Youth and agriculture: Can we combine farming and forest conservation?

By
15 September 2014

Heitor Teixeira asks whether we can combine farming and forest conservation? And working with farmers in Brazil, he thinks that by involving them integrally, we can.

The city of Viçosa is located in the Zona da Mata region, Minas Gerais, Brazil, surrounded by mountains and poor soils that favour family farming rather than industrial agriculture. But land use has been increasing based on large scale monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, degrading natural resources and reducing natural forests to small scattered fragments in the landscape. This is seen clearly in São Bartolomeu, a watershed that also supplies half of Viçosa’s water requirements. Here, local farmers struggle to gain a dignified life from farming, coping with social problems, poor access to markets and lack of labour.

Strategies are needed that enhance farmers’ involvement in combining the conservation of natural resources with sustainable agricultural production. But is that possible?

External threats and the pressure on land are increasing. The city is growing. A mining company has plans for the watershed which would affect the water, soil and also the life of local farmers. In that context, students from the Federal University of Viçosa are working at a landscape level, in partnership with two NGOs, the Center of Alternative Technologies and the Socio-Environmental Institute of Viçosa. The idea is to create ‘agroecological corridors’.

Forest fragments can be connected, natural areas expanded, but also including areas managed using agroecological principles. Such landscapes have great potential to increase biodiversity, allow ‘genetic flow’ between forest fragments, and protect soil and water resources. The project is running workshops developed together with the farmers and considering their needs. The first was about soils with participants exchanging knowledge about different soil types and how best to use them sustainably. The next will be on agroforestry.

Another potential to be explored is the conversion of the watershed into an Area of Environmental Protection, a Unit of Conservation of Sustainable Use. Farmers could stay and continue farming, but may generate other benefits such as ecotourism and access to financial resources through payments for environmental services.

Farmers are being interviewed by the students and questionnaires have a focus that gives autonomy and a voice for farmers’ needs and ideas. The creation and long term success of the protected area cannot work without the incorporation of the knowledge and perceptions of local farmers and other residents and stakeholders. We think that in cases like this, environmental conservation can only be made possible and sustainable unless it is done together with an agroecological transition and the full involvement of local farmers.

Heitor Teixeira

Heitor Teixeira is a forestry student at the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV), Brazil.
Email: heitor.teixeira@ufv.br