As a new organization, our primary goals are to grow our membership base and develop our capacity.

There are dozens of organizations with goals similar to FWB and literally hundreds of development projects underway to support farmers in the developing world, improve sustainable production techniques or provide farmer-focused humanitarian relief. We have no intention of duplicating what is already in place.

Instead, we have examined these groups from our perspective as farmers and identified a number of important needs that are not being met.

We want to create a forum and platform for progressive and ecologically-minded farmers from around the world, regardless of the scale at which they farm. 

One project we are working on now is to pair farming communities. We are establishing a programme to pair thriving and struggling farming communities. In countries all over the world there are thriving communities of experienced farmers who have developed effective techniques that are highly productive, ecologically sustainable and economically successful.

This project will identify these vital communities and pair them with struggling or impoverished farming communities. Well-established farming communities have much to share - from resources and capacity to experience and insight – and we will help them do so.

In addition, there is often great skill and wisdom in traditional or indigenous agricultural systems and we strive to find complementary ways to bring different techniques together.

In 2008 we began our first pairing project between farming communities in Canada and Zambia. On the Canadian side, we have partnered with a Victoria-based NGO, VIDEA (www.videa.ca) and the Vancouver Island chapter of the Canadian Organic Growers (www.cog.ca/vi) to bring together the sustainable development and organic farming community of this region. In Zambia, we are working with a well-established NGO, Women for Change (www.wfc.org.zm) to connect with a subsistence farming village in rural Zambia. We pulled off a very successful fundraiser in 2009 raising enough money to put in a drinking-water well in a village in Lundazi that did not have clean water. 

In the future, we want to expand this work and focus equally on supporting South-South farming community pairing, with an emphasis on promoting diversity and strengthening effective local systems.

Our goals will be revisited following the 2010 AGM.