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IATP's Carin Smaller is blogging from Rome this week at the UN Food and Agriculture High Level Conference on Food Security.

Terra Preta or “black soil” is the name of a fertile soil created by indigenous people in Central Amazonia, which mysteriously continues to regenerate itself. It is the title of the forum for farmers, pastoralists, fishers, environmentalists, human rights activists and NGO’s being held on the sidelines of the UN’s High-Level Conference on Food Security, June 3-5, at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome.

The forum celebrates the vibrancy of local communities, their struggles against injustice, and the prospect of solving the global food, energy and climate crises through local, community-based and sustainable initiatives. But the forum has been tainted with a deep sense of disappointment because many of the leaders here have been excluded from participating in the High-Level Conference; their voices silenced.

At the outset, the FAO had planned a conference on how to ensure world food security, in light of the threat of climate change and biofuels production: then the food crisis exploded. The FAO meeting was transformed into an emergency gathering of world leaders to create a plan to solve the crisis. With Presidents and Prime Ministers from France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Egypt, there simply was no space left for leaders representing communities affected by the food crisis.

And so the Terra Preta forum continues in parallel, while world leaders meet at the FAO headquarters. Debates are taking place around three topics: (1) the food crisis and models of production; (2) land, water, energy and agrofuels; and (3) climate change. The participants are preparing a declaration to read out at the end High-Level Conference and a plan of action of their own on how to solve the food crisis. As I sit and watch the events unfold, I am forced to wonder when the international community will stop, take a breath, and realize that finding solutions to the world’s problems, starts with the people hit hardest.