December 2025 President’s Message
The World Farmers Markets Coalition emerged amidst the scary and heady days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply chains were failing, since systems relied upon many moving parts and internal hand-offs (resulting in the insanity of scenarios like, fresh blueberries being transported from South to North America (where blueberries grow just fine). These long cold chains rely upon every step of the process to be adequately staffed, etc. Add to the new constraints, the war invasion of Ukraine by Russia added additional pressures upon the globalized food system.
For those of us who work in local food, these difficulties only confirmed what we already know: Local food systems provide greater resilience, generate wealth closer to the ground, and provide each locality with the tools necessary to cultivate local food governance, pathways for local leadership, and bright and experiential indicators that provide the necessary evidence for local food’s attributes. With each umbrella, there is a story to tell, a family who is navigating the chaotic uncertainty of farming small in an age of great scale.
Fortunately, the visceral nature of farmers markets provides each market manager, each farmer, and each consumer with the narrative to broadcast to the world why and how the direct connection between farmer and consumer brings life to city centres, periurban farmland, and the potential to imagine a different future than the one that is imposed upon us by Amazon, supermarkets, and the rest of the economy of consolidation and globalization.
It is difficult to describe just how surprising it is that with the transition to 2026, we must recognize that our work together — as the World Farmers Markets Coalition — now spans half of a decade. Today, we are placing family farmers at the centre of agricultural discussions (where they should be). We are developing tools that provide communities who hunger for some degree of control over their food futures with roadmaps to design and implement new farmers markets; and we are cultivating a community that operates with a spirit of generosity.
Importantly, this process is neither easy nor guaranteed to succeed. The forces of scale, hyper-processed foods, and detachment are well endowed. We represent the families who work the land, the consumers who defy odds and demonstrate their loyalty to local food (with 60% of shoppers interviewed in the FARMERSMARKETSCOUNT campaign indicating that they attend the farmers markets at least once weekly), and the professionals who design their own governance systems and economic models largely without public or private investment. We are one of the few bright spots on the horizon.
We are there — a bright spot, because we are not alone. You are the reason why farmers markets are high on the agenda. Grateful for the remarkable support we have received from not only practitioners keen to connect, but also FAO, the Italian Ministry of International Cooperation and others, we leap into 2026 with great enthusiasm.
We know that it is not enough to be on the agenda. We need to shape the agenda. As we approach our new General Assembly, our ambitious array of programmatic work in Asia, Europe, sub Saharan Africa and Latin America, we feel it is important to communicate the farmers market strategy to both partners and investors. Farmers markets are not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to cultivate engaged communities that articulate and act upon the reinvention of local food systems that bring farmers and consumers together as co-conspirators. While we may be able to point to elaborate theory, evidence, etc., we know in our hearts that this comes to fruition through action. The work is hard, the progress incremental, but the world is ours if we can work together in 2026 to grow local food economies all over the planet.
