School of Sustainability

The forest garden that would not call itself agroforestry

Ask Eriberto Guerra why he does not call his plot in the Peruvian Amazon an agroforestry system and he laughs. "That does not work here," he says. He farms near the Cordillera Azul National Park, in the town of Lamas in central Peru, and what he tends is better described as a forest garden: dozens of species grown together, among them traditional plants, on ground that government programmes once tried to improve.

Those programmes promoted coffee or cacao with one or two food crops and a few trees, and offered the sustainable-farming label to go with it. Guerra and other Indigenous farmers around Lamas found it did not perform. Some rejected the label outright. His reasoning is plain arithmetic: when one crop fails in the field, or fetches nothing in the local market, a plot holding dozens of species has others to carry the household through. A plot holding two does not.

Guerra's account was reported by Mongabay as part of a series of interviews with Indigenous leaders about environmental solutions in their communities. His alone is worth pausing over, because it names a recurring failure: an outside programme arrived with a simplified version of a practice the farmers already held in fuller form, attached a label to the smaller thing, and then wondered why it struggled. The farmers' objection was not to trees or to coffee. It was to being offered less diversity than they already planted, and being told it was more.

Mongabay · Regeneration International · Read the source