International Landscapes for People, Food and Nature – An international effort to scale up sustainable rural development
18 November 2011 | Permalink [1]
Photo: Bioversity/E.Dulloo
Our current food, forest and wetland production systems are at risk and there is doubt about their capacity to feed the increasing global population or the growing number of people that are already hungry and malnourished.
Land and water are becoming scarce, some 75% of crop diversity has been lost from farmers fields since the 1990s, and climatic changes are starting to adversely affect our ability to grow food successfully. All this signifies an urgent need for a paradigm shift in agricultural approaches.
Finding ways to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services, improve livelihoods, and feed the world while helping to address climate change, is a tall order. But the good news is that there are already many innovative small-scale farmers, policymakers, food companies, conservation agencies and grassroots organizations, that are out in the field doing just that, albeit with little support and recognition from policy makers and investors.
A new 3 year initiative – International Landscapes for People, Food and Nature [2] - will build on these successful innovations to support new scaled-up sustainable landscape management approaches in over 60 biodiversity hotspots around the world. Bioversity International is one of the co-organizers of this international collaborative effort.
The initiative will seek to understand how complex and diverse ecosystems can support increased food production – for example, by analyzing the different roles of complex functions such as pollinators, forests, water and spore banks - to create indicators and measures that can be used to help scale-up successful approaches for sustainable rural development.
This will be achieved through a synthesis of current evidence, and by working with smallholder farmers to study locally adapted food systems.
Photo: Bioversity/D. Hunter
Smallholder farmers are often regarded as traditional ‘custodians of the land’ and it is increasingly accepted that their use of local agricultural biodiversity can contribute towards its conservation. But this does not do justice to their contribution to global food production or their potential contribution to alleviate food insecurity.
Collectively small-scale farmers feed around one third of the world’s population, and the food that they produce is often more diverse, better quality, more nutritious and more resilient than that produced using modern agricultural intensification methods. Research findings support this – for example, there has been much research done on family farming production systems in Brazil, as well as initial reviews in many other countries that show similar findings.
Yet despite growing evidence about the important contribution of small farms towards managing diversity in rural landscapes, investment and research is mainly directed towards intensification methods.
This initiative hopes to change this through direct input with key policy makers within the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) [3], the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) [4] and key regional platforms such as NEPAD [5]in Africa.
The first milestone will be a Global Review International Forum (6-10 March 2011, Nairobi, Kenya) where thought leaders and innovators will review the evidence gathered so far, and develop action agendas for tackling food insecurity, persistent poverty and ecosystem degradation.
Another key element of this collaboration is to ensure that knowledge is not only exchanged, but also put into practice, by including farmers, governments, NGOs, donors and the private sector in all aspects of the initiative throughout the three years.
Bioversity will provide regular updates about progress and will report back from the Nairobi Forum - more details nearer the time.
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Web Address of the page:
http://www.bioversityinternational.org/announcements/read_more_for_announcements/international_landscapes_for_people_food_and_nature.htmlLinks in this page
- [1] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/index.php?id=5171
- [2] http://landscapes.ecoagriculture.org/
- [3] http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/
- [4] http://www.fao.org/cfs/en/
- [5] http://www.nepad.org/
- [6] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/announcements/international_landscapes_for_people_food_and_nature.html
- [7] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18160089
- [8] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/agrobiodiversity_and_ecosystem_services.html
- [9] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/research/sustainable_agriculture.html
- [10] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/nc/home.html
- [11] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/category/research/sustainable agriculture/
- [12] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/food security
- [13] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/landscapes
- [14] http://www.bioversityinternational.org/browse_by/tag/sustainable agriculture