By Pousali Giri | AGR Knowledge Services
Across food and agriculture, 2026 is shaping up to be a year where supply chain due diligence catches up with something many communities have understood for generations: land is never neutral. The EU’s Deforestation Regulation is now live for large operators and extends to smaller businesses by mid-year. Genetic resource governance bodies are, for the first time, formally recognising Indigenous knowledge in their decision-making. Neither happened by accident. Both are responses to mounting evidence that where Indigenous and traditional knowledge systems are respected, land tends to stay healthier, and where they are ignored, supply chains inherit the risk.
For companies sourcing agricultural commodities across the Global South, this is no longer background context. It is becoming a compliance and reputational line item.
Biodiversity and agricultural resilience
Modern agriculture has a concentration problem. According to the FAO, roughly 75% of the world’s food today comes from just 12 plant and 5 animal species, and three crops alone, rice, maize and wheat, account for nearly 60% of global calorie and protein intake. Over the past century, more than 90% of crop varieties have disappeared from farmers’ fields.
This is where traditional and indigenous agricultural systems tell a different story. The most rigorous available estimate (a peer-reviewed global analysis by Ricciardi and colleagues, which corrects the looser figures often quoted in this space) finds that farms under 2 hectares, disproportionately smallholder and traditional systems, produce 28 to 31% of the world’s crops and 30 to 34% of its food supply, on just 24% of agricultural land, while maintaining significantly greater on-farm crop diversity than large industrial operations.
That diversity is not incidental. It is the accumulated result of generations of localised experimentation: which varieties tolerate drought, which resist a particular pest, which combination of crops keeps soil productive without external inputs. Institutions are beginning to formally acknowledge this. Following a 2024 CBD COP16 decision to establish a Subsidiary Body under Article 8(j), indigenous representatives have started participating substantively in bodies like the FAO’s Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, a shift from consultation to genuine co-governance of the genetic resources that global food systems depend on.
What traditional systems teach about soil, water and land
The FAO estimates that Indigenous People manage approximately 28% of the world’s land surface, including some of the most ecologically intact forest areas that remain. This is not simply land that has been left alone. Much of it has been actively shaped, over generations, by practices such as controlled fire management, rotational land use and water systems tuned to local seasonal patterns.
These practices are now directly relevant to two things every sustainability and land-use framework is trying to solve: soil degradation and water stress. Global biodiversity targets, including the 30×30 goal under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, increasingly recognise secure indigenous land tenure as a precondition for effective conservation, not a side benefit of it. For agricultural businesses, this reframes land management conversations. Soil and water stewardship in a sourcing region are rarely separable from who has secure rights to manage that land, and how.
Where this intersects with global supply chains
This is the part of the conversation that has moved fastest in the last eighteen months. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) applies to large operators from 30th December 2025 and extends to small and medium enterprises from 30th June 2026. It covers seven commodity groups with heavy exposure to indigenous territories: palm oil, soy, cocoa, cattle, coffee, timber and rubber, along with their derivative products.
Critically, EUDR due diligence is not limited to satellite-verified deforestation data. It requires documented evidence of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) consultation with indigenous people and local communities in the country of production, in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Non-compliance carries penalties of up to 4% of a company’s annual EU turnover. The UK and US have comparable proposals moving through their own legislative processes.
The compliance gap here is real. Industry reporting from the accountability framework initiative and CDP found that of over 1,150 companies disclosing on deforestation management in 2023, only 21% presented high-quality information for even one commodity. For global sourcing and ESG teams, “we have a policy” and “we can evidence it at the plot level” are currently two very different claims.
What this means for sourcing and ESG frameworks going forward
A few practical implications follow from where the data and the regulation are both pointing.
FPIC is becoming a standing requirement, not a one-off audit.
Regulatory frameworks increasingly expect ongoing, documented consultation with affected communities, not a single sign-off at the start of a sourcing relationship.
Traceability needs to go to the plot of origin.
Aggregate country-of-origin claims are losing ground to commodity-level, farm-level documentation, particularly for the seven EUDR-covered commodities.
Traditional knowledge should be engaged with, not extracted from.
Where sourcing strategies or ESG reporting draw on Indigenous ecological practices, whether in agroforestry design, soil management or water stewardship, the more defensible position is one that involves the communities holding that knowledge as participants, with attribution and benefit-sharing, rather than as an unattributed input.
Looking ahead, expect this to formalise further.
Given the EUDR’s phase-in through mid-2026 and the CBD’s Article 8(j) body becoming operational, it is a reasonable projection that ESG frameworks and buyer scorecards through 2026 and 2027 will increasingly add Indigenous consultation and traditional-knowledge documentation as a standing due-diligence category, rather than a discretionary sustainability narrative, first and most visibly in palm oil, cocoa, coffee and cattle-linked leather supply chains.
The balance this requires
None of this means traditional ecological knowledge is an automatic solution to modern agricultural challenges, and it would be a disservice to treat it that way. Traditional systems face their own pressures, including land loss, climate disruption and the erosion of intergenerational knowledge transfer. The better approach is to treat the two as partners, not substitutes: sourcing and sustainability strategies tend to hold up better, under regulatory scrutiny and otherwise, when generations-deep local knowledge is paired with modern agronomic science, market data and technology, and when Indigenous rights and participation are actively protected rather than assumed. That intersection, not a romanticised return to tradition, nor a purely technocratic ESG checklist, is where global sourcing strategy is headin
Sources
FAO Forestry Division; FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture; FAO agrobiodiversity knowledge repository; Ricciardi et al., peer-reviewed global smallholder analysis; CBD COP16 decisions; EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) official guidance; Accountability Framework initiative / CDP 2024 reporting; UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
