Food Sovereignty
In Rabinal, climate change is already reshaping daily life: prolonged droughts, depleted soils, and limited employment opportunities are pushing many families to the brink of survival. Voces y Manos works alongside Maya-Achí families to strengthen food sovereignty and resilience in the face of these challenges.
Through agroecology, we are helping communities adapt, preserve, and innovate their ancestral knowledge, improve health, and strengthen community cohesion. Our vision is to achieve Food Sovereignty: “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
Community Leadership for Buen Vivir: At the center of our work are 19 Aju’Wach, community promoters of agroecology who share their knowledge to inspire and guide other families in their journey toward agroecology. Working in close partnership with our young adult agroecology outreach workers, the Aju Wach manage 19 agroecological field schools that serve as living classrooms where farmers learn agroecological principles and tangible skills for diversifying production, improving soil health, ending dependence on agrotoxins, and improving animal health. These activities also bring multiple generations together, regenerating a cooperative ethos rooted in Buen Vivir (Living Well), which had been torn apart by the U.S.-backed genocide.
Saving Native Seeds: Native seed varieties of corn, beans, squash, and amaranth have immeasurable value in the Maya-Achí world. These seeds have been passed from generation to generation across hundreds of years. Unlike purchased seeds, native seeds can be harvested and replanted from one year to the next. Voces y Manos partners with community leaders to create seed banks and to hold seed swaps, bringing community members together to exchange seeds across villages. These seed swaps have allowed farmers to recuperate varieties they had lost to drought. Taken together, these activities help preserve not only genetic diversity but a cherished cultural legacy.
Improving Animal Health: Animals are a critical part of agroecosystems in the Maya-Achi region, and are critical to families’ food sovereignty and livelihoods. Through our “veterinarios comunitarios” (community veterinarians) program, we vaccinated nearly 10,000 backyard chickens. In addition, Voces y Manos team members also taught ethnoveterinary remedies and provided supplements and deworming treatments to over 500 cattle. This dramatically increases the survival rate of animals, strengthening household nutrition and creating income opportunities through the sale of eggs, poultry, and dairy.
Equipping Future Generations
The Maya-Achí community, like many Indigenous communities worldwide, faces unprecedented threats to cultural survival. As agriculture and other local livelihoods become less viable, a growing number of youth are migrating to Guatemala City, North America, or Europe. Elders increasingly fear that farming traditions, cultural practices, and the deep ecological wisdom embedded in them will be lost.
Yet elders are committed to ensuring their culture and way of life stay alive, and a new generation of Maya-Achí youth is rising to meet the challenges of their generation. Voces y Manos is committed to working with the Maya-Achí community to strengthen intergenerational exchanges of wisdom, ensuring the community’s land-based cultural traditions stay alive.
Teaching Agroecology in Primary Schools: Promoting health and cultural survival: Through the “My School Plot/Mi parcela escolar” projects, Maya-Achí young adults are helping children engage with agroecology and connect more deeply with their ancestral knowledge. Children engage through hands-on learning, cultivating milpa, vegetables, and fruit trees, they learn about composting and soil health, and make nutritious meals with the food they produce. These activities strengthen cultural revitalization, food sovereignty, and promote healthy nutrition, all while ensuring ancestral practices thrive in the next generation.
Training The Next Generation of Young Adult Agroecologists: Maya-Achí young adults face their own challenges: few work opportunities, limited opportunities to study, and climate change making it increasingly difficult to earn a living from farming. Fortunately, new generation is picking up the mantle of agroecology.
In 2024, Voces y Manos joined with three sister Maya organizations — Q’achuu Aloom, Campesino 13 de Marzo, and ACPC — to form RAMA (Red de Agroecología Maya-Achí), a coalition committed to recovering native seed varieties within traditional milpa systems, eliminating dependence on agrochemicals, and restoring soils across Achí territory. Within its hundreds of members, the network has identified young people with particular interest in agroecology and ancestral knowledge.
With funding from the Agroecology Fund, RAMA launched a unique training program to equip the next generation of young adult Maya-Achí agroecologists. Over a 24-month period, these young people receive mentorship and work full-time at one of the RAMA partner organizations. In this immersive agroecological training program, they will also receive intensive training in technical agroecological skills, community leadership, and strategic communication.
The goal is to cultivate a generation of young Maya-Achí agroecologists who are rooted in ancestral knowledge, equipped with contemporary tools, and committed to building food sovereignty in their own territory.
