Forgotten Agricultural Heritage

Reconnecting food systems and sustainable development

Parviz Koohafkan, Miguel A. Altieri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315470078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Sustainable Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Contemporary agriculture is often criticized for its industrial scale, adverse effects on nutrition, rural employment and the environment, and its disconnectedness from nature and culture. Yet there are many examples of traditional smaller scale systems that have survived the test of time and provide more sustainable solutions while still maintaining food security in an era of climate change. This book provides a unique compilation of this forgotten agricultural heritage and is based on objective scientific evaluation and evidence of the value of these systems for present and future generations.

The authors refer to many of these systems as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) and show how they are related to the concepts of heritage and the World Heritage Convention. They demonstrate how GIAHS based on family farms, traditional indigenous knowledge and agroecological principles can contribute to food and nutrition security and the maintenance of agro-biodiversity and environmental resilience, as well as sustain local cultures, economies and societies.

Two substantial chapters are devoted to descriptions and assessments of some 50 examples of designated and potential GIAHS from around the world, including rice-fish culture in China, mountain terrace systems in Asia, coffee agroforestry in Latin America, irrigation systems and land and water management in Iran and India, pastoralism in East Africa, and the dehesa agrosilvopastoral system of Spain and Portugal. The book concludes by providing policy and technical solutions for sustainable agriculture and rural development through the enhancement of these systems.

1
Past, Present and Future of Agriculture

Figure 1.1 From the Chinese Han nationality, happy Hani children from Yuanyang, Yunnan Province. One of the 55 known ethnic minorities in China.

Credit: Mary Jane Ramos dela Cruz

The evolution and role of traditional agriculture

For a long period of human history, people were hunter-gatherers directly dependent on nature and natural resources. They relied on wide areas to meet their needs for food, fibre, shelter and medicine. From trailside plantings they moved through forested areas as hunter-gatherers (Hynes and Chase, 1982) and, during their socioecological evolutionary phase, they moved to shifting cultivation followed by settled farming. It was during this time that a variety of complex multi-species sedentary systems evolved within natural ecosystems such as forests, grasslands or wetlands. Traditional societies practising shifting cultivation, variously termed slash and burn, swidden and a range of local names, and other traditional sedentary systems developed in various regions of the world and continue today to be closely related to nature and based on local natural resources. The available biodiversity contributed towards meeting the basic livelihood needs of traditional societies (Ramakrishnan et al., 1996; Ramakrishnan 2000, 2008), and as these traditional cultures depended on both natural and human-managed biodiversity, they developed a culture of conserving biodiversity.

Primary agricultural civilization consists of the first settled and stable communities that became the foundation for later states, nations and empires. Although modern humans (Homo sapiens) have existed for more than 150,000 years, it is only in the past few thousand years, since the discovery of agriculture, that civilization has existed. Around 7,000–10,000 years ago, a most important revolution, the Neolithic Revolution, as it is called, forever changed the interaction between humans and the world around them, by introducing the ingredient that makes civilization possible: agriculture. Indeed, the single, decisive factor that allowed mankind to settle in permanent communities was agriculture. According to archaeologists, once farming was developed in Mesopotamia in about 6500 BCE, people living in tribes or family units did not have to be on the move continuously searching for food or herding their animals.

Earliest agricultural civilization seems to have appeared in the Middle East and the main agriculture regions of the world seem to have centred in Mesopotamia, Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa, China, Mesoamerica and the highland and lowlands of South America. Each had its own ecological feature and suite of cultivated plants and domesticated animals. People associated with them, their cultures and religions, were closely intertwined with the main crops they grew. This appears to be the pattern on a global scale.

This agricultural development was mostly driven by great differences in climates, cultures and technologies, and all agricultural civilization underscores its diversity, evolution, continuity and resilience to preserve its core values while adjusting to forces of environmental, economic and social transformation and scientific and technological advances, a process which still is in a state of transition in the wake of the digital revolution, globalization and instant communication.

