Twenty Years of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems

Foreword

Today hunger is rising exacerbated by the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts, widening social inequities, natural disasters and the climate crisis. Unsustainable agricultural and land practices, degraded ecosystems and biodiversity loss further threaten our ability to feed a growing world population – set to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) believes that promoting and strengthening sustainable agricultural practices, combined with traditional knowledge and innovation, is key to safeguarding our environment, protecting our biodiversity, and increasing the resilience of the 2.5 billion people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture: the small-scale farmers, Indigenous Peoples, fishers, herders and forest-dependent communities.

During the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, FAO launched a Global Partnership Initiative for the conservation and adaptive management of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) as a response to the alarming global trends undermining family farmers and traditional agricultural systems. GIAHS was endorsed as an FAO Corporate Programme at the Thirty-ninth Session of the FAO Conference in 2015 in recognition of its innovative and holistic approach in supporting traditional farming systems.

Systems recognized by the GIAHS represent a living, evolving system of human communities in an intricate relationship with their environment.

This unique programme identifies and safeguards these precious systems and their associated landscapes, agricultural biodiversity, knowledge systems and culture, while increasing the resilience of people´s livelihoods and implementing dynamic conservation strategies.

KENYA
Oldonyonokie/Olkeri Maasai women looking after their livestock
©FAO/David Boerma

EGYPT
Female farmer collecting dried dates from Siwa Oases
©WEST SIWA DEVELOPMENT PROJECT

FAO has designated 67 systems in 22 countries. This not only values stunning natural landscapes, but also the agricultural practices (both traditional and innovative) that combine building rural livelihoods with sustaining biodiversity and resilient ecosystems.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of GIAHS, FAO has brought together this collection of success stories to highlight achievements where actions:

• ensure the protection of agricultural heritage systems by leveraging global and national recognition of the importance of agricultural heritage systems;
• build the capacity of local farming communities and local and national institutions to conduct good management of GIAHS systems and sustainably generate economic value; and
• promote an enabling environment and policies to support the conservation, adaptation and development of GIAHS systems.

I hope these stories inspire you, so that we can all increase our efforts to ensure better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life for all: leaving no one behind.

Qu Dongyu
FAO Director-General