Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

This paper examines the ways of knowing and experiencing climate change, as well as enacting practices in response to its impacts by a set of indigenous organic coffee producers, members of a small, local growers’ association in Colombia. This work centers around two key questions: how do their experiences of the effects of climate variability and change along with their sustainable production practices interact with institutional scientific accounts of climate change within an uneven power dynamics of knowledge production that marginalizes their ways of knowing and acting in nature? How does this evolving indigenous knowledge that reflects an ethics of care remain anchored on ancestral knowledge? I draw upon in-depth, semi-structured interviews I conducted with organic coffee producers, association officials, officials from regional and local organizations in charge of supporting coffee producers, in addition to plot walks, during the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2019.