Agriculture vs protected areas

Agriculturalists strive to increase crop production to provide poor communities with incomes and a secure food supply whilst environmentalists want to expand protected areas and reduce the intensity of farming.

While many protected areas officially limit agricultural activity within their boundaries, the World Conservation Union reports that satellite images show almost half of the world's 17,000 major nature reserves are still heavily used for agriculture. Disruption of traditional agricultural activities for people living in or near protected areas can lead to extreme hunger and malnutrition.

Agriculture has often been a major cause of habitat destruction and encroachment into protected areas:

• millions of hectares of forests and natural vegetation have been cleared for agriculture and timber
• misuse of pesticides and fertilisers pollutes water, soil and coastal areas
• agriculture fragments natural ecosystems, breaking wild populations into smaller units that are more vulnerable to extinction
• farmers often eliminate wild species from their lands to reduce the negative effects of pests, predators, and weeds.

Farming communities often value biodiversity and play an important role in its conservation. Poor rural people rely heavily on wild species for food, medicine and fuel. Many vulnerable wild species inhabit landscapes that also supply resources of economic or cultural value. Ecosystem conservation can provide communities with vital services such as supplying clean water, mitigating the effects of natural disasters, guaranteeing the health of pollinator species and controlling pests. Hungry people can only protect ecosystems if this contributes to their livelihoods in the short term.

Some approaches to conservation recognise agricultural communities as guardians of biodiversity. In eco-agriculture landscapes food is produced in a sustainable and profitable way which also protects wildlife and other ecosystem services. These approaches are important within protected areas and throughout the wider farming system as protected areas alone will not conserve global biodiversity.

Farmers, scientists and environmentalists are finding previously unrecognised 'win-win' solutions that increase food productivity and benefit conservation:

• Communities in Costa Rica have planted trees on intensively farmed land to protect crops from birds and livestock from strong wind. This has improved yields and provided a biological corridor between forest areas.
• Pastoral communities in Kenya and Tanzania have established ecosystem balances between people and wild animals using water and fodder resources at complementary places and times, and controlling stock and wildlife diseases.
• Some farming, pastoral, and forest communities are informally conserving natural habitats over millions of hectares outside public protected areas.

Conservationists and agriculturalists are working with farmers, forest users and pastoralists to develop landscapes that provide for production and conservation needs. These partnerships are important for negotiating interactions and trade-offs (such as access rights), providing technical assistance for poor communities, supporting research initiatives and implementing ecosystem monitoring strategies.

The challenge is to research and implement new technologies, management practices and policies more widely so that increased agricultural production contributes to economic growth and the protection of wild species and natural habitats.

Sara Scherr
Ecoagriculture Partners
1050 Potomac Street NW
Washington DC 20007
USA
T +1 (0)202 298 3004
F +1 (0)202 298 3014
sscherr@ecoagriculture.org
www.ecoagriculturepartners.org

See also

Ecoagriculture: Strategies to Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity, Island Press: Washington DC, by J. A. McNeely and S. J. Scherr, 2003

Agri-culture: reconnecting people, land, and nature, London: Earthscan Publications, by J. Pretty, 2002

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