risk for food security. In light of this scenario, CEPES promotes the development and implementation, by family farming, of ecosystem-based climate change adaptation initiatives.
Lines of action
Research and monitoring
Capacity building
Communication and advocacy
Its activities include creating and disseminating information and knowledge through publications, magazines, electronic bulletins and radio broadcasts. Its publications include:
Debate Agrario (a research journal)
La Revista Agraria (a magazine focusing on agrarian and rural development issues)
Informativo Legal Agrario (a legal review published three times a year)
Notiagro, an online daily round-up of agrarian and rural news
electronic bulletins on the coffee-growing, livestock-farming and milk-producing industries in Peru.
The CEPES website is in Spanish and includes agrarian and rural statistics; rural and agrarian news; audio from radio broadcasts; and downloadable articles from La Revista Agraria and Debate Agrario. The Centre is in Lima.
Land reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership, land use, and land transfers. The reforms may be initiated by governments, by interested groups, or by revolution.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to sustainable agriculture:
The Green Belt Movement (GBM) is an indigenous grassroots organization in Kenya that empowers women through the planting of trees. It is one of the most effective and well-known grassroots organisations addressing the problem of global deforestation. Professor Wangari Maathai established the organization in 1977 under the auspices of the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). GBM's successes in forest conservation, education, and women's economic empowerment have gained the organisation worldwide acclaim. It is also noted for its advocacy of human rights, democratisation of access to public lands, and environmental justice issues such as the role of women's traditional ecological knowledge in addressing environmental degradation and desertification.
The National Agrarian University, also formally called National Agrarian University – La Molina (UNALM), is a public university in Lima, Peru. Of particular renown in the fields of agricultural, biological, and forestry sciences, it is also the only university in Peru offering degrees in meteorology. The university is organized into eight faculties which contain twelve academic departments. It is considered one of the most important higher education institutions of Peru.
A smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology, involvement of family in labor and economic impact. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in developing countries of the world alone, supporting almost two billion people. Smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent, smallholdings may not be self-sufficient. Still, they may be valued for providing supplemental sustenance, recreation, and general rural lifestyle appreciation. As the sustainable food and local food movements grow in affluent countries, some of these smallholdings are gaining increased economic viability in the developed world as well.
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Water resources and irrigation infrastructure in Peru vary throughout the country. The coastal region, an arid but fertile land, has about two-thirds of Peru's irrigation infrastructure due to private and public investment aimed at increasing agricultural exports. The Highlands and Amazon regions, with abundant water resources but rudimentary irrigation systems, are home to the majority of Peru's poor, many of whom rely on subsistence or small-scale farming.
While Peru accounts for about four per cent of the world's annual renewable water resources, over 98% of its water is available east of the Andes, in the Amazon region. The coastal area of Peru, with most of economic activities and more than half of the population, receives only 1.8% of the national freshwater renewable water resources. Economic and population growth are taking an increasing toll on water resources quantity and quality, especially in the coastal area of Peru.
Anthony Bebbington is a geographer, International Director for Natural Resources and Climate Change at the Ford Foundation and Higgins Professor of Environment and Society in the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, USA. He was previously ARC Laureate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia (2016-2019).
Agroecology is an applied science that involves the adaptation of ecological concepts to the structure, performance, and management of sustainable agroecosystems. In Latin America, agroecological practices have a long history and vary between regions but share three main approaches or levels: plot scale, farm scale, and food system scale. Agroecology in Latin American countries can be used as a tool for providing both ecological, economic, and social benefits to the communities that practice it, as well as maintaining high biodiversity and providing refuges for flora and fauna in these countries. Due to its broad scope and versatility, it is often referred to as "a science, a movement, a practice."
The principal environmental issues in Peru are water pollution, soil erosion, pollution and deforestation. Although these issues are problematic and equally destructive, the Peruvian Environmental ministry has been developing regulation and laws to decrease the amount of pollution created in major cities and have been making policies in order to decrease the present deforestation rate in Peru.
José Graziano da Silva is a Brazilian American agronomist and writer. As a scholar, he has authored several books about the problems of agriculture in Brazil. Between 2003 and 2004, Graziano served in the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva cabinet as Extraordinary Minister for Food Security, being responsible for implementing the Fome Zero program, which was a focal point of the Lula Administration's cash transfer program Bolsa Familia. On June 26, 2011, Graziano was elected director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), becoming the first Latin American ever to hold the position. After his first term from 1 January 2012 to 31 July 2015, Graziano da Silva was re-elected for a second 4 year-term during FAO's 39th Conference.
Gender inequality both leads to and is a result of food insecurity. According to estimates, women and girls make up 60% of the world's chronically hungry and little progress has been made in ensuring the equal right to food for women enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Women face discrimination both in education and employment opportunities and within the household, where their bargaining power is lower. On the other hand, gender equality is described as instrumental to ending malnutrition and hunger. Women tend to be responsible for food preparation and childcare within the family and are more likely to be spent their income on food and their children's needs. The gendered aspects of food security are visible along the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization and stability, as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
The Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food is the central executive authority of Ukraine in charge of country's agro-development. It is one of the oldest government agencies of Ukraine. On 29 August 2019 the ministry's function were taken over by the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture. On 17 December 2020 the ministry was resurrected.
The Sustainable Mekong Research Network (SUMERNET) is a network of organizations committed to the sustainable development of the Greater Mekong Region. Launched in 2005, SUMERNET supports policy-relevant research and outreach activities to inform and engage policy-makers, planners and stakeholders. Within this context, it pursues an evolving agenda in response to questions and policy issues that arise in the region. Current research themes are climate-compatible development, regional economic integration, and ecosystem services and local development. The network works on a range of issues including natural ecosystems governance, floods and natural disasters, climate change and adaptation, and transboundary resource flows.
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The Agrarian Reform in Peru was a process of land reform redistribution initiated in the 1960s by struggles of rural workers (campesinos) for their land in the Cusco Region, and legally implemented under General Juan Velasco Alvarado in 1969 through three distinct laws. These land reform laws sought to redistribute large amounts of land that had once been owned by indigenous populations to the rural populations that lived and worked in the lands. The proposed laws promulgated in 1969 would attempt to change Peru´s agrarian infrastructure from being a system dominated by haciendas. That system was characterized by the semi-feudal relationships between haciendas owned by private Spanish patrones which employed peones, a large indigenous group, large cooperatives controlled by the Peruvian state, and areas of land owned indigenous communities that were recognized by the Peruvian government. The land reform was predominately focused on redistributing land from private haciendas to rural communities. For the former hacendados, the government of Peru issued agrarian bonds as compensation for land expropriation.
Magdalena León is a Colombian feminist sociologist specializing in social research and women's studies. Trained with the founders of Colombian sociology, Orlando Fals Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, she transferred the rhetorical and discursive framework to the analysis of empirical reality using the survey, systematization, and data analysis to learn the reality on the ground, not only of Colombia but also from Latin America.
Carmen Diana Deere is an American feminist economist who is an expert on land policy and agrarian reform, rural social movements, and gender in Latin American development. Deere is Professor Emeritus of Latin American studies and Food Resources Economics at the University of Florida and Professor Emeritus of FLACSO-Ecuador. She was honored with the Silvert Award in 2018.
Rural women play a fundamental role in rural communities around the world providing care and being involved in number of economic pursuits such as subsistence farming, petty trading and off-farm work. In most parts of the world, rural women work very hard but earn very little.
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