The early agricultural civilizations often developed along rivers as farming in ancient civilizations had always relied on a dependable water supply and, for the first societies, this meant rivers and streams or regular rainfall. People began to found permanent communities in fertile river valleys, and settlers learned to use the water supply to irrigate the land. Settlement in a place made it possible for them to domesticate plants and animals in order to provide themselves reliable sources of food and clothing. Some of the most sophisticated water management and irrigation systems today bear witness to the ingenuity and agricultural heritage systems of drylands (the qanat irrigated farming system in Iran, oases in the Middle East and North Africa, orchards and fruit gardens in Central and East Asia).

Figure 1.2 Vavilov centres of domesticated crops.

Source: Redwoodseed, en-wiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vavilov-center.webp

According to Vavilov, plants were not domesticated at random, but were domesticated in specific regions where domestication started. These centres of origin are also the centres of megadiversity. Until today the Vavilov centres (see the map) are regions where a high diversity of crops’ wild relatives can be found, representing the natural relatives of domesticated crop plants.

The earliest agricultural civilization engaged in what was basically wheat-barley agriculture, although other crops like lentil, chickpea, pea, root crops and so on were associated with it. This agriculture spread westward around the Mediterranean, across North Africa and Southern Europe and thus northward across the Balkans to Western Europe, the British Isles, Scandinavia and Russia. It spread eastward to the Ethiopian Plateau and on to India. In India the wheat-barley combination found a congenial home in the highlands and was also grown in the lowlands in the winter season. This complemented rice, sorghum and millet summer crops. Wheat and barley became important in China and Japan, but were not suited to Southeast Asia, where rice was the dominant cereal (Damania et al., 1998; Loskutov, 1999).

Meanwhile, an independent agriculture was evolving in Africa. A suite of crops became domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa with no obvious centre, but the activity ranged from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Plants included sorghum, pearl millet, cowpea, African rice and others. Ethiopia contributed a short list of indigenous crops, some of which are grown nowhere else. This includes tef (Eragrostis tef), noog or niger seed (Guizotia abyssinica) and ensete (Musa spp.). Ethiopia has the characteristics of a centre while sub-Saharan Africa does not. Clearly a sub-Saharan agriculture did evolve independently from the Middle East centre.

Another agricultural civilization was developed in northern China dating from about 8500 BCE. Many of the early sites are located on the loess terraces associated with the Yellow River. The early crops were millets of one kind or another, primarily a proso (Panicum spp.) and foxtail millet (Setaria spp.). A rice-based agriculture developed in the lowlands, perhaps centred on the Yangtze River delta. It was an expansive kind of agriculture, and rice became important from eastern China to India and southward into Indonesia.

In the New World, a maize-based agriculture evolved in southern Mexico and spread as far north as Canada and deep into South America. There were other crops, but maize was the dominant cereal over a wide range of the Americas. In South America, agriculture developed in the highlands based on tuber crops, among which was the potato (Solanum spp.), which became important in North America, Europe and other temperate regions. In the lowlands, the dominant crop was cassava originated in the Amazon region, a very important source of starch adapted to tropical rainfall conditions.

Whether nomadic hunter-gatherers or settled farmers involved with traditional agricultural systems, these eco-cultural groups have always looked upon nature with respect and reverence. Indeed, this reverence for nature and natural resources as ‘intangibles’, along with the tangible benefits, has been the basis for the dynamic conservation of traditional agricultural systems as an integral part of their complex landscape and environment.

Ramakrishnan et al., 1998

Figure 1.3 A Quechua woman farmer and her varieties of quinoa – a traditional gluten-free, low-fat, high-protein and fibre-rich grain crop from the Andes (Andean) region.

Credit: Alipio Canahua

Traditional agricultural systems are fundamental to the future of sustainable agriculture and rural development as a source of rural livelihood, local and diversified food systems, employment, conservation and sustainable utilization of agro- biodiversity and viable ecosystem goods and services. While not always recognized by the scientific community, these systems, which bear ancestral knowledge, could be the basis for actual and future agricultural innovations and technologies.

