Enhancing biodiversity to support sustainable crop production

Diverse agricultural practices such as intercropping provide vast opportunities for development of sustainable agricultural systems. The session “Enhancing Biodiversity to Support Sustainable Crop Production” at the World Biodiversity Forum brought policy makers, scientists, and practitioners together to discuss the latest developments concerning intercropping.

Interestingly, it was the practitioners, i.e. the small-holder farmers in Kenya represented through David Odee from the Kenya Forestry Research Institute and the breeders represented through Agata Leska from the small Swiss enterprise Getreidezüchtung Peter Kunz, that highlighted the yield benefits of intercropping. This reflects the current narrative in agriculture, where yield is the main performance assessment measure. However, it also shows that even from this perspective, intercropping performs well.

The scientific community highlighted the challenges associated with intercropping. On one hand, current barriers exist in the acceptance of intercropping by farmers, which were presented by Charlotte Bickler from the Organic Research Center. Their research showed that a lack of available knowledge and advice are preventing farmers from implementing more diverse cropping systems, along with the harvest complexity and associated technical issues. However, solutions are available. Namely, knowledge exchange between the scientific and the practitioner communities and the development of technical kits are possible. Another challenge highlighted by Wim van der Putten from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology was to achieve both sustainable soils and productive plants. In nature, succession has shown that the more biologically diverse the soils (i.e. with highly connected food webs), the less productive the plants. Solutions here might be to look into nature and use mid-successional characteristics of plants and soils – something that may also be achieved through the huge genetic diversity of crops available in gene banks or through their wild populations.

Solutions can certainly be fostered through appropriate policy developments. Markus Hardegger from the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture nicely showed how most of the current incentives for farmers on biodiversity rely on added biodiversity (i.e. land sparing). These incentives only partially reach their goals. He asked for further development of the incentives scheme towards the use of biodiversity, e.g. the use of diverse arable crops or agroforestry where diversity is actually used to produce (i.e. land sharing). Along these lines, Emile Frison from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems highlighted the need for biodiversity and agriculture to work more closely together. He proposed a revised Target 7 of the Global Biodiversity Framework that would include diversified food production systems that apply agroecological principles and sustainably use of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Overall, the session demonstrated that diverse cropping such as intercropping and agroforestry are valuable and promising methods to achieve a sustainable production of food. Some challenges faced by practitioners have been identified and are being addressed at the science and policy level. However, those present general agreed that beyond these challenges, a change in narrative for agriculture is needed towards how we want to feed the world and how we assess the performance of agricultural production systems. A more holistic assessment in agriculture, beyond yield, is required – an assessment of variables that matter to society, such as health or social justice, is also necessary.