By: Immaculata Casimero
Immaculata Casimero is a Wapichan woman from the South Rupununi and an advocate for Indigenous rights, women’s leadership, and community-led development in Wapichan Wiizi. She co-founded the Wapichan Wiizi Women’s Movement and is the Gender Affairs Officer of the South Rupununi District Council (SRDC). She supports efforts to strengthen food sovereignty, protect traditional knowledge, and ensure village voices shape the decisions that affect their lands, health, and future.
Across the vast savannahs, bush islands, mountains, and rainforests of the Wapichan Wiizi (Wapichan Territory), our ancestral home in the South Rupununi, food is our culture. Food is our medicine. Food is our history, our economy, our language, and our connection to the land. If Guyana is serious about celebrating Indigenous Heritage Month, then we must also be serious about the survival of the food systems that keep Indigenous peoples alive. Songs, dances, and craft-making ring hollow when we ignore what is happening to our farms, forests, waterways, and village kitchens that sustain our children.
For generations, the health and strength of Wapichan families have rested on deep environmental knowledge: knowing when wild ité palm fruits ripen in the wetlands, how to read seasonal rivers for fish, and how to cultivate and process bitter cassava into life-sustaining staples. When our grandparents were young in the 1940s and 1950s, many families relied far more regularly on foods from the forest, savannah, farms, gardens, and creeks than on food brought from Brazil and Georgetown.
The change came gradually, then sped up as the government increased its development plans. Over the last ten years, road access and stronger links to Lethem, Georgetown, Bon Fim, Boa Vista, and Manaus have made imported rice, flour, sugar, oil, canned foods, instant noodles, soft drinks, snacks, and beer much easier to buy and more common in our daily eating patterns. Over the last five years, this change has become more noticeable in many households, especially as children’s snacks, school meals, and quick shop purchases become part of our everyday routine.
The COVID-19 pandemic taught us valuable lessons and exposed several issues with our food system: when transport and cash flow were disrupted, families were reminded how important farms, cassava, fish, traditional foods, home gardens, and sharing networks are for survival. As recovery came, our dependence on shops and imported and processed foods returned with it.
The Wapichan Wiizi Women’s Movement (WWWM) is keen on addressing this challenge. The movement brings together Wapichan women who defend land, culture, livelihoods, health, and self-determination. For us, food sovereignty means more than having enough to eat; it means our right to decide what we grow, gather, hunt, fish, cook, sell, and feed our children, based on our own knowledge and values. Men and women often agree that food from the land is important, but women’s daily responsibilities in farming, processing cassava, feeding children, caring for elders, and managing household food expenses give them a deeper understanding of how quickly diets are changing and how deeply those changes affect the health of our children, parents, and elders.
In response, the Wapichan Wiizi Women’s Movement has decided to act by holding village-led discussions with Wapichan women and representatives from across the South Rupununi. Together, we are mapping what reaches our tables, where it comes from, who controls it, what we are losing, and what must be protected. This work is strengthened through partnership with the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College.
The natural landscape of the South Rupununi remains an expansive pantry for our people. Foods from the forest, savannahs, waterways, wetlands, farms, and home gardens continue to shape our daily meals, even as imported foods become more visible. Traditionally, communal hunting, seasonal fishing during the drying of creeks, and the gathering of wild foods such as ité, kuru, plum, honey, crabwood oil, and medicinal plants supplied families with nourishment, flavour, and healing. A complete meal might include cassava bread with fish damorid, farine with roasted wild meat, roasted soorom and chiki (palm grubs, commonly called tocuma) with pepper, or cassava bread eaten with farm-grown vegetables and local greens when available. These are ancestral and nutrient-dense foods.
