The focus of Grow is on agriculture and food. The plan appears to be use agriculture as a lens through which the other issues, like climate, trade laws, gender etc are filtered. Oxfam launched the Grow with a new report Growing a Better Future: food justice in a resource-constrained world which lays out the problems of the current food structures and Oxfam's recommendations for change. It has also produced a little helpful guide to the campaign itself.
Importantly for Oxfam, it is the first campaign that brings on board all of its member offices into one global campaign. This cohesiveness should help the group get coordinated mobilisation and lobbying on their key demands. It is an ambitious campaign, looking at the global structural change rather than identifying just one issue and looks to be political if the billboard adverts are anything to go by.
It is in keeping with the larger NGO's preference for mega-campaigns: multi-year efforts that cover a lot of ground in terms of policy, mobilisation and countries: Save the Children have their equivalent Everyone campaign. As a result, it is difficult to deduce whether this big picture approach is a real, much-needed industry game-changer or is more to do with the internal issues of a larger international NGO like getting buy-in on the policy and campaign strategy from a wide number of diverse offices
It is too early to give a rating to this campaign but time will tell whether Grow does capture the global public's imagination and affect policy outcomes on the ambitious scale of the campaign. It is be one to watch.