All roads lead to Rome

UN FAO Room. World Food Forum, 2025

Sharing Lands is off to Rome to attend the UN FAO World Food Forum. It’s our third year taking part in the annual flagship event of the FAO. This year we’ll be hosting a session alongside our friends and colleagues at the Choctaw Chata Foundation as part of the Global-Hub on Indigenous Peoples' Food Systems

We’ll be exploring how Indigenous Peoples' and Irish historical experiences of dispossession and the recovery of food systems can inform contemporary approaches to food sustainability, biodiversity conservation, cultural revitalization, and community resilience through the preservation and transmission of ecological knowledge, language, and traditional food systems.

Along with colleagues from the Choctaw Nation and others we’ll be discussion what lessons can be learned from history, and particularly the history of the Irish famine, when it is placed in dialogue with Indigenous experiences of dispossession and with contemporary efforts to recover agricultural knowledge. We will be thinking about Indigenous ecological knowledge not as a relic of the past, but as a form of resilience infrastructure – knowledge that can support communities as they navigate environmental change, political instability, food insecurity, and the disruption of global supply chains.

We also plan to examines the role of education and language. Agricultural knowledge is not simply technical information. It can be embedded in language, cultural practice, relationships with land, seed-saving traditions, and intergenerational memory. When those systems are disrupted, communities can lose not only knowledge of how to grow food, but also aspects of their cultural and ecological agency.

We’re really looking forward to meeting colleagues from across the world and to interesting conversations which will no doubt prompt a number of different new research strands for us to investigate.