School of Sustainability

The forest garden that refused to be called agroforestry

Eriberto Guerra is tilling his plot of land in the Peruvian Amazon, not far from the Cordillera Azul National Park in central Peru, when the question comes. Why doesn't he call what he grows agroforestry? He throws his head back, laughs, shakes his head, and goes on working the soil. "That does not work here," he says with a chuckle, and the chuckle carries the whole answer: the name belongs to a scheme, not to the ground he is standing on.

The label arrived with good intentions. Government officials had promoted agroforestry schemes near his community in the town of Lamas - coffee or cacao planted alongside one or two other food crops and some trees. On paper it was sustainable farming. In the soil it underperformed, and Guerra and other Indigenous farmers began to refuse the name altogether. What the scheme offered was too thin to live on.

What Guerra grows instead is a forest garden of dozens of species, traditional plants among them, and his reasoning is plain bookkeeping. When one crop fails in the field, or fetches nothing in the local market, the others carry the household through. Diversity here is not an environmental badge. It is the insurance policy, written in plants, that the official version never bothered to include.

Guerra told all of this to Mongabay, as one of the Indigenous voices in a piece asking what environmental solutions are actually working inside their own communities. His answer is not a programme or a pilot but a plot he tills with his hands near a national park, and a refusal to rename it after the version that failed. The detail that stays is the laughter - a farmer being asked to call a working thing by the name of the thing that didn't.

Regeneration International · Mongabay · Read the source