Smallholder farmers in Rwandan and the rest of Africa will soon be better able to weigh up the cost and benefits of adopting new practices supporting most overlooked contributors to global food security; the insects, animals that pollinate crops and boost yields.
“Three quarters of all food crops need insect pollinators to get good yields. 35% of all food production globally comes from crops dependent on pollinators.However, there are reports of declines in pollinators from several regions of the world,” says Barbara Gemmill-Herren of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Maryanne Grieg-Gran of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Gemmill-Herren have co-authored a handbook that smallholder farmers and organizations that work with them can use to identify such pollinator-friendly practices and evaluate their impacts on livelihoods, incomes and health.
“Sharing information with farmers about pollinator-friendly practices is a good first step. But farmers will adopt pollinator-friendly practices only if they can see that these practices will bring benefits to them – and while cash always helps, other less tangible benefits may also be important,” says Grieg-Gran.
There are striking examples of farmers managing for pollination services – in Ghana, a mango farmer realized some of the common weeds growing under his trees attracted pollinators into the orchard.
To conserve those pollinator species, the farmer chose to hand-weed rather than use herbicide even though weeding was four times more expensive.
The handbook, to be officially published on 8 March by FAO, draws on work with farmers in Ghana, India, Kenya and Nepal.
To improve pollination of their horticulture crops, farmers in the Mankessim area of Ghana chose to try out reducing pesticide use, protect riverside vegetation and sacred groves that provide habitat for pollinators and allow flowering plants to grow along field borders.
In Uttarakhand State, in India, farmers who plant grasses to prevent soil erosion at the edges of their fields could instead use plants that also attract pollinators.
The handbook provides a five-step approach, centred in the farmer field school tradition, for smallholders to assess current production systems, identifying and testing new practices, and evaluating their impacts. It will enable farmers to weigh up the costs and benefits of adopting different approaches to farming.
“Wild pollinators are some of the most important contributors to global food security, but farmers often overlook them,” says Maryanne Grieg-Gran of IIED. “Farmers need to be directly involved in testing practices that encourage pollinators to visit their crops so that they can assess the benefits and costs for themselves.”
Barbara Gemmill-Herren of FAO adds, “As agriculture intensifies with large-scale monocultures and greater use of agricultural chemicals, pollinators are increasingly threatened. There is a critical need to develop agricultural practices that sustain and increase yields, based on the ecosystem services such as pollination provided by wild species.”
The publication has been produced under the Global Pollination Project, a Global Environment Facility-supported project, implemented by United Nations Environment Programme and executed by the Food and Agriculture Organization, with seven national partners.
The production of the handbook was facilitated by funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
