Bedoya is in Rome, where the forum ’Peoples’ Food Sovereignty Now!’ is taking place in parallel to the FAO’s World Summit on Food Security.
“It is a forum that has enabled us to meet”, said Bedoya. He explained that the members of La Via Campesina are participating in this important forum, but that other alliances have joined as well.
“The idea is to influence, to start to talk about the issue of food sovereignty as the peoples’ right to food, but generating a real space for discussion and greater incidence and impacts on the proposal for food”.
Bedoya reflected about how the governments and international agencies’ discourse on food sovereignty has changed, but said there was still a long way to go to make their words come true.
He said “The rhetoric has changed. FAO’s Director General was present at the kickoff of the peoples forum and his speech focused very much on supporting food sovereignty, solving the world’s hunger, calling on the governments to make a greater investment and to have more political will on this matter. But we know the rhetoric is one and the practice another. This is seen in the fact that most of the G8 countries did not attend the FAO’s summit. Although they issued a declaration to erradicate hunger, they fail to make the social investment, they do not increase their money spent on fighting hunger”.
“So this is a very important fight that the native peoples should have”.