Walking with Youth Toward Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty is a community movement that seeks to transform the food system. The right to decide on agrarian and food practices is with the people who care for and sow the seeds, distribute and prepare the food, reproducing livelihoods with their daily work.
For us who integrate the Community Agroecology Network, an international and multicultural work team, these affirmations are one of the pillars that support our actions. We are strengthening solidarity networks that cross borders, interconnecting accompaniment processes in different territories. In this sense, we conceive accompaniment as a reciprocal relationship built on respect, transparency, and solidarity. These shared principles guide our actions, to strengthen productive and community organization processes already underway.
We work through collaborations with organizations that in turn work with communities in the territories. We seek to accompany shared visions about food sovereignty, this implies an exercise of horizontality that is expressed in attentive listening, open dialogue, recognition of needs, and deep understanding of the environment, and from there, find ways to act from sharing and coexistence. Thus, for us, accompaniment is a dynamic impulse that help us to continue building community.
As facilitators, we recognize our commitment to accompanying the youth and learning from them. The youth are committed to recovering the knowledge of their grandparents and to continue defending the territory even when their voices are attempted to be silenced.
Minelia Xiu, one of the facilitators accompanying CAJAC -a learning and practice community for the creation and strengthening of youth agroecological commercialization processes in the Yucatan Peninsula region of Mexico-
“My participation as a facilitator is supportive in highlighting those strengths, virtues, and values that young people have to share”.
Within CAJAC, CAN facilitates collective reflection on agroecological practices and community marketing processes to analyze how a collective good can be generated beyond just selling a product. This generates the possibility of co-creating alternatives to an extractivist economic model of production and focuses on what communities and youth need. We accompany in many ways in this journey toward food sovereignty.
Our Way of Constructing Accompaniment Processes
Sharing Practices, Knowledge, and Agroecological Products
Each product-whether honey, eggs or vegetables-connects us to the culture and history of the territories. We incorporate local foods during the meetings we organize, encouraging youth to bring products for preparation. When we invite youth to bring products for preparation. When we invite youth to bring their products, to prepare or present them, they exchange practices and knowledge vital to their daily lives.
Sharing Sacred Spaces
In CAJAC, youth are part of the foundations of the learning community, the values and principles that govern this community of learning and practice are built by them. For this reason, the process of incorporating identity is important and connecting with the contexts in an intergenerational way. The youth – together with spirituality, cultural, and community identity – are the base for these projects to continue to flourish.
Family Farm and Organization Visits
Among the practical visits, we have organized tianguis for the youth to sell and exchange their products. We have also made visits to solidarity stores and farms of the same families of the youth participating in CAJAC.
Question Power Relations
Agroecology also acts as a healing process for people, for example, women who are looking for a way to get ahead with their children and as a way of healing begin to cultivate and be part of productive groups. Our form of accompaniment allows us to recognize that power relations and the different manifestations of violence that emanate from them are deeply rooted in our daily lives, so it is important to question them, denounce them and reflect on other ways that allow us to repair them collectively.
Co-creating Organizational and Collective Practices
We created a Review Commission with a subset of members from each of ‘the Architects’, and our facilitator team-, who participate in the learning community. This is another example of a collective way of dialoguing and being transparent about the distribution of funds to promote projects with all the participating organizations.
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