By Alex Jackimovicz
On April?25,?2025, Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law (located in White Plains, NY) hosted the “Seeds for Food Sovereignty” presentation by Filipa Costa, President of the Prout Research Institute, Portugal (PRI-P). Drawing a house of environmental law students, community organizers, and local food-system advocates, Costa’s talk wove together PRI-P’s overarching mission, the strategic “seeds” of participatory planning, and the regional social movement that has taken root in the Cova da Beira region.
Costa opened her talk by reminding the audience that, just as Portugal celebrates Freedom Day on April?25th, communities can reclaim their own “freedom” over food systems by practicing genuine economic democracy and regional self-sufficiency. In PRI-P’s view, food sovereignty isn’t a distant ideal but a practical right: the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food produced sustainably, with local inhabitants controlling agriculture and food policy.
To illustrate how this right takes root, Costa described PRI-P’s neighborhood-level planning process. In 2022, their teams conducted a participatory assessment involving some 32 stakeholders, which included interviews with farmers, school officials, directors of non-governmental organizations, local government representatives, market vendors, and elders; organizing vision sessions; and touring the farms of Cova da Beira, a rural area in Portugal. These conversations revealed both the region’s fertile soils and critical obstacles: an aging farmer population, youth outmigration, fractured institutional cooperation, exploitative pricing by large retailers, and a lack of legal and logistical structures preventing small family farms (over 90% of producers) from invoicing and supplying local schools or social institutions.
Out of that diagnostic work sprang Cova da Beira Converge, PRI-P’s regional organizing project. Costa recounted how each month, gatherings literally moved across the three municipalities of the area (Covilhã, Belmonte, and Fundão), bringing together thematic working groups in agriculture, education, environment, culture, social justice, and well-being. Every session concluded with communal dance—an intentional ritual to cement trust, sustain enthusiasm, and bind practitioners of all ages and backgrounds into a living social body.
From this project sprang PRI-P’s Food Sovereignty Plan, whose first strategic thrust was to build short supply chains linking small producers, over 90% of whom are family farmers, to schools, restaurants, social institutions, and final consumers. To operationalize that plan, Costa introduced their centerpiece innovation: anintegral cooperative, Converge Cooperativa da Cova da Beira, modeled on Catalan precedents. This multi-sector cooperative provides the legal and logistical infrastructure—invoicing, storage, transport coordination, and timely payments—without which farmers had remained sidelined. It embeds agriculture, culture, education, housing, and social services under one democratic governance structure, allowing members to share resources like accounting, marketing, and advocacy, and binding producers and consumers alike in shared ownership, truly aligning day-to-day transactions with the Samaj ethos of “society moving together.”
Costa then detailed two early pilot initiatives: 1) the Community Harvest project which mobilized volunteers to reclaim unharvested orchards—rescuing fruit from elderly landowners, reviving communal bonds, and redirecting produce to local tables, and 2) PRI-P negotiation with municipal councils to revise public procurement contracts, shifting criteria from lowest bid to “best value,” rewarding freshness, ecological stewardship, cultural fit, and regional circulation. Through ongoing community gatherings and awareness-raising campaigns, these pilots are embedding food sovereignty principles into public systems and ensuring that the seeds they’ve sown in Cova da Beira will grow into enduring structures of self-reliance and justice. Although rooted in Portugal’s rural heartland, Costa stressed that any U.S. community, with participatory assessments, regional gatherings, and cooperative frameworks, could adapt these “seeds” to reclaim control over what and how it eats.
Video of Filipa Costa’s presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlwz0btowbQ&t=1452s