What is ecoagriculture?

"Ecoagriculture" is a term coined in 2000 (by Sara Scherr and Jeffrey McNeely, authors of the Future Harvest-commissioned report Common Ground, Common Future: How Ecoagriculture Can Help Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity) to convey a vision of rural communities managing their resources to jointly achieve three broad goals at a landscape scale — what we refer to as the “three pillars” of ecoagriculture:

• Enhance rural livelihoods;
• Conserve or enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services; and
• Develop more sustainable and productive agricultural systems.

Ecoagriculture is both a conservation strategy and a rural development strategy. Ecoagriculture recognizes agricultural producers and communities as key stewards of ecosystems and biodiversity and enables them to play those roles effectively. Ecoagriculture applies an integrated ecosystem approach to agricultural landscapes to address all three pillars, drawing on diverse elements of production and conservation management systems. Meeting the goals of ecoagriculture usually requires collaboration or coordination between diverse stakeholders who are collectively responsible for managing key components of a landscape.

See also the ecoagriculture entry in Wikipedia.