Know the Green Network 
Compiled by Atención staff

Terre Madre and Slow Food


Terra Madre brings together those who support sustainable agriculture, fishing and breeding with the goal of preserving taste and biodiversity. 

Slow Food, whose philosophy is, “eating is an agricultural act and producing is a gastronomic act,” conceived the Terra Madre project. Slow Food had always stood for the pleasures of the table, for the importance of good-tasting food and for the defense of cultures facing growing homogenization with today’s production, distribution and economies of scale. Slow Food realized the need to protect and support small producers, and to change the systems that put them in danger by bringing together decision-makers: consumers, educational institutions, chefs and cooks, agricultural research entities and NGOs.

Only through repeated, cumulative, local action, following a guiding global vision, can a significant impact be achieved. Terra Madre was born to give visibility to the rural food producers who populate our world; to raise their awareness, and that of the population at large, of the value of their work; and to sustain their ability to work under the best conditions, for all of our good and for the good of the planet.

We must continue to have fertile lands on which grow plants and animals appropriate to those environments, rather than needing to be pumped full of chemicals to make them thrive artificially. We also must continue to have people capable of stewarding these lands, to have their know-how, so we can have food that still carries the tastes of our youth.

Slow Food rallied public institutions as well as local, regional, and national bodies to collectively form the Terra Madre Foundation, further partnering with private companies and numerous like-minded networks.



Terra Madre network

The network integrates new members who wish to act to preserve, encourage and support sustainable food production methods. These methods are based on attention to territory and those distinctive qualities that have permitted the land to retain its fertility over centuries of use. This vision is in direct opposition to pursuing a globalized marketplace, with the ongoing, systematic goal of increasing profit and productivity. The guardians and inhabitants of this planet pay the price for such methods and the damage begins with small producers who, lacking the means to create markets within their own regions, become crushed by subsidy systems that render their working conditions unfair.

The Terra Madre family organizes and defends local cultures and products, and makes real the Slow Food concept of Good, Clean and Fair quality. Good refers to the quality of food products and of their taste; Clean, to a production process that respects the natural environment; and Fair, in which there is dignity and appropriate economic return for the people who produce.

The first members of the network were the food communities themselves, joined later by cooks and academic researchers. 



Food communities

Food communities are the people involved in producing, transforming and distributing a particular food who are closely linked to a geographical area either historically, socially, or culturally. Food community members are small producers who make high-quality products in a sustainable way. They share the problems generated by intensive agricultural methods, wasted natural resources and by a mass-market food industry focused on standardization. These problems put the existence of small producers at risk.



Cooks

Cooks play essential roles as the interpreters of a territory, who can add value to it through their own creativity. Terra Madre cooks understood that pleasure must not be separated from responsibility to producers, without whom none of their work would be possible. They reinforce the food communities through dialogue and collaboration with producers, and fight against the abandonment of cultural tradition and standardization of food. Philosophy reaches gastronomy for consumers in their restaurants.



Universities

The Terra Madre network comprises 250 universities and research centers, including 450 individual academics throughout the world. All are committed to further the preservation and growth of sustainable food production—through both public education and food-worker training.

Academics seek to cultivate a reciprocal relationship with producers by sharing scientific knowledge and promoting exchanges within local communities, but also by listening to those communities and learning from their firsthand experience and solutions.



First Terra Madre conference

In 2004, the inaugural gathering in Turin brought 5,000 delegates from 130 countries. The program included 61 Earth Workshops where participants discussed topics such as organic certification, rural communication, rare livestock breeds, indigenous agriculture systems and small-scale fishing. 

Terra Madre seminars are intended to focus on topics such as genetically modified foods, the development of organic food, sustainability, water rights, and the impact of globalization on traditional food cultures.



Terre Madre Argentina, August 2009

More than 70,000 visitors from around the globe descended on Buenos Aires for the first Terra Madre conference in Argentina. One of the objectives of the event was the exchange of ideas and experiences to facilitate a development plan for the production of healthy, sustainable and fair food in the region.

Highlights of the event included artisanal food items from the Manjares del Litoral women’s collective aimed at reviving traditional foods and techniques of preserving fish and vegetation of the area and protecting the regional culture and gastronomy