FAQs about EcoAgriculture Partners

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1. What does EcoAgriculture Partners do?

2. What are EcoAgriculture Partners' basic values and principles?

3. How is EcoAgriculture Partners governed?

4. How can actors from diverse perspectives collaborate effectively in EcoAgriculture Partners' activities?

5. How does EcoAgriculture Partners add value to the work of other organizations?

6. How is EcoAgriculture Partners financed and what are its fundraising policies?

7. How does EcoAgriculture Partners engage the private sector?

8. Does EcoAgriculture Partners have a position on the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?

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1. What does EcoAgriculture Partners do?

We support rural communities to produce food and enhance their livelihoods while protecting the biological diversity of plant and animal life, and we educate policymakers, institutions, and innovators in ecoagriculture management approaches to enable this to happen. We support diverse ecoagriculture innovators from the agriculture, conservation and rural development sectors to strengthen and scale up their ecoagriculture management approaches by strengthening understanding of ecoagriculture; facilitating collaboration amongst practitioners, and mobilizing strategic institutional change to enable ecoagriculture.

2. What are EcoAgriculture Partners' basic values and principles?

EcoAgriculture Partners seeks to support the emerging global movement for ecoagriculture. To serve this diverse constituency, we will follow these principles.

EcoAgriculture Partners holds centrally a commitment to:

• Food and livelihood security and rural poverty alleviation as key drivers for action;

• Conservation of biodiversity in all its forms, locally as well as globally;

• Protection of ecosystem services needed for both humans and wildlife;

• Supporting agricultural (including pastoral, fisher and forest) communities as primary stewards of our ecosystems and biodiversity, integral to decision-making processes at local, national and international level.

EcoAgriculture Partners will provide a framework to embrace a diversity of partners from a wide range of approaches to food production, conservation and natural resource management. We recognise that the most appropriate strategy in any landscape will require negotiation (and balancing trade-offs) among stakeholders and land stewards within a landscape and that nobody has a monopoly on wisdom.

EcoAgriculture Partners will offer an independent and inclusive platform for cross-sectoral, multi-stakeholder dialogue and action on ecoagriculture.

EcoAgriculture Partners will consider “ecoagriculture” to include landscapes and agro-ecosystems where land managers are pursuing outcomes at a landscape scale in relation to all three “legs of the stool": more sustainable and productive agriculture, conservation of biodiversity and enhanced rural livelihoods

(rather than a specific production or resource management practice).

EcoAgriculture Partners respects diversity and self-determination, and seeks to understand and support diverse approaches to ecoagriculture undertaken by different groups in different places.

 

EcoAgriculture Partners will operate with maximum transparency and values constructive feedback from partners and others to help improve our work.

3. How is EcoAgriculture Partners governed?

EcoAgriculture Partners is governed by an independent Board of Directors, who are nominated for their proven experience and leadership in ecoagriculture. The Board reflects diverse stakeholder groups, and each Board member brings unique skills critical to the governance of an international organization devoted to catalyzing collaborative action and partnership development.

4. How can actors from diverse perspectives collaborate effectively in EcoAgriculture Partners' activities?

With such a broadly defined scope, ecoagriculture encompasses many different and often conflicting schools of thought. Currently collaborating partners differ sharply on issues such as the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), public protected areas vs. community-managed conservation, organic agriculture vs. use of agrochemical inputs, and the diversion of water for irrigation.

Given these conflicts, it is often challenging to foster the cross-sectoral dialogue and collaboration necessary for ecoagriculture solutions to succeed. Nonetheless, EcoAgriculture Partners believes that there are significant opportunities for productive dialogue, based on the foundation of mutually agreed rules and norms of
engagement, including respect for diversity and self-determination.

While we do not underestimate the challenges, a core purpose of EcoAgriculture Partners is to encourage agricultural and conservation sectors to work together. Our cross-sectoral learning and advocacy work helps make this happen.

5. How does EcoAgriculture Partners add value to the work of other organizations?

EcoAgriculture Partners seeks to strengthen collaboration and knowledge exchange among ecoagriculture innovators working in different locations, farming systems, and sectors, and to mobilize the scaling up of successful ecoagriculture approaches by catalyzing strategic connections, dialogue, and joint action among key actors at local, national, and international levels. EcoAgriculture Partners can help by synthesizing and sharing information on practices, strategies, methods and policy analyses within and across conservation, agricultural, and rural development sectors.

