— Together to preserve traditional seeds and the environment
Peasants, food workers, and small-scale producers are facing multiple crises, including climate change, Covid-19, and economic challenges. The impacts of climate change include droughts and floods, while Covid-19 has led to household debt, food insecurity, and lack of agricultural market protection. These issues often result in farmers abandoning agriculture and migrating. Prices of agricultural products fall, and issues like land confiscation, exploitation, domestic violence, discrimination, and social inequality persist. The current food system is export-oriented, promoting unsustainable practices with heavy reliance on foreign markets, chemical inputs, and over-exploitation of natural resources. This system heavily favors local and foreign traders.
The fourth Solidarity Seed Festival and Harvest Ritual Celebration in 2024 brought together more than 400 people, uniting the local community in Pailin province with other communities, especially those that had previously celebrated the festival in Siem Reap in 2020, Battambang in 2022, and Kampong Chhnang in 2023, each with different themes promoting safe agricultural practices and independence for farmers, peasants, and small-scale food producers, as well as fishermen, indigenous peoples, youth, community artists, Buddhist communities, community members, land communities from various provinces, and associations and organizations working in the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The seed festival provided a space for peasants, farmers, and small-scale food producers to exchange experiences and cultivation techniques, practical work, seed selection and preservation, and process food based on agroecology or natural farming practices, as well as sharing and building skills with local people.
The Solidarity Seed festivals featured a variety of programs such as exchanges and sharing of seeds kept by farmers, religious programs tailored to the religious context of each region, art events, as well as sharing and exchanging knowledge among farmers.
The purpose of the Solidarity Seed Festival is as follows:
- Participate in the preservation, restoration, and conservation of ancient species at the local level.
- Disseminate and share knowledge on the preservation of traditional varieties and natural farming techniques or agroecology practices to promote farming that reduces the cost of agricultural inputs for farmers and small-scale food producers and reduces the impact from the use of chemicals.
- Connect and strengthen relationships between farming communities that practice agroecology.
