Marcelo Fosatti, member of the Coordination of the Seed network said over a thousand children from rural schools and guests from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Italy and Ecuador will attend the event, where there will be a space to exchange native seeds, a meeting of farmers of across Uruguay, and they will all celebrate genetic diversity.

The University of the Republic, the National Agroecology Network and the National Commission of Rural Development also support the initiative, said Fosatti. This is the fourth edition of the main event for the exchange of experiences around agroecologic production in Uruguay, where forestry and soy monoculture plantations have occupied large extensions of land in the past 10 years, with the acceptance of the authorities.

“The plan is to organize several meetings at the same time so that the producers get to know each other. This year the focus is on children, with a view to the future, so that children become familiar with the seeds and their importance”, said Fosatti.

He highlighted the importance of rural women in the conservation of seeds: “we know from many years of experience of our Network that women are the ones who know best how to keep the seeds”, he said.

The Program to Save and Value Native Seeds and Food Sovereignty began in 2004 with the joint participation of farmers, the School of Agronomy of the University and REDES- FoE Uruguay.

The program aims to contribute to building people’s food sovereignty through valuing the native seed varieties and to promote agroecologic production through the active participation of the farming families, thus creating a critical space on genetic values and food sovereignty.

It comprises 120 projects from all over the country, and it works as a network of farmers organized in areas in order to attend to and determine organizational and productive aspects of the network.

Fosatti pointed out that after seven years of advocacy of the Network, there has been an increasing reliance of Uruguayan agriculture on industrialized seeds and supplies, so the farmers have come to the conclusion that “seeds are a key part of the whole production and of Food Sovereignty, so we cannot trust the corporations on something as sensitive as seeds”.