SEEBYN was officially formed in 2016, bringing together young people from different states and regions who had completed the social awakening process known as the Buddhist Youth Meeting for Spiritual Development and Buddhist Youth Leadership Training and who were concerned about issues of the environment, peace, and youth.<\/p>\n

SEEBYN\u2019s core values include carrying out social well-being and humanitarian activities in accordance with Buddha\u2019s preaching: following such principles as mutual understanding; mutual respect; empathy; self-harmony; loyalty; acceptance and valuing diversity; and constructive thinking.<\/p>\n

The Network \u2014 which is an informal network of young Buddhists from different walks of life \u2013 urban, rural, students, social activists, farmers, and social enterprise owners \u2014 actively raised funds and provided humanitarian support when the floods of 2016 affected several states and regions destroying people\u2019s livelihoods and homes. It was SEEBYN\u2019s first experience of providing a collective social response to the disaster caused by climate change, which is affecting the country more each year. Their commitment to achieving peace through achieving environmental justice grew stronger after these earliest efforts, with SEEBYN\u2019s young leaders sustaining their movement momentum by collaborating together to organise forums, exposure trips, humanitarian support and peace campaigns without external donor funding.<\/p>\n

They believe that seed sovereignty is the key to achieving environmental justice, which also includes climate justice. Farmers in Myanmar are increasingly using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to increase yield, and they have also started to use GMO seed imported mostly from China to resist environmental stress such as floods and drought and to produce designed crops. Instead of working with ecological processes and taking the wellbeing and health of the entire agro-ecosystem into account, SEEBYN has seen that Myanmar\u2019s agriculture is becoming reduced to an external input system reliant on chemicals. And instead of small farms producing diverse crops, large monoculture farms produce a limited selection of cash crops such as corns, bananas and sugarcane.<\/p>\n