When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt in early 2020, people around the globe were left struggling to support themselves and their families, without work or transport, and facing shortages of products from toilet paper to basic foodstuffs.

The pandemic laid bare the vulnerabilities of global food supply chains that rely on long distance transportation, and of farming systems that depend on access to markets to purchase external inputs and sell products. But it also highlighted the tremendous resilience of the self-reliant biocultural food systems of Indigenous Peoples around the world.

Indigenous mountain communities – from Peru to Kenya to Tajikistan, Bhutan and Papua New Guinea – were able to ensure the food security and health of their communities thanks to their localised, biodiverse, circular food systems founded on ancestral knowledge and cultural values.