In the past century, Indigenous knowledge has been dismissed in different ways. Take the Green Revolution, a vast increase in the production of food grains in the decades after the Second World War. This resulted mainly from the introduction of high-yielding crop varieties and changes to agricultural practices, such as the use of machinery and chemical inputs.
By tripling cereal production within four decades, the spread of agricultural technologies helped to alleviate hunger and poverty in some places. However, in others it created food insecurity and exacerbated pollution, deforestation and the displacement of Indigenous and small-scale production systems.
In principle, Indigenous and local knowledge could help to create training data sets. These could enable researchers and crop developers to find food sources that contain certain nutrients, that will tolerate anticipated climate shifts or that harbour resistance to emerging pests and pathogens. Phylogenomic models and artificial intelligence could then mine these data to predict the occurrence and function of genes that underlie useful traits across the tree of life23. And with genomic sequencing and gene-editing techniques becoming more accessible and affordable, more of the work to modify and cultivate species and varieties could happen at local and regional levels.
