One of the hundreds of representatives present before the FAO Regional Meeting is Antonio Gonzalez, from Guatemala, who is regional coordinator at the Agroecological Movement of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In an interview with Real World Radio, Antonio highlighted the link between agroecology and Food Sovereignty, and said that this “implies autonomy in political, economic and therefore food terms’.
Member of the Network in Defense of Food Sovereignty in Guatemala (REDSAG), Gonzalez said that the main threats against communities that produce food in his country are GM seeds and agribusiness, stating that the goal of the Agroecological Movement is to join a “broader struggle at continental level” to provide answers to the problems of the continent.

MAELA is made up by 200 grassroots organizations from the entire continent and is part of the Regional Committee for Food Sovereignty and the Civil Society Mechanism operating at the level of the Committee on World Food Security of the FAO.

Before the 3rd Special Conference on Food Sovereignty, members of the Movement gathered in the Argentinian capital city to make decisions on the agenda of the social movements and the creation of a Latin American School of Agroecological Thought, among other issues.
Antonio Gonzalez explained in the interview that the goal is to “strengthen critical thinking to guide an analysis about global threats to agroecology and thus Food Sovereignty, and to enable a double answer: from global to local levels and viceversa”.