28 February 2013 | Interviews | Water | Land grabbing | Food Sovereignty
Forging an Alliance
Panama: Meeting of Meso-American members of the Food Sovereignty Alliance, interview with Jorge Stanley
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In Panama City, members of women, young-people, indigenous, environmentalists, fisherfolk and peasant movements will meet this weekend to discuss about the guidelines of the Continental Food Sovereignty Alliance.
This space has been in a process of construction for over ten years in the continent through the International Planning Committee, which put the issue of food sovereignty from the social movements perspective on the table at the FAO.
This was what Jorge Stanley, member of the Political Commission of the Alliance, told Real World Radio before the sub-regional meeting.
The alliance will decide on its structure, approve its guidelines and its action plan that will have an advocacy element both with reference to the regional FAO (Latin America and the Carribbean) and in spaces such as the Committee on World Food Security.
But the main component will be the gathering of different networks that support the demand for Food Sovereignty and the definition of joint mobilizations with that end, in addition to denouncing the conflicts that affect the fundamental rights of rural populations in the sub-continent.
The participants of this preparatory space in Panama include the Latin American Coordination of Countryside Organizations (CLOC-Via Campesina), the Confederation of Artisanal Fisherfolk of Central America, the International council of Indigenous Treaties, Friends of the Earth and the Agroecological Movement of Latin America and the Caribbean (MAELA) and FIAN, who works on the Human Right to Food.
Stanley, a model for the indigenous Kuna people of Panama, said that some of the issues to be discussed by the Alliance is the implementation of the Guidelines for Good Governance in Land, Fisheries and Forests (approved in 2011 by the CSA), the Global Strategic Framework, the increase in the price of commodities, the so-called Responsible Agricultural Investment, the boom of agrofuels and the International Year of Family Farming.
He also highlighted the Alliance as an international solidarity and support expression to territorial conflicts faced by several communities, from Paraguay to Honduras and Colombia.
The sub-regional meeting will be held this weekend, while it will be officially launched on May 3-6 in Buga, Colombia. The event will be covered by Real World Radio.
