The document discusses how agroforestry can help address major challenges facing agriculture and the environment in the 21st century by helping to meet growing food demands in a sustainable way. It outlines how agroforestry can help reduce poverty and food insecurity, adapt to and mitigate climate change, restore degraded land, and provide ecosystem services. The document calls for integrating agroforestry into agricultural policies to achieve benefits across food production, environmental protection, and rural development.
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The 2 nd challenge is to fit PES projects in Conservation Agriculture to local conditions. Farmers need to be able to retain opportunities to modify land use over time, to invest in CA in those fields and farms that make most sense, to have aflow of funds that matches local capital requirements as well as those of buyers. Because of the need for aggregation, and th epotential economies of scale for PES, collective action is needed to agree upon strategies, sequencing, local input, pricing, etc. Typically, the price of ecosystem services will not cover these organizational costs.
The third challenge is to build and link the various institutions required across the full value chain of ecosystem services. The green octagons in this diagrma show the buyers and sellers. And most people are aware that Pes often involves ffinancing agents, and intermediaries. But there are many other actors, including planners, verifiers, certifiers, financiers, If the system is highly fragemented and inefficient, then the proportion of the total payment by buyers that will actually reach the farrmer may be very small indeed. There is no reason to believe that PES value chains will be any fairer to farmers than product markets, unless proactive efforts are made to invest in this value chain in ways that benefit the seller.
Conventionally, it has been assumed that tradeoffs between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation objectives are unavoidable. However, in many circumstances, agricultural practices depend and capitalize upon the inherent benefits and services provided by natural ecosystems, while many farming, herding, forest and fisher communities play an important role in conserving wild biodiversity. Approaches to managing agricultural landscape mosaics to minimize trade-offs and optimize synergies between agricultural livelihoods and biodiversity are emerging (or being recognized) in agroecosystems worldwide. These diverse approaches have come to be known collectively as ‘ecoagriculture’ (McNeely and Scherr 2003).