Eco-agriculture: producing food while conserving biodiversity

A tall eucalyptus tree with long hanging branches stands behind Joyce Odari's semi permanent farmhouse in Kakamega, western Kenya. Odari, an elderly subsistence farmer, and a mother of seven adult children, needs fuel to cook but she cannot imagine cutting the branches, even though they damage roof of her house. When once she cut branches to prevent them doing damage, she was arrested by the forest authorities and jailed for six months. However, her imprisonment led to an idea that has transformed the lives of over 200 households and won her national recognition.

Odari's three-acre farm is at the edge of the extensive Kakamega Forest in Kenya's western region where, for the last five years, forest authorities have blocked the local community from accessing the forest. This is to prevent indiscriminate cutting for firewood and building materials, which threatens the forest, a natural resource that regulates the area's climate. Odari understands the situation so, she says, "I thought of an idea by which women from my village could start a project where we could get our firewood without seeking permission from the forest authorities." After serving her prison sentence, Odari mobilised 28 women from her village to form a group that is now involved in agro-forestry. "We decided to plant trees which can provide us with firewood, building materials and food for our livestock, and also enrich the soil." The trees have been intercropped with food crops, ensuring that provision of household food remains uninterrupted.

Defining eco-agriculture

credit:Stephen Mbogo

Odari's project has now won accolades from the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) for providing a model for the emerging "eco-agriculture" farming approaches being promoted by ICRAF, also known as the World Agroforestry Center. Eco-agriculture is an approach to farming that seeks to reverse the trend of massive biodiversity extinction worldwide by helping farmers, most urgently those living in or near important centres of biodiversity, to produce more food while greatly reducing harm to wildlife and other natural resources. Walter van Opzeeland, the Public Awareness officer at ICRAF headquarters in Nairobi, describes eco-agriculture as a system that dramatically breaks with both traditional conservation policies and common agriculture techniques, and yet is a major hedge against hunger, famine, and natural disasters.

At Odari's village, families are now harvesting indigenous trees and vegetables including high nutrient soya beans, which the villagers process to feed children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. In addition, families have hung beehives in their trees for the honey-harvesting project they started, the honey being sold to supplement the villagers' income.

ICRAF believes that the on-going famine in eastern and southern Africa is due to resource degradation, and blames the failure of current farming practices and policies that ignore agriculture-environment links. "Many people believe that biodiversity can be preserved simply by fencing it off," said Dennis Garrity, Director-General of ICRAF. "But what research has shown is that agriculture and biodiversity are inextricably linked. To feed the hungry and yet avert further widespread extinctions of plants and animals, we must integrate biodiversity preservation into all landscapes: from coffee plantations to rice paddies."

Irrigation for eco-agriculture

Another form of eco-agriculture is gaining popularity in Southern Africa where, instead of farmers relying on conventional large-scale irrigation that is expensive, they have developed a small-scale irrigation system known as 'Dambo irrigation'. Dambos are shallow, seasonally waterlogged depressions or wells. With a dambo, water is applied to crops, either with buckets, hoses, or watering cans: no expensive pumps are required. Research on dambo irrigation in Zimbabwe found that yields per unit of land and water were approximately twice as high as in more formal irrigation systems. Also, dambo irrigation is environmentally sustainable since it does not mine the groundwater, dry up the dambo or reduce downstream flows.

Impacts on habitat and wildlife are relatively benign because farmers with dambo fields often retain some native vegetation, have high crop diversity in small plots, plant diverse native tree species as "live" fencing, and leave part of the dambo land uncultivated. Sara Scherr, the Director of Eco-agriculture Partners, says the new farming concept is necessary, because satellite photographs show that over a third of the world's land area is heavily influenced by cropland or planted pastures and researchers have recognised that dambo cultivation alleviates pressure from livestock grazing.