Under the theme Women and Territory: Feminist Alliances for a Sustainable World, the congress brought together around seventy people linked to the rural world, the primary sector, associations, and public administrations. The conference underscored that despite women's fundamental role in sustaining farms, managing land, and maintaining community networks, their contributions often remain invisible.
A central focus of the meeting was denouncing the gender inequalities that persist in rural areas. Identified challenges include barriers to accessing resources and farm ownership, limited female representation in decision-making spaces, lack of recognition for care work, and difficulties in ensuring generational succession.
The inaugural talk featured Luz Haro Guanga, an Ecuadorian defender of indigenous and rural women's rights and executive secretary of the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Rural Women (RED-LAC). Subsequently, a round table brought together experiences from women involved in livestock farming, forestry, rural associations, and the maritime sector.
Participants shared initiatives and demands to strengthen female leadership, build support networks, and move towards a fairer and more sustainable rural development model. The interventions also addressed other challenges in the primary sector, such as rising costs, bureaucratic burdens, and the need to ensure conditions that allow farms to be maintained and their continuity favored.
The conference included a participatory workshop to advance the construction of the Rural Women's Agenda for the province of Barcelona. The objective is to gather participants' needs and proposals to guide future actions and public policies.
This initiative aims to place rural women at the center of decisions affecting their territories, recognize the diversity of their realities, and strengthen feminist alliances across sectors and communities. By hosting this first edition, Vacarisses has become a meeting point for sharing knowledge and experiences and for advocating for the essential role of women in the sustainability, cohesion, and future of the rural world.
