Sol y Verde  
May 2024

The Organización Ecológica Sol y Verde is a rural grassroots project and registered non-profit located in ​​Paxcaman, Guatemala, focusing on serving the vulnerable communities through permaculture and bioconstruction practices.

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Relevance

Paxcaman is located in the El Petén region in northern Guatemala. The El Petén region is home to the Maya biosphere reserve, Guatemala’s largest reserve.

 

Despite the importance of the agricultural sector in Guatemala, the majority of its agricultural products are exported, meaning that most of the food products are imported from the country’s neighbouring countries. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a sustained inflation, resulting in high food prices. Moreover, the predominantly green El Petén region is faced with deforestation of the non-protected areas for monoculture plantations where chemical fertilizers and pesticides are applied, or for cattle grazing, changing the environmental composition and altering the ecosystem. 

 

Increasing extreme weather conditions such as extended droughts and hurricanes, however, are resulting in crop failures and pushing rural, and often indigenous, inhabitants into extreme poverty, and/or forcing them to seek new livelihoods in urban areas. In addition to these challenges, a cultural change is noticeable with younger generations no longer wanting to pursue a livelihood in agriculture. 

 

This is where Sol y Verde comes in. Their aim is to develop solutions to the growing poverty, food insecurity, including through the revitalisation of Maya traditions and relearning of ancestral  knowledge. 

 

What is Sol y Verde's solution?

Sol y Verde was founded in 2021 by Balthazar Giron. The organisation’s vision is to act as an educational centre that can support the local communities, including children, towards more self-sufficiency. For this, Sol y Verde aims to develop solutions that are locally sustainable, affordable, culturally sensitive and are designed to be accessible and replicable for local community members. 

 

Sol y Verde seeks to a) teach and share permaculture practices with the local communities and schools, including subsistence farming; b) (re-)introduce ancestral building practices that are economical, using local materials that are adapted to local hazards; c) demonstrate and train knowledge in natural medicine and cultivation of relevant herbs and plants.

 

Conclusion

From an environmental standpoint, Sol y Verde’s strength is to create awareness about and teach hands-on permaculture practices that can directly lead to improved subsistence of local families. The project’s terrain exhibits an excellent example of how an ecosystem can be created and maintained. 

 

The project’s educational centre works primarily with schools and women groups, and seeks to create awareness about and understanding of permaculture. E.g. to support children and women’s learning about permaculture to later replicate in their own homes, or through school visits, and playful activities where each child helps cultivate its own small lot on Sol y Verde’s property, thereby strengthening the children’s interest in gardening and healthy diets. By working with schools in particular, Soy y Verde fosters a community thinking and aims to strengthen childrens’ connection to nature. 

 

In future, Sol y Verde is hoping to develop a program for migrants to work on their farm in exchange for food and lodging, so as to enable them to seek shelter and/or recover from their passage to the USA. ​

 

Website: https://solyverde.org/ 

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