From the Amazonian rainforest to the Argentine pampas, through the Andes and the Galapagos Islands, Latin America is home to the world’s greatest biodiversity. Over the millennia, Indigenous peoples have acquired a thorough knowledge of these territories and developed ingenious agronomic techniques, enabling them to feed themselves while, in turn, nourishing the soil and sustaining biodiversity.
However, according to a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published in 2023, more than one in three people in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer from food insecurity, which is defined as having irregular and insufficient access to healthy, nutritious food. Indigenous children suffer chronic malnutrition at twice the rate of non-Indigenous children.
According to agronomy engineer Kelly Ulcuango, from the Kichwa Cayambe nation in Ecuador’s Andes, this growing food insecurity, exacerbated by climate change, is caused, in particular, by the expansion of industrial agriculture in recent decades.
“Practices such as monoculture or the intensive use of chemical fertilizers have impoverished soils and biodiversity. Food insecurity is also rooted in the social injustices and systemic racism that stem from colonization. For example, the government does not provide good health and education services for everyone. To go to school or get a job, Indigenous people migrate to the city, where they abandon their culture and eat ultra-processed products,” summed up the researcher, who heads the agroecology and food sovereignty program at the Universidad Intercultural de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos Indígenas Amawtay Wasi [Amawtay Wasi Intercultural University of Indigenous Nations and Peoples], one of the few Indigenous universities in Latin America.
To regain their food self-sufficiency, can Indigenous communities reconnect with their traditional knowledge? How can this be done while respecting their “cosmovision,” their perception of the universe, which encompasses beliefs, values, knowledge and practices, and is at the heart of traditional food?
This is what Kelly Ulcuango and several other scientists have been working on since 2022 in a vast study program deployed in five Latin American countries and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Through five research projects, members of Indigenous and local communities are seeking to transform their food systems to make them healthier and more resilient in the face of climate change. The aim is also to take back the reins of production and marketing. To achieve this, they work with some 50 research managers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as knowledge custodians. This makes it possible to “base the research on real Indigenous science,” according to Kelly Ulcuango, who runs the program in Ecuador. “Our food is based on a principle of reciprocity: the Earth feeds us, and we feed it in return,” she explained. “You can, as a non-Indigenous person, study the food systems of First Peoples, aligning your methodology with their cosmovision, but you’ll never be able to speak, feel, work or investigate from your being as an Indigenous person will.”
Among those in charge of the research is María Quispe, an Aymara agronomist who heads PROSUCO. For more than 20 years, this organization has been helping communities in Bolivia to become food self-sufficient. María Quispe’s role is to encourage discussion within the community so that it can define its own priorities.
“For example, in Cusi Cusi, a Quechua community of 25 families located at an altitude of 3,000 metres that is part of this project, there is a problem with access to water that is exacerbated by climate change. This was a priority, as they don’t even have water for their own consumption. Because the community is so isolated, no one before us wanted to tackle this problem. So we organized an evening of video screenings of projects PROSUCO has carried out elsewhere in the Andes. People quickly identified with the other Indigenous people who had solved their problems. It gave them confidence. Together, they decided to build ferrocement rainwater tanks. We guided them by training and paying local technicians, but the workers were the family members!” she described.
Promoting knowledge transfer
For communities to tap into their cosmovision, María Quispe explained that scientists need to find and empower yapuchiris, an Aymara word that translates as “local talents.” “These are often older people, who find it easy to assimilate and interpret the knowledge passed down by their ancestors,” she said. “They can sometimes predict rainfall or periods of frost simply by observing the sky or wind direction on key dates. They are also the ones who test new techniques in their gardens to respond to a challenge and to develop ancestral knowledge.”
But, like the soil, this rich human heritage is eroding, María Quispe lamented: “It’s urgent, because the wise are dying without having passed on their knowledge to the young. We have to travel the land with yapuchiris, with our grandparents and parents, to acquire this knowledge which is passed on orally.”
The research managers and the community are thus creating intergenerational spaces where young people and local talent can update their cosmovision. “For example, there’s a technical institute that trains future agronomy technicians four hours from the Andean community of Julo de Torotoro, which we support. We set up a partnership with the institute so that the students’ end-of-year internship would take place in their community,” summed up Renato Pardo, an anthropologist by training who took part in the research.
“Recently,” he continued, “a student and a yapuchiri teamed up to create an organic fertilizer in a place where papaya and lime production is suffering. They first identified local plants that could enrich overexploited soils, then explored the territory together to find out where to find them and how to harvest them to maximize their properties, and then tested them on two areas of farmland.” Lastly, the student, Nestor Condori, wrote up his experience and the knowledge transmitted by the yapuchiri, giving him credit.
Food sovereignty
According to Kelly Ulcuango, this alliance between young people and local talent is the key to enabling communities to protect their right to food sovereignty with regional, national and international political bodies. “We are witnessing the emergence of a network of young Indigenous people who have mastered new technologies and can transmit the knowledge and wisdom of their ancestors on social media in Spanish or English. It’s also this fight for equity that we want to encourage,” stressed the 35-year-old researcher, who herself broadcasts Kichwa-language capsules on social media.
The momentum of these communities inspires far beyond local borders. Last May, Indigenous leaders from seven countries on the American continent gathered in Yunguilla, Ecuador, at the initiative of IDRC. “I felt a very strong bond with them,” said Ken Paul, a member of New Brunswick’s Wolastoqey Nation (Malecite) who was in attendance. “They held a two-hour welcome ceremony that was very similar to ours. They honour, for example, the four directions as we do... We discussed our mutual struggles to have our rights and those of Mother Earth recognized. Communication was easy, because we share the same value system.”
Ken Paul, who defends the rights and interests of First Nations regionally, nationally and internationally on fisheries and oceans issues in Canada, notes that the voice of Indigenous nations is increasingly sought in finding solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss, challenges that have a direct impact on food systems. “I recently participated as a speaker at a major meeting organized by UNESCO to ensure that our vision of the challenges of fishing and ocean preservation is taken into consideration. This was the first time a member of Canada’s First Nations had been invited. Things are starting to change,” he said proudly, and resolutely optimistic.
The program described in this article and the production of this report were made possible by support from Canada’s International Development Research Centre.
This article was originally published in French in the December 2024 issue of the magazine Québec Science.