How can ecoagriculture strategies help improve global food supplies, support efforts to conserve biodiversity, AND improve rural livelihoods?
Strategies to deliver agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation often appear to be conflicting, involving significant trade-offs. Economic and market policies often present disincentives for farmers and communities to practice ecoagriculture. Government subsidies to maximize agricultural production have driven the conversion of landscapes to expansive monocultures, with the accompanying loss of critical biodiversity habitat such as wetlands and field borders. While diversified agricultural systems are often desirable for generating biodiversity benefits, sustaining the economic viability of such production systems requires markets for multiple products – and these markets may still be poorly developed. However, new evidence of ecoagricultural practices and systems indicates that opportunities for synergy are far greater than had been previously imagined by most agricultural and biodiversity practitioners and policy-makers. Of the 36 ecoagriculture cases highlighted in the
