Agrobiodiversity: knowledge, culture and climate conversations

Abstract

The article proposes an intercultural and comprehensive approach that goes beyond specialization and technicality in the understanding and management of agrobiodiversity, and presents it as a strategy to face current global challenges. New research findings have been analyzed and contrasted with results from agrobiodiversity research projects conducted over the past 20 years in Andean and Amazonian communities in Peru. Due to the magnitude and vastness of all ancestral knowledge in the area, special emphasis has been placed on the ancestral system of climate indicators. The results support the idea that the ancestral knowledge is closely related to the community’s cultural conceptions about life and the world. The research responds to the need to expand the social and cultural perception about ancestral knowledge, which contribute to the drafting of policies with cultural and ecological relevance based on its own profound values and ethics. Ancestral knowledge is, above all, knowledge; its quality lies in its epistemological nature that explains the meaning of such knowledge, the state of conservation of agrobiodiversity and the environment. Therefore, it is necessary to act and to reverse the progressive loss of ancestral knowledge that leads to the decrease in agrobiodiversity and landscape degradation.