Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems and Biocultural Heritage: Addressing Indigenous Priorities Using Decolonial and Interdisciplinary Research Approaches | Land Portal

Resource information

Date of publication: 
January 2022
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
LP-midp002550
Copyright details: 
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article

The food systems and territories of Indigenous Peoples sustain much of the world’s biodiversity, cultivated and wild, through agroecological practices rooted in Indigenous cosmovision and cultural and spiritual values. These food systems have a critical role to play in sustainability transformations but are widely threatened and have received limited research attention. This paper presents the results of four virtual workshops with Indigenous Peoples: a global workshop and local workshops with communities in coastal Kenya, northeast India and southwest China. Indigenous participants highlighted the role of their food systems in resilience to climate change, nutrition, sustainability and resilience to pandemics, and threats from agriculture, development and conservation policies. They called for research on the rapid loss of Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous Peoples’ land rights and food sovereignty; and the impacts of industrial agriculture on Indigenous food systems, stressing the need for decolonial approaches to revitalise Indigenous knowledge. The paper presents a decolonial and interdisciplinary framework for action-research on Indigenous food systems past and present, from farm to plate, drawing on the virtual workshops, Andean decolonising methods and historical approaches. It concludes that decolonising action-research, led by Indigenous Peoples, is urgently needed to reverse the rapid loss of food-related biocultural heritage.

Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Swiderska, KrystynaArgumedo, AlejandroWekesa, ChemukuNdalilo, LeilaSong, YichingRastogi, AjayRyan, Philippa

Corporate Author(s): 
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Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050; CODEN: SUSTDE) is an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly and open access journal of environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. Sustainabilityprovides an advanced forum for studies related to sustainability and sustainable development, and is published monthly online by MDPI. 


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    MDPI AG, a publisher of open-access scientific journals, was spun off from the Molecular Diversity Preservation International organization. It was formally registered by Shu-Kun Lin and Dietrich Rordorf in May 2010 in Basel, Switzerland, and maintains editorial offices in China, Spain and Serbia. MDPI relies primarily on article processing charges to cover the costs of editorial quality control and production of articles. Over 280 universities and institutes have joined the MDPI Institutional Open Access Program; authors from these organizations pay reduced article processing charges.

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