9 March, 2016
The Biodiversity Festival was celebrated on March 9th at NEN Resource Centre, Chizami, with the theme ‘Bonding Communities, Celebrating Diversity’.
The festival brought together different farming communities and other important stakeholders from the states of Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya and Telangana. Amba Jamir from the Sustainable Development Forum of Nagaland (SDFN) delivered the keynote address.
The biodiversity exhibition – crops, uncultivated food, medicinal plants, natural fibres & dyes – put up by the women farmers displayed the rich resources and the knowledge attached to them. Celebrating agro-biodiversity, local food and ecological agriculture, the participating farming communities shared solidarity messages, sang folk songs and exchanged seeds- as symbolic of sharing life. The Biodiversity festival was, as said by NEN’s Wekowe-ü Tsuhah, “a reaffirming of faith in our food systems, facilitating communities to share knowledge as a means to empower each other”.
