Enacting food sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand and Peru: revitalizing Indigenous knowledge, food practices and ecological philosophies

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a cross-cultural study of two Indigenous¹ knowledge and food security systems: Quechua² people of Peru and Māori³ of Aotearoa – New Zealand, and implications for food systems sustainability and traditional knowledge. This study takes a novel approach by using a traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) lens to examine respective “good living principles” of Allin Kawsay/Buen Vivir in Peru and of Mauri Ora in Aotearoa in safeguarding food security. In this study, I introduce the “Khipu Model” as a source of knowledge production and sovereignty guiding the development of an Indigenous research-based framework. Drawing on over 45 interviews, with elders, community leaders, and people engaged in sustainable food production in Peru and Aotearoa. I show that an Indigenous “food security policy framework” underpinned by a set of cultural and environmental indicators of wellbeing resonates with conceptualizations of food sovereignty, whereas the dominant food security approaches do not. I argue that such a framework enacts practices of food sovereignty and represents a tool of Indigenous resurgence and social change in food politics for the revitalization of Indigenous food sovereignty as an alternative sustainable food system.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable food systems
• food sovereignty
• food security
• Indigenous peoples
• Mauri Ora
• good living/Buen Vivir
• TEK
• Khipu Model

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my most profound gratitude to the Quechua and Maori communities who took part in this research. Your wisdom, love and determination sustained me in completing this investigation. Also, I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Nigel Haworth and Dr Rachel Wolfgramm for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers which feedback enhanced the clarity of this paper.

Notes

¹ In this article, I capitalize “Indigenous” when I refer to Indigenous, Aboriginal, or Native people.

² The Quechua people are the Indigenous people of South America, and there are approximately 3.5 million Quechua people in Peru who predominantly live in the Andean region (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática 2017).

³ The Māori are the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, and according to the 2013 census, there were 598,605 people of Māori ethnicity, representing 14.9% of the country’s population (Statistics New Zealand 2017).

⁴ The Khipu (or talking knots) is a complex and colorful system containing knotted cords. A Khipu composes of one long “primary cord” of approximately 1 cm thick, woven from llama or alpaca wool laces, and with a series of subsequent pendant cords attached to it. Each pendant cord has a particular color, spin, knot, and contain encoded information (Urton 2003).

⁵ Māori centric research framework developed by, with and for Māori people (Smith 1999).

⁶ In this article, I use cosmovision and worldviews interchangeably to reflect the fact that cosmovision as opposed to worldviews is widely used in the Andean world.

⁷ Agroecology is the application of ecological concepts and principles to the design, development, and management of agricultural ecosystems. The goal is to achieve sustainable agricultural systems balanced in all areas; this includes the socioeconomic and the ecological or environmental and socioeconomic impacts of modern technologies (Altieri 1995).

⁸ Chacra in the Andean world is understood not only as a small plot of land but as the sacred space of the nurturance and flourishing of all forms of life (Field research notes in the Andes, July 2014).

⁹ Meeting place of Māori to connect and unify as Māori.

¹⁰ Forms of life in this study refer to the distinctions of each one of the living beings that inhabit Pachamama and Papatūānuku.

¹¹ Cultural/land resource in this study refers to the intrinsic relationship that Indigenous peoples have with the land driven by an animist cosmological vision that regards human and nonhuman significant living entities (Huambachano 2017).

¹² Person of mixed European and Indian ancestry.

¹³ For the purpose of this thesis, the human right-based approach refers to application of human rights principles to food security (Wittman, Desmarais, and Wiebe 2010).