Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on-farm conservation projects?

Abstract

Smallholder farmers who grow diverse landraces in centres of crop diversity contribute to sustaining the capacity of agricultural and food systems to adapt to change by maintaining crop evolution in their fields today, thus enabling humanity to continue to have the broad genetic variation needed to adapt crops to changes tomorrow. Given this fact, the last 20 years have witnessed an ever-growing interest in on-farm conservation of crop infra-specific diversity. While numerous projects to support it have been, and continue to be, implemented worldwide, there has been very little systematic assessment of the extent to which these projects have been effective at contributing to the maintenance of crop diversity on-farm and the creation of associated benefits for the farmers involved. The factors and relationships implicated in attaining conservation and livelihood results are complex, so that a conceptual scheme that brings them together in a simplified but coherent fashion can be extremely useful for the scientists, donors, policy-makers and practitioners concerned. This paper presents a conceptual framework for analysing on-farm projects, the trade-offs involved and assesses their success in a more systematic way.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Projects Supporting On-Farm Conservation of Native Crops: Evidence From the High Andes of South America

“…In the last 20 years, many projects to support OFC have been implemented worldwide. There has been very little systematic assessment, however, of the extent to which OFC projects have actually made a difference beyond what de facto conservation is already delivering (Bellon, Gotor, & Caracciolo, 2015;Bellon & van Etten, 2014). For example, a recent and extensive review (Jarvis, Hodgkin, Sthapit, Fadda, & LopezNoriega, 2011) identified 59 different types of interventions for supporting OFC worldwide, but there is little evidence that they actually made a difference.…”

Livelihood implications of in situ-on farm conservation strategies of fruit species in Uzbekistan

“…The project assessment was developed using the theoretical framework developed by Bellon et al (2015a), that provides a series of linked hypotheses needed to assess the success of a in situ/onfarm conservation program. One of the most common objective faced by institutions and scholars that implement development programs aiming to promote the sustainable use of agricultural diversity in rural settings is the identification of the intervention pathways needed to reach a significant and tangible impact.…”

“…Figure 2 represents the sustainable pathway of an effective in situ, on-farm conservation project. According this framework, the following four hypotheses should be tested in order to assess the success of in situ, on-farm conservation project (Bellon et al 2015a): a) Participation in project interventions leads farmers to apply options provided by the interventions; b) The application of these options leads to farmers maintaining higher levels of wild fruit diversity than would have been possible without the interventions; c) Farmers with higher levels of diversity obtain additional benefits from this diversity; d) The higher levels of fruit diversity linked with the application of these options are associated with higher levels of genetic diversity than would have occurred otherwise.…”

“…Indeed, the agroforestry sector has become more market-oriented, generating private incentives that hamper the conservation and sustainable use of genetic diversity in favor of economic activities that threaten this diversity, resulting in biodiversity loss risk (Drucker et al 2001;Leakey et al 2005;Bellon et al 2015a). While several economic values (whether direct or indirect and option values) are associated to the agro and tree biodiversity access, exchange and use, they are only partially captured in the market place (Pearce and Moran 1994).…”

“…The latter is pivotal for assessing the long-term efficacy of activities and their real impact on rural livelihoods (Bellon et al 2015a). Tracing impact over time presents problems that require rethinking or adapting existing methodologies or creating new impact assessment approaches across temporal scales (White 2010).…”