Farmers in the Kaffa region of Ethiopia collect lianas (woody climbers) in semi-wild coffee forests to build their traditional houses
By Getachew Tadesse, Environmental Studies Department, University of California, Santa Cruz
Agriculture was probably 8,000 years old by the time Arabica coffee was first domesticated in the montane forests of Ethiopia around 800 AD. Throughout its history, agriculture has been largely dependent on natural ecosystems and native biodiversity and will continue to be so in the future. For millennia, the resilience of agricultural production in the face of periodic perturbations was only possible because of the wild biodiversity that coexisted with cultivated biodiversity and the vital ecosystem services that flowed from natural and modified landscapes.
Although traditional agriculture and conservation are inextricably interlinked, paradoxically, biodiversity conservation targets have been alienated from agricultural production and vice versa. As food production and biodiversity are more disconnected, they become more threatened by ecosystem degradation, agroecosystem intensification, and climate change. In particular, biodiversity and traditional livelihoods in human-dominated tropical landscapes face such threats.
In our recent study published in Biological Conservation, we explored the prospects for conserving biological diversity and ecosystem service provisioning that support traditional and subsistence livelihoods in natural forests and coffee agroforests of southwest Ethiopia. Here, coffee is produced in wild, semi-wild, garden, and plantation systems. That is, coffee systems in this region span a gradient from coffee grown under a natural forest (wild) to intensive plantation. We believe that many natural forest fragments in the region have been conserved in the past for their wild and semi-wild coffee and other forest-based ecosystem services. We found that coffee agroforests integrate food production with biodiversity and ecosystem services better than similar production of cereals, tea, or Eucalyptus plantations.
However, wild and semi-wild coffee productions typically yield only up to 10% of the coffee yield produced from the garden and plantation systems. In the short-term, such low coffee productivity discourages farmers who desperately need to increase income or meet their livelihood needs. In addition to the growing local demand for more coffee and food, land-tenure changes and agricultural development policies at national levels have aggravated deforestation and the conversion of less intensive coffee agroforests into more intensive coffee, cereal and other plantations. These changes are negatively affecting biodiversity and sustainable food production in the region.
For native woody species alone, for instance, we found that the conversion of forests to traditional coffee agroforests resulted in a loss of at least 34% of forest-based woody species, with an additional 37% loss if semi-wild and traditional agroforests are more intensified to coffee plantations. On our recently published manuscript in Applied Geography, we found that wild and semi-wild coffee productions were also better for ecosystem services that support food production despite facing similar pressures.
We cannot ensure food security without sustaining biodiversity and vice versa. We should take action instead of debating whether biodiversity conservation should be separated from agricultural production or not. Such debates have little relevance in regions such as southwest Ethiopia where too little protected habitats remain for biodiversity preservation, and where food production is intimately linked with and largely dependent upon biodiversity-driven ecosystem services.
We need both forests and coffee farms – we cannot lose all the forests to coffee or low-intensity and semi-wild coffee from these landscapes without losing considerable biodiversity and ecosystem services. If we continue to lose biodiversity and ecosystem services as agroforests become intensified, can such losses be compensated by the higher coffee or other crop yields? Certainly not!
Finally I want to end my note with the following two questions: How can we promote the synergies and minimize the trade-offs between food (and coffee) production and conservation in subsistence societies? How can environmental incentives programs such as coffee certification, PES, or REDD+ schemes be effectively used to promote such production landscapes in the context where local people have little power to decide on managing their land?
For more details, please read the entire studies:
Photo: Getachew Tadesse
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