A Sustainable Integrated Agroforestry System

Abstract The development of industrialized agriculture has met the need to feed a growing global population with higher quality foods, through increases in yields, productivity, and efficiency. However, agriculture is now a dominant force behind many environmental threats including excessive deforestation, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, chemical pollution, and contributions to greenhouse gasses and global warming. These externalities can no longer be ignored. Several agricultural movements arose as an alternative to the conventional farming paradigm, using various terms including “organic”, “biodynamic”, “ecological”, and “biological”. None has been capable of challenging the development trajectory of conventional agriculture, underpinned by simplification, specialisation, and increased inputs. As extreme climate events have become globally more common, a heightening of the level of public awareness about global warming and the relevance of ecosystem services provides an opportunity for change. All climate adaptation and mitigation strategies with a potential to have global impact are worth disseminating and discussing. Agroforestry, which is the intentional combination of trees and shrubs with crops or livestock, could be the next step in sustainable agriculture. This multifunctional approach for our food system, focusing on complexity, diversity, and recycling, mimicking nature’s functions, has the potential to sustain production while supporting a range of ecosystem services. For over two decades and a half we have committed heavily in the creation of the integrated agroforestry system we document here. The creation and continued leveraging of the system provide an example that it is possible to recover biodiversity and ecosystem services on lands previously eroded due to highly extractive exploitation. Collaborations with public extension agencies have helped in capacity building and public outreach to show how an economic activity can be strengthen by the recovery of natural complexity. We believe that our project and similar ones should be one type of strategy in the toolkit for meeting the 2030 biodiversity targets, e.g., as discussed in the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 15) Global Biodiversity Framework.