Protecting the Earth
Ultimately, agroecological practices aim not only to improve the lives of individual farmers but entire ecosystems.
With our partners in ACPC, Voces y Manos is committed to ecological restoration throughout the Maya-Achí region. We do this through the gradual elimination of agrochemicals, and through campaigns of watershed protection.
Transitioning from Agrochemicals to Organic inputs: After many decades of intensive promotion of agrochemicals and synthetic fertilizers, many farmers in the Maya-Achí farmers have become heavily dependent on these expensive and toxic inputs. From cancer links to severe soil degradation, the harms of agrochemicals are well-documented.
A transition to organic inputs is therefore essential for human and environmental health.
Using simple, locally available materials like leaf litter, molasses, and barrels, community agroecology promoters are building a network of 48 biofactories across the Rabinal region. In partnership with RAMA, these community-run spaces produce and share organic bioinputs, including repellents, fungicides, and soil amendments, using mountain microorganisms (microorganismos de montaña, or MM).
By making these low-cost, organic alternatives widely accessible, the biofactories can help thousands of farmers transition away from toxic agrochemicals and toward sustainable, agroecological practices.
Protecting Forests & Soils: Voces y Manos has planted more than 18,900 forest trees and 1,400 fruit trees. This helps improve water recharge and reduce erosion.
Working with family farmers to create a network of community nurseries which will grow coffee saplings, and a range of native tree and plant species. These nurseries will be managed by women’s groups, providing them with a source of income. They will also provide a key source of native species, which Voces y Manos’ agroecology leaders will help farmers integrate into coffee-growing agroforestry systems. These community nurseries will play a key role in stimulating local economies and creating a sustainable mechanism for community-led ecological restoration.
Advocacy and Action-Research
With roughly ⅓ of global emissions attributable to agriculture, we know that transforming the food system is critical to surviving the climate crisis. We also know that Indigenous communities’ food systems are among the most sustainable and diverse in the world — their revitalization is vital to addressing the climate crisis. Yet strengthening Indigenous food systems is not a simple task: it requires fundamental changes to international policies, which continue to favor agribusiness at the expense of small-scale farmers. It also requires new approaches to research, capable of integrating Western science and Indigenous knowledge.
Voces y Manos’ research and advocacy leverage our local, community-based experience to drive changes in knowledge and policy. Moving beyond a search for technocratic fixes, our research braids together Indigenous and Western knowledge systems, contributing transdisciplinary knowledge needed for ecological and cultural restoration. Transforming research to practice, we aim to build stronger, more interconnected communities.
Watch: Voces y Manos co-founder Michael Bakal describes Voces y Manos’ model of community-driven development toward a vision of Buen Vivir.
Our Research: Our community-based research aims to document promising strategies to equip the next generation of Maya-Achí leaders to achieve Buen Vivir — good and dignified life conditions — in their communities. Guided by a philosophy of Buen Vivir, our research and are concerned with humanity’s relationship to the natural world — we seek to transform a paradigm of extraction (of knowledge and resources) to one of interconnection, co-creation, and reciprocity.First, we are studying the impacts of climate change on Maya-Achí communities, documenting not only ecological impacts but also impacts of climate change on the Maya-Achí culture and way of life. Second, we study howIndigenous philosophies and knowledge are being leveraged to foster successful climate change adaptation. Third, we study the teaching and learning practices of agricultural outreach workers to understand how they encourage the spread of sustainable, resilient practices. Finally, we are documenting the health and environmental impacts of a transition to agroecological practices.
Advocating for Change Through Community Organizing and Strategic Partnerships: Ultimately, food sovereignty for Indigenous communities will not be addressed without tackling a fundamentally unjust global food system. By participating in advocacy networks, we push for equitable and just environmental, economic, and health policies.
Voces y Manos is proud to be a co-founding member organization of the Maya-Achí Agroecology Network or “RAMA.” Together with our partner organizations, we have developed a comprehensive strategic plan for climate change adaptation in the Maya-Achí region. We are also an active member of the REDSAG, the Guatemalan food Sovereignty Network. Through the network we are working to pass legislation protecting the right to native seeds of the Mayan People. With strong footholds in both the Global North and Global South, we also educate, inform, and inspire activism to challenge global inequalities. We do so through educational delegations and field schools to Guatemala, through our community organizing, and through public writing.
