Mainstreaming Agricultural Biodiversity in Traditional Production Landscapes for Sustainable Development: The Indian Scenario

Abstract

Mainstreaming biodiversity in production landscapes ensures conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity, the key objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the projects supported by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) Global Environment Facility (GEF). Mainstreaming integrates biodiversity in existing or new programs and policies, both cross-sectoral and sector-specific. The conventional model of agricultural production with limited diversity in production systems and use of high chemical input has taught us a valuable lesson as it is adversely impacting the environment, the essential ecosystem services, the soil health and the long term sustainability of our food systems. Using a qualitative participant observation approach, our study investigated four distinct traditional Indian production landscapes to gage (i) the farming communities’ response to institutional policies, programs and agricultural biodiversity-related activities in traditional Indian production landscapes and (ii) opportunities and challenges for sustainable development in smallholder traditional Indian farming systems. Results indicate that the top-down decision-making regime is the least effective towards achieving sustainable development in traditional Indian farming landscapes and that farmers’ experiential knowledge on participatory biodiversity management, maintenance and use for sustainable development are of critical importance to India’s agriculture and economy. Reclaiming agriculture’s spiritual roots through organic farming and locally grown food emerged as key, including the need for designing and implementing a more sovereign food system. Revisiting traditional smallholder farming under the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons learned for repurposing India’s agricultural policy are also highlighted.

Agroecological Approach to Farming for Sustainable Development: The Indian Scenario

“…In traditional Indian farming contexts, we find limited responsiveness of modern science to societal needs [24]. The gap between experts' knowledge and traditional innovations in actual farming situations were more pronounced when sustainability issues are being considered.…”

“…In the following sections, we use data collected on the UNEP-GEF project to investigate how well FAO's elements of agroecology are embedded into traditional farming landscapes in the four agroecologically contrasting regions of India, described above (Figure 1). This includes data collected through exploratory surveys with farmers across four representative agroecosystems based on participatory focus group discussions and observational surveys, between 2017 and 2020 [23,24]. Farmer surveys indicate that about 80% of households have crop-livestock mixed farming across the four Indian agroecosystems, while the remaining 20% are engaged either in crop production or livestock production alone (Table 1).…”

“…Deploying and protecting currently available biodiversity in production landscapes, contributes to a range of production, socio-economic, nutrition and environmental benefits. Diversification has been a common and key to agroecological transition ensuring food and nutrition security and sustainable management of natural resources in all the traditional Indian agroecosystems researched in the recent past [23,24]. Traditional production systems in India are highly diverse, characterized by polyculture farming; crop-livestock small-scale mixed farming; greater farmer household production and dietary diversity; use of traditional agriculture innovation practices, etc.…”

“…Native farming communities in all Indian agroecosystems are especially vulnerable to weather uncertainties and climate change [24]. The community level climate change adaptation plans are often rooted in Western scientific knowledge, largely ignoring traditional farmer innovations.…”

“…Meanwhile, there has been a rampant rise in obesity and diet-related diseases; 1.9 billion people are overweight or obese and non-communicable diseases (cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes) are the number one cause of global mortality, a pattern also followed in India [76,77]. Sourced from: Bisht et al [24].…”