In addition to its development activities, AVSF carries out advocacy work in the North and in the South.
For AVSF, engaging in advocacy work goes hand in hand with its technical activities in support of smallholder families and organizations in the South. Through its engagement in advocacy, AVSF seeks to defend and gain recognition for the role that smallholder farmers play in the development of Southern countries.
AVSF strives to bring about greater equality in international relations and refuses to consider hunger, poverty, and exclusion as inevitable. AVSF fights, both in the North and in the South, to defend the rights of smallholder farmers and promote agricultural, environmental, and economic policies (such as market regulation) that are favorable to them.
AVSF’s advocacy work in France and Europe is threefold:
In order to make possible its activities and its stances, AVSF is constantly monitoring the national and international political scene. For AVSF, this involves constructing arguments based on its concrete experiences working with smallholder families in the countries where it is engaged on a daily basis. This work is carried out individually or collectively with our partners: Coordination Sud's “Agriculture and Food” and “Climate and Development” committees, the Association des populations des montagnes du Monde, Groupe Initiatives, VSF Europa.
In the countries where it works, AVSF’s objective is to strengthen the capacity of its partners to defend their rights and promote policies that are favorable to smallholder farming. This involves directly assisting its partners, and sometimes even governments, in the development of national sectorial policies (water policies in Equateur, short supply chain policies in Andean countries, animal health policies in Africa and in Asia, etc.) and working with local authorities to develop local decentralization policies.
AVSF also offers its partners methodological support for the implementation of their advocacy activities as well as technical and financial support to help them create tools that will allow them to influence policy. Since 2009, AVSF has trained more than 130 smallholder leaders and representatives of partner organizations in the advocacy process, and assisted them in developing strategies for addressing their national and local governments and for submitting constructive proposals to them.
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