About us
Centro Internazionale Crocevia is an organisation founded in 1958. For 65 years we have been working together with local communities around the world on projects and campaigns which aim at agroecology, artisanal fishing, farmers‘ rights and farm workers’ rights.
Since 1996, Crocevia has held the Secretariat of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC), an autonomous and self-organised global platform of small-scale food producers, Indigenous Peoples, rural workers’ organisations and grassroots social movements whose aim is to advance the food sovereignty agenda at global and regional levels.
Our vision is of a world in which every individual has the right to access diverse, healthy and culturally appropriate food. We believe that small-scale food producers deserve to live and work with dignity and that their rights should be guaranteed.
We believe that local communities should have control over their food systems, and that their rights should be respected. We see agroecology as a model for humanity’s sustainable relationship with ecosystems.
Our mission is to work with small-scale food producers around the world, supporting their struggles for collective rights to resources, lifestyles and modes of production.
We cultivate spaces for political participation and confrontation, with the aim of influencing the regulatory frameworks adopted by international and national institutions as to embed a vision of food sovereignty and agroecology, including the right to food, the right to seeds, and rights to land and water.
Crocevia’s Staff
A history that has been going on since 1958
For more than sixty years we have always maintained our identity as a ‘crocevia’, i.e. a crossroad and meeting point of different cultures and social realities, following our ‘philosophy’ of intervention, supporting projects and programmes designed together with partners. Over all these years, the choice of how and where to operate has never been easy. Analysing and reflecting on the world situation has led Crocevia to take a position, not an easy one but, rather, a painful one, regarding the type of cooperation to be implemented. We thus rejected the logic of emergency activities in war-torn territories and chose the logic of supporting populations in resistance, victims of political, economic, environmental and social injustice.
For decades, we have been facilitating and organising dialogue between movements of peasants, artisanal fishermen, labourers, Indigenous Peoples, the urban poor and consumers from the five continents and brought together in the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC). The aim is to keep alive a global conversation that strengthens the self-organising capacity of small-scale food movements and their public voice locally and internationally.
Crocevia has had the privilege of partnering and working with some of the men and women who have visibly marked the history of humanity: Thomas Sankara, Samara Machel, Graca Machel, Yasser Arafat, Lula and Ka Memo. But let us also not forget those who have made the history of humanity while remaining invisible: the resisters to the dictatorships of Pinochet, Marcos, Suharto, the Argentine, Brazilian, Uruguayan generals, and those who silently built and still are building alternatives for all of us, such as the peasants of Vietnam, China, Indonesia, Sahel, Peru, Japan, the teachers of Palestine and Israel, Ecuador, Brazil, Mozambique, the filmmakers and journalists from the native peoples of Canada, the USA, Latin America, Taiwan, New Zealand, the workers’ union of South Korea, the shepherds of Iran, and the fishermen of Lake Rukwa and South Africa. Let us not forget the many women and men everywhere who every day continue to find solutions to live with dignity and build a future outside the dominant model. Starting with food production.
