The thesis “Unpacking the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Decision to Stop Funding UAWC” examines how security narratives led the Netherlands to end its funding in 2022 for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). For many years, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had supported this Palestinian NGO, which worked to improve the livelihoods of Palestinian farmers, particularly in Area C — the part of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli military control. The research into the reasons behind the decision to defund UAWC is based on documents obtained through the Dutch Transparency Act (Wet Open Overheid, or WOO), comprising more than 1,100 pages of written communications.
Continue readingEU Cultivate – Replication study Freiburg – Zusammen Leben x WUR x Cascoland
Plan
During the replication phase of the EU Cultivate project, WUR will travel with the Library of Citizen engagement to the Food Sharing initiatives in each of the six spoke locations.
Our first stop ? Freiburg im Breisgau – where WUR & CASCOLAND visited CULTIVATE partner Zusammen Leben.
Zusammen Leben – (German for Living together) have been managing a 3500 square meter community garden – as an intercultural meeting space since 2016. And as part of the ten year anniversary of this intercultural civic space, Zusammen Leben hosted a Lab &Kitchen at the garden. As explained in our library, Lab & kitchen is a creative methodology that fosters collaboration, bridges knowledge systems and engages communities through participatory cooking and good sharing activities. Importantly, Lab&Kitchen evolves with each iteration, responding to specific community needs. In designing this Lab&Kitchen, Zusammen Leben and CASCOLAND agreed that engaging people with a migration background should take priority.
Continue readingFood Commons – Summer School 2025
This June, the Rural Sociology Group (RSO) hosted its first ever Food Commons Summer School. In a new blog, Rohit Dash shares his experiences and insights from the event.
What if food could be shared like stories. What if, we could build the truly proverbial village in our communities to raise a farm of delicious, cared for and nutritious food. Imagine a world, where food systems were entirely “Commoned” stripped from the materialist notions of private ownership, instead nurtured by care and collective stewardship. How do we get to this utopia? Was there ever a precedent to such an utopia? or are there examples of islands of utopia that remain hidden in plain sight?
Continue readingBook review: Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado
In 2018, I was researching the revitalization of agriculture in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The violence wrought by forced collectivization and urbanization under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime had left the agricultural sector in disarray since the 1980s. After winning de facto autonomy in 1991, the partyfamilies ruling Iraqi Kurdistan often spoke of the region’s fertile, water-rich land as a source of promise; in practice, the sector was largely neglected. In many seasons, farmers abandoned their produce to rot in the fields, unable to compete with cheap imports from Iran and Turkey flooding the local markets. Meanwhile, the ruling party-families showed little genuine interest in agricultural renewal. I vividly recall one meeting in 2018 when a senior official casually mentioned the possibility of making the land attractive for lease to investors interested in growing potatoes for export to markets in the Emirates. I was stunned. Only after reading Andrew Ofstehage’s Welcome to Soylandia did I begin to fully grasp the underlying logic: investors are drawn to farmland where they can grow their capital without forming long-term attachments to the land or the farmers who manage it.
Read more: https://authorservices.wiley.com/api/pdf/fullArticle/100356915
Immersing in Kisumu’s urban food markets
This blog post by Marit Meijer shares her experiences during the second fieldwork period of the project “Learning from Food Provisioning Networks in City Regions of Kenya”.
From May 26th to August 12th, 2025 I spend 2,5 months in Kenya for the second fieldwork period of the project “Learning from Food Provisioning Networks in City Regions of Kenya”. The focus of the fieldwork was to immerse (for 2 months) in two urban food markets in Kisumu, namely Kondele Market and Kibuye Market. People who have congregated in these market places for the last 10 years shared with us the history of their careers and their perspectives on present and future developments of the food markets. We want to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone willing to share with us their time, effort and personal stories so generously. And to those who introduced us to them. A special thanks goes out to Damarice Auma Akwanya, Moline A’chieng and Isiah Okoth.
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Rural Sociology Wageningen University 