Back to the roots, traditional agriculture and agroecology

Starting points in the development of new agricultural systems are the very systems that farmers have developed and/or inherited throughout centuries. Such complex farming systems, adapted to local conditions, have helped small farmers to sustainably manage harsh environments and to meet their subsistence needs without depending on mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides or other inputs and technologies of modern agricultural science (Denevan, 1995). Although many of these systems have collapsed or disappeared in many parts of the world, the stubborn persistence of millions of hectares of agricultural land under ancient, traditional management in the form of raised fields, terraces, polycultures (with a number of crops growing in the same field), agroforestry systems and so forth documents a successful indigenous agricultural strategy and constitutes a tribute to the creativity of traditional farmers. These microcosms of traditional agriculture offer promising models for other areas because they promote biodiversity, thrive without agrochemicals and sustain year-round yields.

Since the early 1980s, hundreds of agroecologically based projects, promoted by NGOs and farmers’ organizations throughout the developing world, have shown that by blending elements of traditional knowledge and modern agricultural science, the productivity and sustainability of small farming systems can be optimized and the conservation of natural resources and community food sovereignty can be enhanced. The emerging concept of food sovereignty emphasizes farmers’ access to land, seeds and water while focusing on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, energy and technological sovereignty and farmer-to-farmer networks (Altieri and Toledo, 2011).

The new models of agriculture humanity will need to include are forms of farming that are more ecological, biodiverse, local, sustainable and socially just. This means that they should be rooted in the ecological rationale of traditional small-scale agriculture, representing long-established examples of successful community-based local agriculture. Such systems have fed much of the world for centuries and continue to feed people in many parts of the planet. The future sustainability of agriculture depends also on young people wanting to remain on the land, and therefore farming must provide a way of life which is satisfying for young people.

Historical evidence shows that smallholder agriculture, adequately supported by policy and public investments, has the capacity to contribute effectively to food security and food sovereignty, and substantially and significantly to economic growth, the generation of employment, the alleviation of poverty, the emancipation of neglected and marginalized groups and the reduction of spatial and socio- economic inequalities. Within an enabling political and institutional environment, it can contribute to sustainable management of biodiversity and other natural resources while preserving cultural heritage.

The contribution smallholder agriculture makes to world food security and nutrition is both direct, in as far as it links production and consumption for many rural households, and indirect because (a) it is provisioning domestic markets with the main food products, (b) it does so in a potentially resilient way, and (c) in many countries smallholder agriculture functions as an important social safety net.

At a time when fortification is widely promoted as the most effective solution to address micronutrient deficiencies, we should remember that nature and traditional agriculture provide an almost infinite variety of food diversity which is disregarded and therefore pushed into oblivion and extinction by the prevailing industrial food production system (Hajjar et al., 2008). The recognition of the value of nutritional and dietary diversity of traditional agriculture is also becoming an important entry point for exploring more sustainable food systems. The causes and consequences of impoverishment in food diversity and simplification of diets are complex and span culture, health, agriculture, markets and environment. However, it seems likely that agricultural biodiversity can play a role in moderating nutritional problems (Johns, 2006; Johns and Eyzaguirre, 2006; De Wit, 2015). The combination of various crops and animals in traditional agroecosystems not only allows the more efficient utilization of ecological niches; it also increases locally available nutrients for human diets or improves household income, allowing the purchase of alternative food items on the market.

Indigenous species harboured in traditional agriculture and family farms are important to health, besides having an important role in ecologically based production systems. In many crops, the choice between one variety and another can make the difference between micronutrient deficiency and micronutrient adequacy. Projects implementing an integrated approach to sustainable agriculture and improved nutrition have successfully built upon locally available biodiversity to revitalize local or regional food products and systems and have had a positive impact on communities’ livelihoods and health.

The challenge of future agriculture in both developing and developed countries is to identify win-win options whereby intensification or changes in land use meet the demands of expanding population and economic development while reducing negative externalities of purely market-based agricultural production and maintaining the goods and services provided by the environment. A desirable endpoint for all viable land use and agricultural systems is clearly a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Past, present and future of agriculture
• 2 Agricultural heritage and sustainable food systems
• 3 A view to protecting and safeguarding our heritage
• 4 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems: concept and the initiative
• 5 Dynamic conservation of GIAHS
• 6 Lessons learned, experiences and impacts
• 7 GIAHS are around us: sites and systems of interest
• 8 Final reflection and key messages
• Index