Keeping Indigenous food practices alive

The Khasi are an Indigenous people living in the eastern part of Meghalaya, a state in northeastern India. Far from the capital New Delhi, the remote region is known for being one of the rainiest in the world. For generations, the Khasi have used their traditional knowledge and growing techniques to create a food system that remains strong and resilient to this day.

“Our traditional governance system is strong and transparent,” said Bah Phrang Roy, a Khasi community member and coordinator at the Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty. “There is a sacred relationship with nature, and because of that, the sharing, caring, and nurturing of the land that plays a very important role in our community.”

The figures are remarkable — in some villages, locals use more than 200 varieties of wild and domesticated foods for both consumption and medicinal use. They interplant plots in forest areas using traditional seed varieties of potatoes, cocoyam, and sweet potatoes. They also have sacred forest areas that they are forbidden to enter.

Despite not widely adopting modern agricultural methods, such as monocropping or intensive chemical inputs, they also enjoy far lower food insecurity compared to most of South Asia, according to a survey conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

While the Khasi people’s ability to maintain their food system is remarkable, the ability to produce food while maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem health, as well as staying resilient amidst climate change, are attributes common among Indigenous food systems in other regions. That’s according to a report released by FAO in June, which analyzed eight Indigenous food systems around the world and mapped their threats and insights.

“We found that Indigenous food systems are sustainable and resilient,” said Yon Fernández-de-Larrinoa, an author of the report and leader of the Indigenous peoples team at FAO. “It’s amazing how alive these food systems are despite globalization, commercialization, trade, and the lack of dedicated policies to protect them.”

Modern challenges

In Northern Thailand, the Pgaz K’Nyau, widely known as the Karen people, still follow their traditional rotational farming system and seed saving methods. But a lack of government recognition and an education system that drives the youth to the cities are posing challenges to the preservation of their techniques.

“The modern education system pushes young people to the city, because we don’t have colleges in the area, and most of them look for jobs in the city, and do not come back,” said Prasert Trakansuphakon, a Pgaz K’Nyau and president at the Pgakenyaw Association for Sustainable Development.

Another concern is climate change, which is being felt acutely in both northern Thailand and northeastern India.

“When we talk with the elders, they feel that it's too hot, too warm, not like before [due to climate change],” Trakansuphakon said. But so far, the traditional farming system has held up, partly due to its use of diverse farming techniques, as the Pgaz K’Nyau utilize five different mechanisms for gathering food.

“With climate change, we have some years of hard drought — this has become a big problem, especially for the paddy fields,” Trakansuphakon said. But rotational farming, which utilizes different rice species, fares better during these times, and even in years with too much rain. “It’s good to have diversity in farming techniques and seed species.”

For the Khasi, rainfall has also become less predictable year by year due to climate change.

“Last year, we had too much rain, whereas this year, we’ve only received a little rain,” said Pius Ranee, a Khasi youth, and former director at the North East Slow Food & Agrobiodiversity Society, a local NGO. They did a field survey to understand how Khasi communities were being impacted. While many Khasi continue to utilize traditional practices, the community is dispersed, and some villages due to outside pressure, have shifted to cash crops or monoculture farming. They were suffering from too much or too little rain.

“In communities where they are doing traditional farming, they don’t have as many problems. They have diverse crops to depend upon. Traditional farming is more resilient to climate change shocks,” Ranee said.

Supporting Indigenous youth and farming practices

Around the world, there are an estimated 476 million Indigenous peoples who preserve an astounding 80% of global biodiversity. Despite their increasingly measurable benefits to food security, biodiversity, and resilience, Fernández-de-Larrinoa said that not nearly enough is being done to support Indigenous peoples by the development sector.

“When we analyze the development packages, agricultural support actions, as well as conservation measures, they completely ignore the centrality of Indigenous food systems, and in most cases, when there is a program or a law passes to support certain ecosystems, the first thing they do is stop Indigenous peoples from conducting their traditional practices,” Fernández-de-Larrinoa said.

One area that Phrang Roy said is an opportunity for more international support is the creation of Indigenous-led organizations, so that communities like the Khasi and Pgaz K’Nyau can create mechanisms and opportunities for the youth to carry on traditions and be more involved in global food movements.

“Indigenous youth need to be funded to build their leadership skills, to understand their traditional knowledge,” Phrang Roy said. “It is not true that all youth want to go to urban areas, there are significant [numbers] who are eager to stay in their communities, as long as they can see that there is something for them to do.”

Fernández-de-Larrinoa hopes that raising awareness about the knowledge and benefits of Indigenous food systems leads to more efforts to protect them and their land, and to adopt their lessons on making how we produce food more sustainable.

“We’re very good at producing food by chopping down the forests, and adding a monoculture farm with intensive use of inputs to generate tremendous yields, but humankind doesn’t have the knowledge to generate food without destroying the environment and this is where Indigenous peoples come in,” Fernández-de-Larrinoa said.

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