Collaborating with smallholder farmers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Tanzania, this project addresses biodiversity loss, enhancing global production systems for improved livelihoods and climate resilience.
Challenge
Agrobiodiversity (or agricultural biodiversity) underpins food security, nutritional health, livelihood resilience, ecosystem functioning and the capacity of food systems to respond to environmental change. Yet globally, agrobiodiversity is declining at an alarming rate as increasingly simplified and industrialised agricultural systems replace more diverse farming and agroforestry landscapes.
Historically, around 7,000 plant species were cultivated for food, yet today approximately half of all plant-based calories come from just three crops: rice, wheat and maize. This narrowing of the global food base increases vulnerability to climate change, pests, diseases and market shocks while reducing dietary diversity and nutritional health. These trends reflect wider global patterns in which agricultural expansion and intensification are among the leading drivers of biodiversity loss. Reversing them is therefore an important priority for both biodiversity conservation and food production. Conservation and food production must now join hands.
Insight
Many of the world’s remaining agrobiodiverse production systems are maintained by smallholder farmers and Indigenous Peoples. Through generations of seed selection, knowledge sharing, cultural practice and agroforestry management, these groups have developed highly diverse systems that integrate crops, trees, livestock, wild foods and forest products. These systems provide food, fuel, medicine and other essential resources while maintaining the genetic diversity and ecological functions that underpin resilient landscapes.
For individual producers, addressing such challenges alone can be difficult. This where collective organisations – groups of individuals or institutions that come together to jointly identify and work towards a shared goal or interest – can play an important role. By working together, collective organisations can help members to share knowledge, coordinate action, pool resources, improve access to markets and finance, and strengthen collective bargaining power – helping producers to navigate or overcome these barriers.
Understanding how collective organisations help sustain agrobiodiverse production systems under pressure is therefore central to efforts to nurture nature while supporting viable rural livelihoods. Working closely with smallholder producers in Philippines, Indonesia and Tanzania, the Nature Nurture project examines how collective organisations support smallholder farmers and Indigenous Peoples to sustain agrobiodiversity in different social, ecological and political contexts.
Collaboration
The Nature Nurture project is implemented by IIED, NTFP-EP and MVIWAARUSHA through local partners and communities. In Indonesia, Dayak producer groups in West Kalimantan, supported by the Riak Bumi Foundation, help maintain diverse agroforestry and swidden farming systems that combine rice, fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants, timber species and non-timber forest products.
In the Philippines, the Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF) supports Ikalahan communities to maintain Indigenous agroforestry systems comprising diverse crops, fruit trees, forest resources and locally adapted varieties across their ancestral domain. And in Tanzania, Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima na Wafugaji Mkoa wa Arusha (MVIWAARUSHA) works with networks of smallholder farmers and pastoralists to sustain diversified agroecological farming systems that integrate crops, livestock, trees and local seed varieties.
Duncan Macqueen & Janine Duffy
Duncan Macqueen directs IIED’s work on forests. His work focuses on forest and farm producer organisations and climate-resilient forest and farm business models – with an emphasis on group enterprises that pursue a broad vision of prosperity for their members and aggregate products and services from multiple smallholdings or Indigenous Peoples territories to deliver a wide range of public goods. Over the last 30-plus years Duncan has been a conceptual pioneer in the design and implementation of programmes to sustain climate-resilient and locally-controlled forest and farm businesses.
Janine Duffy is a researcher specialising in the equity and justice dimensions of environmental governance. Her interests lie in examining who has power, who benefits, and whose voices are heard in processes that shape human–environment relationships, and how shifting these dynamics can create fairer, more resilient outcomes for people and ecosystems.
