Communities can play key role for inclusive food system: Phrang Roy
Shillong, Nov 18: Noted agro-economist Phrang Roy highlighted the strategically important role that communities can play for any healthy, inclusive and sustainable food system while addressing the UN’s climate change conference COP29 being held at Baku in Azerbaijan.
“We only look to the state and the market as key pillars of our development with communities playing only a subservient role to these two entities,” said Roy, also the founder of NESFAS (North East Society for Agroecology Support) and currently the Rome-based coordinator of TIP (The Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty).
In his address through video-conferencing, he also said TIP along with NESFAS and three other indigenous peoples partners undertook an agroecology assessment of the food systems of indigenous peoples of 500 households living in 16 landscapes in Northern Thailand, North East India, Kenya and Yucatec Mexico.
The study indicated very high and positive agro-ecological practices and principles.
It found that all their food systems are rooted in their respective local environments. They do so because these communities believe they have a sacred relationship with their lands and their soils, Roy said.
They enhance their soil ecology and sustainability through their traditional systems of keeping some of their landscapes as fallow lands for natural regeneration, he added.
Their social values of caring and sharing also led them to evolve inclusive local governance systems including the empowerment of women in the management of natural soil and water resources.
Quoting the study, Roy further said when the market through large-scale monetisation or the promotion of monocropping for commercial purposes or when the state intervened and eroded traditional governance mechanisms as in the name of modernisation, these healthy, inclusive and sustainable food systems have had to seriously compromise their inclusive decision-making and equitable access to community resources.
Roy, therefore, made this clarion call: “Let COP29 and its many events therefore call upon policy makers to take note that a community in any landscape or geographical location is an important and indispensable pillar of development, as important as the state or the market. Only then we will collectively march towards healthy, inclusive and sustainable food systems”.
“As stakeholders who are strong believers in nature-based food systems, we are constantly looking for pathways that generate convincing outcomes to enhance biodiversity, improve nature-based nutrition, generate local green initiatives and build climate resilience,” he said.
Narrating his own understanding of traditional food system, he said “We have found through our own experience with NESFAS that a community-initiated and nature based school meal initiative can be an important programme that we can all support. This will ensure an effective and sustainable use of local wild edibles that are often a part of the local biodiversity of remote areas.”
“It will enhance the nutrition of children and build human capital and it could improve the food security of those who are often left behind. It could also encourage local communities to see the wisdom of local circular markets offsetting climate risks generated by linear value chains. It could generate local livelihood opportunities,” he said.
“But the school meals Initiative is only one of the many pathways that we could pick up from the template of solutions of communities,” he added.