EcoAgriculture Partners:

• Explicitly aims to support inter-sectoral collaboration among diverse stakeholders.

• Focuses on understanding and integrating at landscape scale the actions of diverse resource managers;

• Takes strength from the diversity of groups and sectors participating in our activities;

• As an autonomous non-governmental organization, is unconstrained by institutional frameworks or mandates that selectively prioritize production, conservation or rural development.

6. How is EcoAgriculture Partners financed and what are its fund-raising policies?

EcoAgriculture Partners’ non-profit status necessitates that we seek funding from a wide array of sources. The EcoAgriculture Partners board has established a set of guidelines for fund-raising, to reflect the multi-sectoral nature of our mission and strategy, and to ensure maximum transparency.

Key principles within the guidelines include ensuring:

• A diversity of financial and in-kind contributions from inter-governmental and governmental organizations; public and private foundations; non-profit organizations, for-profit enterprises and representative associations;

• Financial supporters remain distinct from the governance of EcoAgriculture Partners.

• The principles of the United Nations Global Compact (in relation to human rights, labor standards, environment and anti-corruption [www.unglobalcompact.org]) are used as a point of reference when considering support from businesses, business associations and foundations.

EcoAgriculture Partners has received financial and in-kind contributions from a diverse array of public, civil society and private sector entities. A list of our current supporters can be found on the EcoAgriculture Partners’ website.

7. How does EcoAgriculture Partners engage the private sector?

We recognize that corporate actors are influential players with profound impacts on ecosystems, agricultural production, and rural livelihoods. For EcoAgriculture Partners’ goals to be met at a globally meaningful scale, there will need to be dramatic changes in the thinking and activities of corporate and other private sector actors. All stakeholders in a landscape must be involved in planning and negotiations to achieve ecoagriculture’s goals. New collaborative partnerships can enhance the corporate sector’s desire to adopt and implement ecoagriculture strategies. Thus, EcoAgriculture Partners actively seeks to work not only with community, farming, and conservation leaders, but also with ecoagriculture innovators within agribusiness and the food industry. EcoAgriculture Partners’ work with specific businesses to strengthen ecoagriculture activities is not an endorsement of their other activities. This principle holds in our work with specific government agencies, NGOs, and others as well.

8. Does EcoAgriculture Partners have a position on the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?

EcoAgriculture Partners serves as a platform for exchange of views and the promotion of joint action among very diverse actors. EcoAgriculture Partners itself does not endorse, promote, or repudiate the introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) or any other technologies and resource
management practices with the potential to negatively impact upon the environment or local livelihoods. Rather, EcoAgriculture Partners supports the Cartagena Biosafety Protcol in promoting rigorous evaluation of their actual impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services at genetic, species,
ecological, community, and landscape scales, as well as their impacts on the productivity and sustainability of agriculture and on rural livelihoods.
EcoAgriculture Partners also supports applying the “precautionary principle” to the introduction of new agricultural technologies. A common definition of the principle is: ‘Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.’

EcoAgriculture Partners actively encourages the development and assessment of new agricultural and natural resource management (NRM) practices within a landscape framework to ensure they contribute to all three goals of healthy ecoagriculture systems: enhanced biodiversity conservation, increased agricultural production, and improved rural livelihoods.

 

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FAQs about EcoAgriculture Partners

1. What does EcoAgriculture Partners do?

2. What are EcoAgriculture Partners' basic values and principles?

3. How is EcoAgriculture Partners governed?

4. How can actors from diverse perspectives collaborate effectively in EcoAgriculture Partners' activities?

5. How does EcoAgriculture Partners add value to the work of other organizations?

6. How is EcoAgriculture Partners financed and what are its fundraising policies?

7. How does EcoAgriculture Partners engage the private sector?

8. Does EcoAgriculture Partners have a position on the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?

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1. What is ecoagriculture?

Ecoagriculture is a landscape-management approach that achieves three goals at a landscape scale: conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services; sufficient food production; improved rural livelihoods.

The concept of ecoagriculture emerged from the recognition that in the 21st century, humans will place unprecedented demands on the world’s finite land base, seeking to increase global food production by 50 to 100% and improve living standards for billions of poor people, while simultaneously protecting wild biodiversity and the ecosystem services that sustain human life. These demands must be addressed together, and solutions must be based on land use systems that advance multiple goals in the same geographic space. Thus, ‘ecoagriculture’ was born.

