A recent workshop hosted by IIED and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew explored how the way Indigenous Peoples grow and consume food holds answers to the world’s broken food system.

Modern food and farming systems are fundamentally unsustainable. They contribute around a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and are responsible for almost 60% of global biodiversity loss. They are degrading the natural resources – water, soils, genetic resources – needed to sustain agricultural production.

Despite increased yields, food insecurity has been rising in recent years – more than 820 million people are hungry and 2 billion people are food insecure, underscoring the immense challenge of achieving the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of zero hunger by 2030.