MST

Educational Exchange trip to Brazil

• Our goal is to learn more about global food sovereignty movement and share our knowledge of the seed saving movement in North America

• We also want to experience community solidarity processes of Afro-Brazilian homestead movements and resistance cultures; and gain valuable tools to augment community work being done in Virginia

• We are going to form relationships with our South American counterparts and allies; and invite them to Virginia for a world cultures conference in July 2023

Why do we want to visit the MST? 

We are part of a small federation of income sharing, agrarian communities in North America, the FEC. We have a long standing tradition here of living in community and practicing regenerative agriculture, and we believe, share many values with the MST.  The MST is large, successful and relevant on a national scale in Brazil. Our question is how we can work to expand and grow our movement. We want to learn from the MST how to potentially scale up the work we are doing. We are part of the global movement of peoples who share these values of shared land, shared wealth, and respect for people and the Earth. The objective of our visit is  to build a relationship of solidarity with you all as part of this movement.

As seed savers, as farmers, as food sovereignty activists, we are interested in connecting about these topics. We know that the MST is a vast organization and specifically what we are interested in are: MST communities, politics, and agriculture. 

Connecting on seeds, we potentially have something to offer. If it would be useful to you we could share experience and knowledge of seed saving, or give a workshop on what is the state of the organic seed movement in North America and/or what are ways that we could collaborate as seed savers. 

We would like to see how we could be of service to the MST because of our positionality in the first world while also learning from the scale and massive national level success of the MST. 

We want to acknowledge the enormous history of North Americans and Europeans coming to Brazil in an extractive way. We think it's important to express that the dismantling white supremacy and all forms of colonialism and exploitation are core to our goals of this trip and our organizations. We endeavor to be  intentional about building alliances that are beneficial for all organizations involved. We are also looking to gather funds to remunerate our sister organizations for the time that they invest in us.