Ecoagriculture advances the idea that wildlife conservation, agricultural production, and enhancement of rural livelihoods can be complementary activities, especially if they are undertaken at a landscape scale. Innovations in land management demonstrate that the tradeoffs traditionally perceived between conservation, food production, and rural livelihoods are not always accurate or necessary.

Ecoagriculture concerns itself not just with a diversity of agricultural systems but with entire mosaics of land use that also encompass forests, human settlements, coastal zones, and waterways. Taking into account the ecological systems that interact with agricultural systems is critical for identifying and fostering synergies between conservation and production. For example, a nature reserve may benefit nearby farms by providing clean water and natural pest control, while sustained high levels of production on farms in the landscape may alleviate pressure to expand agriculture into the nature reserve. The health of the nature reserve will also be affected by the type and intensity of the agricultural production happening at its borders; therefore, the management of the agricultural area must take conservation goals into account.

Thus, a key feature of ecoagriculture management is strengthened coordination and collaboration between land users and managers. Ecoagriculture can rarely be achieved by individual land managers, and depends upon collaboration between the diverse stakeholders who impact and manage the landscape.

The ecoagriculture concept was first documented by Jeffrey McNeely and Sara Scherr in their 2003 book Ecoagriculture: Strategies to Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity.

2. Why is ecoagriculture defined at a landscape scale?

A landscape is a cluster of local ecosystems with a particular configuration of topography, vegetation, land use, and settlement. The goals of ecoagriculture – to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services, manage agricultural production sustainably, and contribute to improved livelihoods among rural people – cannot be achieved at just a farm or plot level, but are linked at the landscape scale. Therefore, to make impact, we must consider all of the elements of a landscape as a whole.

How a landscape is defined depends on the local context. Landscapes may be defined or delimited by natural, historical, and/or cultural processes, activities or values. Landscapes can incorporate many different features, but all of the various features have some influence or effect on each other. Landscapes can vary greatly in size, from the Congo Basin in west-central Africa where landscapes are often huge because there are vast stretches of apparently undifferentiated land, to western Europe where landscapes tend to be much smaller because of the wide diversity of topographies and land use activities occurring close to each other.

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3. How does ecoagriculture relate to other approaches with similar objectives, such as sustainable agriculture and permaculture?

The values and/or principles of ecoagriculture have much in common with existing concepts, such as sustainable agriculture, permaculture, agroecology, integrated natural resource management, organic agriculture, agroforestry, conservation agriculture, protected area management, and many others. In fact, ‘ecoagriculture’ landscapes often feature many of these approaches. Ecoagriculture draws heavily on these and many other innovations in rural land use planning and management. The landscape management framework defined by ecoagriculture has four particularly important characteristics:

• Large scale: Ecoagriculture moves beyond the management of individual farms and/or protected areas to help detect and plan for interactions among different land uses at the landscape scale. In addition, important attributes such as wildlife population dynamics and watershed functions can be meaningfully understood only at the landscape scale. Also, in recognition of the fact that short-term tradeoffs may lead to long-term synergies, ecoagriculture advocates conducting analyses over longer temporal scales than is commonly done.

• Emphasis on synergies: Ecoagriculture emphasizes both the need and the opportunity to foster synergies among conservation, agricultural production, and rural livelihoods. The ecoagriculture research and monitoring agenda seeks, in part, to identify and document these synergies.

• Emphasis on stakeholder Collaboration: Ecoagriculture can not be achieved by individual land managers. The management of ecoagriculture landscapes requires processes that support a variety of land managers (within the landscape) with diverse environmental and socio-economic goals to collaboratively develop coordinated conservation and production management approaches that collectively achieve conservation, production, and livelihood goals at a landscape scale.

• Importance of both conservation and agricultural production: Building on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecoagriculture brings conservation fully into the agricultural and rural development discourse by highlighting the importance of ecosystem services in supporting continued agricultural production. Ecoagriculture also identifies the conservation of native biodiversity and ecosystems as an equally important goal in its own right. It also supports conservationists to more effectively conserve nature within and outside protected areas by working with the agricultural community and developing conservation-friendly livelihood strategies for rural land users.
  

