Ensure FAMILY FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
Pastor Juan Elvir and his wife harvesting manioc, beans, squash, and nutritious greens from their kitchen garden in El Chol.
A top priority for Sustainable Villages Honduras (SVH) staff, Coordinator Roy Lara and the Vecinos Honduras facilitator, is to teach families how to increase the amount of healthy and abundant food they themselves can grow.
They also teach farmers how to train other farmers.
Out of the 126 families that SVH currently works with,
74 families use specific “best practices in agriculture” that they have been taught by Roy and Idania or by other SVH families.
47 families use only organic products, such as organic fertilizer or organic pesticides and herbicides and
79 families have their own kitchen gardens with many kinds of vegetables besides the food staples of corn and beans—plants that provide important minerals and vitamins that improve family health.
Luis Linares, left, is demonstrating to other La Majada farmers how to mix natural products to create an organic pesticide.
The good luck of abundant rainfall in 2020 brought about an abundant harvest. SVH families, confined to their villages because of Honduran policies to contain COVID-19, found themselves with plenty of food. Some of those who had lost jobs in the cities chose to return to their family land and took advantage of the opportunity to learn techniques of organic agriculture.
Luis Linares of Majada, for example, was let go from a maquila (factory) in San Pedro Sula. He set out to learn the sustainable agriculture techniques that his neighbors had been taught by Roy Lara. For the first time, he did not buy chemicals but used organic fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides and was happily surprised at their impact on crop growth and production.
Farmer Rene Hernandez, also of La Majada, gives thanks to God for the rains. Like other farmers he is considering building a metal silo to conserve the surplus of basic grain crops (corn and beans) to sell before the next harvest in 2021.