Alongside our wild foods, farms and gardens remain the heart of Wapichan food production and show why access to our ancestral lands is important. Rotational farming involves cultivating a farm area for a specific period, then allowing the land to rest and recover before using it again. This practice reflects a deliberate system of soil recovery, seasonal observation, and respect for the living landscape. Women maintain a diverse range of crops, including bitter and sweet cassava, yam, sweet potato, eddo, pumpkin, corn, plantain, banana, peppers, bora, ochro, and other vegetables. Bitter and sweet cassava form the foundation of our diet and are transformed through highly skilled processing into farine, cassava bread (badi), damorid, and fermented beverages such as parakari and kasiri.
What we are losing
The loss we are experiencing is beyond nutrition. Some of our children now feel ashamed to carry cassava bread, farine, or traditional foods to school because they are made to believe that packaged snacks and coastland meals are more modern. In some school feeding programmes, poorly prepared meals disconnected from local taste and Indigenous nutrition are served to children, while foods grown by their own families are treated as secondary. This is one of the hard truths of Heritage Month: how can a country praise Indigenous culture while teaching Indigenous children to look down on the food of their own people?
The loss is also impacting our health. As our diets shift towards sugar, refined flour, and processed foods, our communities are beginning to see a rise in diet-related illnesses, like diabetes and high blood pressure, that were once rare in our communities. Why is this happening? It is because of the nutrition transition, the rapid shift away from traditional, nutrient-dense local foods toward cheaper, more accessible imported processed goods from Georgetown, Manaus, and Boa Vista. This transition is not just changing what we eat; it is changing our health, our bodies, and the future we leave for our children.
Women leading food sovereignty
In our Wapichan culture, women are chefs, agricultural scientists, food technologists, economists, teachers, and organizers of household food and resources. Women stretch limited resources, decide what can be stored, what can be shared, what can be sold, and what must be saved for children, elders, or challenging times. It is often women who select which cassava varieties to plant based on weather predictions, manage the intricate fermentation processes required to make traditional beverages, and ensure food is preserved for periods of scarcity.
Food scarcity is a real problem in the South Rupununi. For example, a creek running low can mean no fish for the pot; a dry farm can mean less cassava bread and farine on our family’s table. Delayed vehicles or a sudden rise in shop prices can change what families can eat that very day. These pressures make food sovereignty a matter of practical survival and are grounded in our daily experiences.
Through the WWWM, women across the South Rupununi are organising to place food discussions and regulations at the centre of village governance. We are documenting local food use, leading conversations about nutrition, evaluating shop purchases, encouraging families to value traditional meals, and discussing practical tools that reduce labour without replacing knowledge. Ideas such as a Wapichan Wiizi cookbook, community video lessons for young people, demonstrations with elders, and collaboration with chefs who respect Indigenous foodways, efforts the NYC Food Policy Center will be supporting, can help make traditional foods visible, attractive, and teachable again. These efforts are about making our food future stronger.
After the speeches
Reversing the shift away from our traditional foods will require collective action led by Village Councils, Toshaos, regional health officials, educators, local organizations, State officials, and families. A good starting point is creating village-designed food and nutrition guidelines, standards for what is grown, served, and taught in our own communities. Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) has too often been ignored by government offices, and village-designed guidelines are one way to restore accountability.
The growing dependence on imported and processed foods is a challenge we can reverse through conscious action, strong village leadership, women’s knowledge, and intergenerational education. Heritage Month must be more than speeches and presentations while changing diets, land pressure, weak food policy, and the erosion of food systems continue quietly in the background. If the State can fund ceremonies and celebrate Indigenous culture in public, then it must also fund practical, respectful, and accountable programmes that protect Indigenous food sovereignty every day.
It is time for us to make food sovereignty a shared priority. Every household, Village Council, school, health worker, and community organization needs to get involved. By honouring the wisdom of the land, supporting the WWWM, and adopting village-designed guidelines, we can ensure that our children grow up healthy, strong, and deeply rooted in Wapichan Wiizi. Every local meal prepared by us, from our own lands, nourishes our bodies and stands as an act of resistance, renewal, and independence for generations to come.
Discussion