Fausto Sarmiento, José Tomás Ibarra, Antonia Barreau, Carla Marchant, Juan González, Manuel Oliva and Mario Donoso
There is a growing trend for inclusion of the food sovereignty dimension as a driving force of biodiversity conservation in mountain production landscapes. This is particularly important when dealing with agrobiodiversity in the tropical and temperate Andes, whereby complex agricultural systems and domesticates have incorporated ethnographic overtones in food production and consumption. One segment of this new imperative relates to foodstuff associated with rituals or religious practices and community-based observance of heirloom varieties and recipes of Andean food staples. These foods include specialty corn staples, potato races, quinoa varieties, rare lupines, and a collection of tropical fruits, seeds and fibers, including plants and animals, as former elements of a continuous forest cover that has now been reduced to patches amidst the herbaceous matrix of the Páramo, Jalca, Puna and temperate highlands. By using case studies of mountain foodscapes of the tropical and temperate Andes, changes to the foodscape narrative for vernacular culture-nature sustainability are suggested, making specific reference to field observations and research projects conducted in these regions. As global environmental change lures closer in the mountain development horizon, the stewardship of heirloom practices should be highlighted, and the cultivation of respect and observance of Andean traditions with syncretic undertones, found in historical and contemporary foodscapes of the tropical and temperate Andes, must be observed. For this, using the Montology framework as a way to fuse Western science (WS) with Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), new research agendas are devised via transdisciplinary applications in the complex socio-ecological production landscapes (SEPLS) of the Andes, concluding the need of managing them as foodscapes deserving protection as biocultural microrefugia.
