Independiente Diálogo
Enfoque geográfico:
Sin fronteras
Area of divergence
Adapted from Rosado-May’s remarks: Global warming, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, hunger, pollution, among other crises challenge all cultures and peoples. Science has confirmed in recent years that Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems have been resilient and sustainable for centuries. They have been designed, managed and functioning within a cultural context that involves a complex of social, technological, ecological, economic (trade & marketing), governance, land tenure, horizontal decision making, and reflecting ways of processing information as well as constructing and passing on
... Leer más knowledge to new generations. This biocultural complexity explains the role of indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems to preserve and enhance biodiversity, mitigate climate change, control soil erosion, and sustain global ecological processes that benefit the planet. About 500 million Indigenous Peoples’ around the world have, in their hands, minds and hearts, conserved around 80% of the natural resources, including seeds of crops adapted to almost any ecological setting on our planet. Scientific literature reports that farmers cultivating up to two ha produce 70-80% of the world’s food; this figure has been challenged reducing the value to around 32%. The data does not specify how many of the smallholders’ farmers are indigenous but we can assume that the vast majority of them are, and still apply their traditional knowledge. Lets’ consider that 100% of the 500 million Indigenous Peoples’ are responsible for the 32% world food production; as compared to the 7.9 billion people in the world, small farmers/Indigenous Peoples’ represent only 6% of the world population. Impressive considering the many challenges those farmers are facing today. Nevertheless, the resilience and the knowledge that supports Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems are being lost rapidly. Immediate policy interventions are needed to prevent their total loss. How can we explain the above figures if it is not because of the resistance and resilience capacity of Indigenous Peoples forged over centuries? Indigenous Peoples understand that we live in a multicultural world, we also understand the value of different worldviews. As we all live in one house, we should learn how to maintain our multicultural settings and also build bridges for intercultural processes. Plenary remarks: Enacting systemic change requires institutionalizing support and making it part of the formal/subnational structure. There are a plethora of informal platforms that exchange knowledge/share information and alliances, but there is a missing link to the formal planning/decision making structures. Linking platforms to formal planning/budgeting processes is key. There remain risks in this in terms of capture of power, preexisting power imbalances, inequality and discrimination so empowerment and capacity building will be critical. Currently, there is a lack of participation in food systems from marginalized groups due to exclusion according to age, race, gender, and ethnic belonging. Territorial governance can help reduce tradeoffs of national policies that lack inclusion and can become a space for interaction between different cultures, an essential step to move to reducing pervasive discrimination. Many organizations are implementing solutions that refer to territory and to land governance. In Ethiopia, the national project on sustainable land management supports the legalization of watershed user cessations so locals can plan and manage their own watersheds at a scale of a couple of hundred hectares. Angola has gone through the process of an institutionalized farmer-field school approach integrating national rural extension services and linking local communities with local government and municipalities. The missing link is how to use these many context-specific solutions and make them part of the macro solution for food systems and territorial governance of food systems. To bridge this gap, we can bring together and integrate projects through longer-term action plans agreed on by communities that span the time needed to support natural capital (e.g., 20+years) and respect human rights. This requires: • Continued support for community cohesion, engagement and policy advocacy to enable networks at micro and macro levels. • Support for local government strengthening, through technical assistance, development of policy frameworks, policy advocacy to mainstream integrated approaches so bottom-up input stimulates national level changes. • Support for agroecological transitions and integrated landscape management by linking community and small-scale initiatives to broader landscape-scale projects and international support organizations. • Co-creation and re-design of agricultural extension services which integrate local and indigenous knowledge to ensure contextual understanding, and institutionalizing these services with cross-ministerial collaboration to ensure incentive and expenditure efficiencies. • Design public and private finance for the local context to support farmer and community transition to agroecology, processing and infrastructure with a wide variety of instruments and mechanisms. • Support for inclusion of women, youth, elders and traditional knowledge keepers within territories. • Participatory monitoring efforts with communities to serve the double function of engagement, validation, and trust building; as well as measuring contextually established indicators for success (i.e., watershed restoration, hectares under: riparian area management, agroecology). 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Línea(s) de Acción: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Palabras clave: Data & Evidence, Environment and Climate, Finance, Governance, Human rights, Innovation, Policy, Trade-offs, Women & Youth Empowerment