Reincorporating Traditional Knowledge into Agricultural Development Paradigms: A Look at the Food and Agriculture Organization's Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System Initiative in Chile

The concept of food security that global institutions, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), have emphasized for decades does not promote the engagement of people suffering from hunger and poverty. Food sovereignty, on the other hand, advocates for people having complete control of their local food system. This concept is meant to return power to the people worldwide that are producing the majority of the global food supply, despite the dominance of industrial agriculture in global export markets. Food sovereignty also supports the use of local and traditional agricultural knowledge as part of developing and maintaining successful food systems, while food security does not specifically support such knowledge and instead promotes simply "knowledge of basic nutrition and care" ("Food Security", n.d.). This thesis will first provide a brief historical background of the role of agriculture in Chilean development, discuss the main arguments for why small-scale agriculture is more sustainable than large-scale industrial agriculture, and explore the connections between the concepts of traditional ecological knowledge and food sovereignty. Second, a brief history of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will be outlined, tracing its evolution from its inception in 1945 until today. The FAO is in the midst of reform and its changing attitudes have paved the way for new initiatives, such as the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) initiative. The third chapter concentrates on the region of Chiloe, a GIAHS site in southern Chile. This chapter aims to demonstrate the following: 1) the structure of the GIAHS initiative in Chiloe and its main objectives in the region, 2) the challenges this initiative faces within Chiloe, and 3) how the valuation of agricultural heritage can help support an alternative model of agricultural development within the region. Rethinking the concept of food security as food sovereignty can help put power back into hands of local producers and consumers and thus promote more culturally-appropriate food systems and the development of policies that better support small-scale producers. Though the FAO's GIAHS initiative is still new and there are not yet results as to whether it will help increase valuation of traditional agriculture and its products, it is still an example of an alternative development paradigm and how this alternative, typically associated with grassroots peasants' movements, NGOs and bottom-up approaches, has made its way to the institutional level.