DECOLONISING DEVELOPMENT TO END HUNGER IN RURAL PERU
Abstract
This paper focuses on the issue of hunger and food insecurity in the Peruvian Andes. It provides a critique of the development industry and argues that the responses it utilises often draw on colonial structures that reproduce oppression. The development industry tends to be driven by the idea that the remedy to hunger and poverty exists in embracing globalisation and marketisation. However, interventions rooted in capitalism can actually exacerbate rather than resolve these issues.Rather than relying on imported solutions from the global North, this essay discusses a process of cultural affirmation and the reassertion of traditional knowledge in the Peruvian Andes. It canvases the decolonising work of a Peruvian Non-Government Organisation (NGO) known as El Proyecto Andino de Tecnologías Campesinas (PRATEC) and argues that contextualised responses that affirm Indigenous knowledge and encourage the co-production of knowledge rather than the wholesale importation of foreign solutions can reduce food insecurity at a local level.
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