The 8th video of the series PROGRESS Good Practices presents the A.P.S. Comunità del Cibo de dell'AgroBiodiversità della Garfagnana (Tuscany, Italy). A community with the main objective of recovering, conserving and enhancing the biodiversity of agricultural and food products while improving the territory’s sustainability and its people’s development. The video was filmed live with interviews in Garfagnana on April 1st 2022, and it is the only one of the video series in this format, the video is available in its original recording in Italian and in a version with English subtitles (see below).
The food community has precisely this purpose, capturing needs, transforming problems into resources, and seeing how to bring us toward the future, moving together as a community.
Fabiana Fiorani
Garfagnana Food and Agrobioversity Community
The Garfagnana Food and Agro-biodiversity Community is a social promotion association (A.P.S.) aimed at the enhancement and promotion of local agro-biodiversity as a material and intangible heritage of agricultural breeds and varieties, uses and traditions, knowledge and flavors, which over the generations they have shaped the landscape and culture of the people. It is also an ethical and cultural movement that wants to improve the quality of local life, encourage a solidarity economy, respectfor ecosystems and natural balances, history and of the vocation of the places.
In the realization of the model that defines the project, the custodian farmers of Garfagnana identified three fundamental tools for the establishment and functioning of a food community of this type:
- The Community charter: an operational tool, which dictates roles, rules, organizational form and fundamental principles that the members of the Community must adopt.
- The Pact for food and agro-biodiversity: a support tool that involves institutional subjects, associations and other sector experts who promote the initiatives implemented by the operating group.
- The Strategic plan: An operational tool that identifies actions aimed at consolidating the Community and the territory.
In Garfagnana with the work we are doing on divulgation even nowadays the consumer is diverse,
I am a consumer and I look for these varieties and I am willing to pay them more because I want to keep my territory alive.
Cinzia Lenzarini, Garfagnana Union of Municipalities
Once the project model was defined, the food community could center its focus on the main purpose: capture needs, transform problems into resources, and see how to bring them toward the future, moving together as a community.
Central to the agrobiodiversity model is the germplasm bank, where the seeds and plants of local varieties, the ones that are traditionally grown in Garfagnana, are kept. It’s possible to find 35 herbaceous varieties and many tree varieties, as many as 200 varieties of ancient fruits, and 50 different grape varieties preserved in a collection of 1200 plants.
This is the last of the PROGRESS Good practices videos that, during the project 1st phase years of 2020-2022 has produced 8 videos presenting the most valued good practices of the project.
