By Tendai Chisiri
It was a hive of activity at Botanical Gardens in Harare over the weekend as the annual 2 day Good Food and Seed Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary with a great attendance from the general public.
The festival was celebrated under the theme “Enhancing Local Food Systems through Bambara Nuts” and the sub theme was “Lost seed varieties is lost nutrition”.
The Good Food and Seed Festival is a platform for farmers from different corners of Zimbabwe to exchange knowledge in farmer managed seed systems, traditional foods and Agro-ecologic. Farmers get to to share, exchange and trade farm saved seeds.
Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Zimbabwe (PELUM) programme coordinator, Theophilus Mudzindiko in an interview said the event was well attended and very successful.
“From what I observed, more and more people are participating in the festival. On day 1 which is the National Seed Festival we had Food and Nutrition Council. The Genetic Resource and Biotechnology Institute also attended and had a stall, so the event is well in sync with government efforts”, he said.
The event was organised by Food Forum which has a number of organisations as members. Day 1 was the National Seed Festival and focused primarily on small stakeholders. They got to share, exchange and trade traditional farm saved seeds as well as the knowledge about that seed and accompanying farming practices. The day was literary fair day. Day 2 was the Good Food Festival and the main thing was engagement of the general public in celebrating the traditional foods. The public bought the food and seeds for consumption.
Theophilus Mudzindiko said the festival is also about showing stakeholders including policy makers and the general public on alternative path or approach to food and agriculture Agroecology is a sustainable food and agriculture approach, it applies ecological principles to farming systems and address the majority of the challenges that conventional agriculture creates while guaranteeing food nutrition and income security on the face of climate change as well as sustainable utilisation of natural resources.
Bio Innovation Zimbabwe (BIZ), also a member of Food Forum had their stall selling traditional food like cooked nyimo. Caroline Jaquet project manager with BIZ commended the festival. “This is the festival that brings together farmers and consumers so it helps farmers find market for their product.
BIZ helps farmers to commercialise wild timber forest products like woods, honey, mushrooms and fruits.
Edward Makoni with Trocaire said the festival has to do with livelihoods hence they funded part of what happened. Trocaire do funding for Non Governmental Organisations for them to get their programmes running in different area like governance and human rights, livelihoods, women empowerment and even humanitarian work.
“This is to do with livelihoods and we have livelihoods partners exhibiting here and our partners have brought with them farmers who are also exhibiting quite a lot of things like seeds, and processed foods and even wild fruits”, said Makoni.
“Our co-partners are Caritas Masvingo and they are working in the Gutu and Bikita districts of Masvingo Province, in Insiza we have Zimbabwe Project Trust whilst other two partners here are from Matobo district that the Dabane Trust and Caritas Bulawayo.
“We are very much into it through funding because we know that this is the way the farmers work get exposed to what is happening outside their areas and also we have taken it upon ourselves to make sure we do a hit of funding for the whole thing to take shape”, he added.
Farmers came from all over Zimbabwe, from Chimanimani, Bikita, Shashe, Goromonzi, Matobo, Insiza, Victoria Falls, Rusape, Gutu, Rushinga and Mwenezi.
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