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4. Where is ecoagriculture particularly important?

Ecoagriculture approaches are crucial in regions where: 

• Landscapes are highly degraded, and improved agriculture, livelihoods, and biodiversity all depend on ecosystem restoration. Many of the regions facing the greatest challenges in achieving the Millennium Development Goals coincide with those facing significant problems of ecosystem degradation. Since two-thirds of the world’s poor are dependant on subsistence agriculture for their survival, increasing their productive asset base and planning for the long term regeneration of the landscape upon which they depend will profoundly improve their quality of life, while fostering healthy and varied ecosystems.

• Local livelihoods depend upon agricultural activities in or around protected areas. The portrayalof a divide between conservationists, who wish to preserve land by setting it aside, and agriculturalists, who depend on landscape-derived products for a living, creates a false dichotomy

   

  between the two and is neither helpful nor necessary. With rising population rates and a decrease in productive land, rural actors already interact with land that is officially protected,and will increasingly do so. Whether these interactions are detrimental to the landscape, benign, or

  mutually beneficial will depend very much upon crafting a deliberate framework for landscape management.

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5. Why are agricultural areas so important for biodiversity conservation?

Agriculture is the most dominant human influence on earth. Nearly one-third of the world’s land area is heavily influenced by cropland or planted pastures. An even greater area is being fallowed as part of an agricultural cycle or is in tree crops, livestock grazing systems, or production forestry.

In addition, most of the world’s 100,000+ protected areas contain significant amounts of agricultural land. And over half of the most species-rich areas in the world contain large human populations whose livelihoods depend on farming, forestry, herding, or fisheries.

Agriculture as it is often practiced today threatens wild plant and animal species and the natural ecosystem services upon which both humans and wildlife depend. Over 70% of the fresh water withdrawn by humans goes to irrigation for crops, causing a profound impact on the hydrological cycles of ecological systems. Moreover, fertilizers, pesticides, and agricultural waste threaten habitats and protected areas downstream. Landclearing for agriculture also disrupts sources of food and shelter for wild biodiversity, and unsustainable fishing practices deplete freshwater and coastal fisheries.

Additionally, an increase in the planting and marketing of monoculture crops across the globe has decreased diversity in agricultural products, to the extent that many local varieties of fruits, vegetables, and grains have now become extinct. Given that demands on global agricultural production are increasing, it is imperative that the management of agricultural landscapes be improved to both increase productivity and enhance biodiversity conservation. Wild biodiversity increasingly depends on agricultural producers to find ways to better protect habitats, and agriculture critically needs healthy and diverse ecosystems to sustain productivity.

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6. Why should farmers and rural communities be interested in ecoagriculture approaches, and what incentives exist for them to implement these approaches?

Farming communities play a vital role as stewards of their ecosystems and biodiversity. Their dependence on their land and natural resources necessitates a conservation ethic. Agricultural productivity critically depends upon a range of ecosystem services. Wild species often also play an important role in providing livestock fodder, fuel, veterinary medicines, soil nutrient supplements and construction materials to farmers, as well constituting an essential element of cultural, religious, and spiritual practices. The dominance of agriculture in global land use requires that ecoagriculture approaches be fostered by rural producers and their communities on a globally significant scale. To do this, farmers need to be able to conserve biodiversity more consistently in ways that benefit their livelihoods. Experiences from around the world suggest that there are a number of incentives to encourage and enable farmers and their communities to preserve or transition towards ecoagriculture landscapes:

• Many management practices that improve ecosystem health also benefit farmers by reducing production costs, raising or stabilizing yields, or improving product quality. Intensive rotation grazing systems practiced in Europe, the United States, and Zimbabwe have been shown to reduce dairy production costs compared to stall-fed systems, while also reducing risks of land degradation and improving wildlife habitat.

• Farming communities are especially motivated to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services critical to their own livelihoods and cultural, spiritual, or aesthetic values. To protect their access to local water sources and medicinal plants, for example, farmers in western Kenya have mobilized to protect threatened forests in and near their communities. And in some agricultural landscapes in West Africa, “sacred groves” are the principal remaining areas of native forest.

• Farmers are seeking new income opportunities from product markets that value supplies from biodiversity-friendly production systems. More than 80 eco-certification programs now provide opportunities for farmers to receive higher prices for products produced with environmentally friendly practices.