The Agroforestry Antidote: A remedy for South Ecuador's High Rates of Deforestation
Date
2017-04-06
Authors
Graeme, Michael
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Abstract
Land extensification is a land-use pattern that involves the clearing of forests for short-
lived, unsustainable pastoral and agricultural operations. This pattern of razing forested
landscapes, cultivating them briefly until soils become depleted, and then repeating the
process in a new area, is common in Ecuador, although it has not always been so.For millennia, long before the arrival of Columbus to the Americas, the forests of Ecuador
were cultivated using agroforestry systems as responses to the complex problems faced by the first peoples of these landscapes. Recently Ecuador’s forests have been subject to new forms of management, resulting in the highest rates of deforestation in all of South America with South Ecuador experiencing a startling 46% loss of forest cover between 1976 and 2008. Agroforestry practices are based in using the interrelationships of trees, animals
and crops to provide food security and economic wellbeing, while at the same time
conserving ecosystem integrity. The underlying factors allowing land extensification to
continue in Ecuador will be explored, as well as some intervention points for
implementing agroforestry as a sustainable alternative. My research, complemented by
first hand observations carried out in November 2016, will examine how moving away from extensification and into agroforestry-based land-use patterns can simultaneously
supplant the problem of deforestation, encourage cultural restoration, provide stimulus
for decolonization, and help realize food security in South Ecuador.
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Keywords
Agroforestry, Ecuador, Deforestation, Eco-cultural, Regeneration,