SEPTEMBER 2026
Hello Network Members,
We are back and feeling energised after a month's break. To restart the Network's activities, we are returning with two exciting news.
As promised in our previous newsletter, we are launching agrofutures; a website dedicated to the Feminist Agroecology Network. There you can find our past newsletter archive, alongside a brand-new initiative called "Women Farmers' Stories".
The initiative contributes to the UN International Year of the Woman Farmer, aiming to shine a light on the multifaceted stories of women farmers from across the world. We envision this initiative going beyond 2026, becoming a living archive of stories of women living from and with the land.
We are currently open to submissions, so if you have a story to share, please get in touch at agrofutures@proton.me (submissions should be between 500–800 words, plus up to 10 images. We are currently accepting stories in English, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Hindi, and hope to expand this list in the future).
Launching the initiative is the story of Nilima, a woman farmer from Maharashtra, India. The state has recently made headlines for passing the Women Farmers Empowerment Bill, 2026, recognising women engaged in rural livelihoods as farmers, irrespective of landownership. This is a landmark ruling in a state where over 80% of the rural workforce is female, yet only 15% are landholders.
We hope you enjoy the new website, and if you have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
Our newsletter updates are below!
Warmly,The Agrofutures Team
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
González Muñoz, A. D., Cruz Hernández, D. T. & Villagómez Valdés, G. I. (2026). Mujeres protagonistas de la agroecología en la Península de Yucatán frente al neoextractivismo. Revista Tohil, 28(55/enero-julio), e004-e004. https://revistatohil.uady.mx/tohil/article/download/68/93
Laurenti, C. (2026). Feminist Agroecology and Cannibal Capitalism: Boundary struggles in the Agri-Food System. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2026.2697034
BOOKS
Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields, Andrew Flachs (Author)
This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Flachs shows how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.
Unsettling Land: Relational Practice for Contemporary Politics, edited by Preeti Sampat & Andrés León Araya,
Unsettling Land brings together anthropologists and geographers examining land relations across South Asia, the Americas, Northeast Africa, Eastern Europe, and Oceania to show how land's forms, affordances, and meanings shift across diverse historical contexts and uses. Land is not a fixed, passive surface or static resource but a dynamic entity with agency that is shaped by social, historical, and material relations. As such, land is crucial to understanding contemporary political challenges around climate change, capitalism, and conflict.
MEDIA ARTICLES
Beyond Recognition, the Way Forward for Maharashtra's Women Farmers, Seema Kulkarni, The Migration Story.
In this piece, Seema Kulkarni, Senior Fellow at the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), reflects on the Women Farmers Empowerment Bill, 2026,a landmark ruling recognising women engaged in rural livelihoods as farmers irrespective of landownership. In the article, she examines in detail the legislation and also suggests that to be truly transformative, it must move from recognition, to access to resources and then to rights.
Bodies for Export: Blood Cherries, Ignacia Borgeaud, Carolina Amaral, and Magdalena Ceballos, Progressive International.
The article examines how Chile's booming cherry export industry rests on the precarious labour of thousands of migrant women, particularly from Haiti, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Colombia, who work largely without formal contracts, labour protections, or safety measures. Drawing on research from the O'Higgins Region, it argues that the Chilenian government's intensifying anti-migrant rhetoric and deportation policies deepen this exploitation rather than resolve it, using migrants as scapegoats for structural crises while the export economy remains dependent on their labour. The article was originally published in Spanish in El Ciudadano on 2 July 2026.
Mujeres Tz'utujiles: Recetas para la Recuperación en Chuk Muk is a cookbook created through a collaborative research project with Tz'utujil Maya women in Chuk Muk, researchers from the University of Edinburgh, artists, translators, and local collaborators. Following the displacement of Tz'utujil Maya families after Hurricane Stan in 2005, the project explored how recipes, home gardens, traditional crops, and food knowledge could help preserve cultural identity and strengthen community resilience. What makes the project particularly meaningful is its approach to knowledge. The women were not treated simply as research subjects, but as knowledge holders whose experiences, priorities, and traditions shaped the work. The resulting cookbook preserves much more than recipes. It documents relationships between food, land, memory, family, and cultural identity—and offers a powerful example of how Indigenous food knowledge can contribute to recovery and resilience.
JOBS, STUDENTSHIPS & GRANTS
The Coexistence Fellowship is open for applications for its 2026 cohort. The Fellowship is a programme that empowers pairs of fellows, including local community members, to collaboratively develop culturally grounded, equitable conservation practices focused on human-wildlife coexistence across India. It aims to shift conservation paradigms by centring community knowledge, fostering mutual learning, and building a movement of conservation practitioners rooted in empathy, reciprocity, and shared stewardship.
EVENTS & TRAINING
The Degrowth Rural Futures online course for Research & Degrowth International is back - and applications are now open!
This is a 5-week intensive deep-dive course led by Donatella Gasparro (SNS & ICTA-UAB) guiding 25 students through key topics at the intersection of degrowth, critical agrarian studies, political (agro)ecology, ecofeminism and ecosocialism to put land back at the centre of socio-ecological transformations.
Find full syllabus here: https://lnkd.in/dJusc5XG
Registration links here: https://lnkd.in/dND4rMHJ
Course starts on the 22nd of September?
FUNDRAISING
Mutual Aid in Gaza – by Women for Women
In Gaza, preserving seeds, livestock breeds and agricultural knowledge has become an act of resistance.
This GoFundMe campaign supports two sisters, Hanadi and Mona, whose work makes a crucial contribution to Gaza’s food system. Hanadi is a seed preserver and co-founder of the Al Qarara Seed Bank. After the seed bank was destroyed in December 2023, she managed to save part of the family’s collection and is now working to multiply and share locally adapted seed varieties with farmers.
Her sister Mona, a veterinarian, works with livestock and poultry. She has established small hatcheries to breed indigenous chickens for eggs and distribution, while continuing to support women farmers with advice on animal health and nutrition.
Together, the sisters have also developed a farming advisory network connecting more than 600 women producers across Gaza. Through mutual support and the sharing of agricultural knowledge, they are helping communities maintain access to locally adapted seeds, livestock and food-producing practices at a time when agricultural inputs are severely restricted.
Read their story and support the campaign: Mutual Aid in Gaza – by Women for Women
AGROECOLOGY AND ART
In this short film, The Land That Holds Us portrays women's relationships with the land, the people around them, and the wider social systems they navigate, through the lens of four women's farming journeys. While acknowledging their creativity and resilience, the film foregrounds physical, mental and emotional labour, financial precarity, and the challenges of accessing land without inheritance or long-standing family ties. As such, it complicates dominant pastoral imaginaries, highlighting the ambivalent, uncertain, and often unvoiced realities of contemporary small-scale horticulture. Featuring interview excerpts and observational footage from organic market gardens in the Sussex Weald and rural Mid-Wales. https://vimeo.com/1178802360