01.06.2012

Dear friends and colleagues of the ITLA this time I want to give an update about the latest activities of ITLA and inform you that the announcement for the World Conference on Terraced Landscapes and Cultures will be sent out after the next Committee Meeting in Peru in July 2012.

Visit to Valstagna in Italy last week

Maruja Salas and myself had the opportunity to join the First Festival of the Landscape in the Brenta Valley North of Padua in the Veneto Region of Italy.

On Friday May 25 we could join and observe the Human Chain of 1300 school children of different ages to embrace the valley and send hundreds of balloons with messages about the value of the landscape for the human society, especially in the Brenta Valley with superb terraces where wine, legumes, potatoes, vegetables grow on a small scale production. Mauro Varotto from Padua University and the historian Angelo Chemin from the local museum network led us to several hamlets with functioning terraces. As a way to maintain the terraces they have created with the municipality of Valstagna the program - Adopt a Terrace, where private persons can adopt a terrace for free but it obliges them to keep the terrace clean and functioning. For example, Aziz from Morocco adopted a terrace and is planting Moroccan mint, so that he can offer in his Italian-Moroccan restaurant authentic Mint tea so important for his culture. In Valstagna is a large community of Moroccan immigrants working in local services and industries for many years. By having the program of adopting a terrace many abandoned terraces have come into life again.

During the afternoon the Italian section organised a meeting to discuss their progress and learn about the results of the last planning meeting of the Peruvian Organising Team in January in Lima. Lucija Azman from Lubljana - Slovenia - attended the events also and we discussed the need for the European Encounter and Workshop on Terraced Landscapes to be held end of November in Italy. We also worked on the elaboration of a proposal for funding to the EU within the Edulink program, which would support academic courses on terraced landscapes and cultures in cooperation between European and ACP countries. We spoke about including besides the European universities institutes with experience on terraces from Morocco, Ethiopia and Madagascar. We emphasised the need to exchange experiences and inventories of terraced landscapes worldwide, be it to harmonise methodologies, or to establish a world map of terraced landscapes. We will share soon the methodology proposed by Alpter about the data sheets for terraced areas. We discussed the possibility that researchers from Slovenia and Italy could join the presentation of the inventory of terraces in Peru.

During the evening of the 25th the Observatory of the Landscape from Val di Brenta presented a video about the recent experience of terrace adopters showing the efforts, the ideas and the result of the improvement of the terraced landscapes. We also could take part of a brindis during the torch relay of the mayors of the different municipalities in the valley, which symbolizes the need for joint cooperation to protect the specific landscape and culture of the region of the Brenta Valley. On Saturday, May 26th we presented in Valstagna during a seminar of the Observatory together with Donatella Murtas, the Italian coordinator of ITLA, the Alliance, since its origin in 2010 in Mengzi in Honghe Prefecture and the preparatory process of the World Conference in Peru. The seminar was attended by the students of the Academic Course of the universities of Padua and Venice on Landscape Planning, who received their diploma of the one year program.

World Conference in November 2013 in Peru

The organising committee is preparing the first announcement for the World Conference on terraced Landscapes. We are proposing now 9 topics:
 1. History and Cultures
 2. Agro-Biodoversity in Terraced Landscapes
 3. Food Sovereignty and Food Cultures
 4. Social organisation of Terraced Landscape management
 5. Water, land and climate change
 6. Government policies and regulations
 7. Inventories of Terraced Landscapes and Methodologies of GIS
 8. World heritage sites, tourism and landscapes
 9. Construction and maintenance of terraced landscapes

The Peruvian organisers are engaged in the preparatory process about the Peruvian agricultural terraces - inventory, case studies, regional workshops and encounters in Cusco, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Lima, a national workshop early 2013, academic courses on the history and culture of Terraced landscapes in Peru at the Catholic University as well as on Water and Land Management in the Andes at the Center Bartolomé de las Casas in Cusco.

We also want to prepare a bibliography on terraced landscapes and the 9 topics of the World Conference. On one side we shall do it for Peru, but we also want to invite you as members of ITLA to provide a selection of the most outstanding documents and papers for a compilation to be give to the participants for the World Conference in 2013. We also expect your proposals to name an International Advisory Committee for the World Conference 2013 with representatives of all countries involved in ITLA.

Our next planning session will be mid July in Lima Peru and you will immediately afterwards receive news from ITLA about the announcement and inscription to the World Conference planned to be held in November 2013. I will contact next week all members who have not sent in the registration to ITLA, which is independent from your participation in the Conference. We count now with 80 members of the International Alliance but their is much room for incorporating more members from terraced landscapes countries.

Best regards, Timmi

Timmi Tillmann, Advisor of Right Livelihood College at CenPRIS - Center for Policy Research and International Studies, e-mail: timmitillmann@googlemail.com, Universiti Sains Malaysia - 11800 Penang, Malaysia