Traditional agricultural landscapes as protected areas in international law and policy

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Abstract

The protected area approach to conservation of habitats and species emphasises a natural world shaped without human influence. Despite the debates relating to community conservation, stakeholder involvement in conservation and equitable benefit sharing, progressive approaches to community conservation tend to permit traditional agricultural practises, that support biodiversity preservation, to operate only in land outside core conservation areas. Nevertheless, there are many ingenious agricultural systems that have shaped novel, resilient landscapes for centuries and in so doing have also sustained high levels of biodiversity. The traditional practices deployed also constitute a wealth of unique cultural heritage. These systems are of such importance that they merit primary support in protected areas and should not be relegated to operate only in formal and informal buffer zones. Further, some of these systems may be internationally important and capable of fulfilling aspects of key global policy mandates established at the Earth and World Summits held respectively in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg.

This analysis examines the extent to which the current international regulatory and policy matrix dealing with protected areas supports the continuance of traditional agricultural landscapes which are herein described as landscapes in which primarily, traditional sustainable agricultural practices are currently carried out and where biological diversity (which includes agrobiodiversity) is conserved thereby.

Introduction

The early history of area-based biodiversity preservation demonstrated an emphasis of appropriation and assumption of control. The forced removal of humans from protected areas in order to secure a concept of wilderness and to permit endangered species to live within natural ecosystems is well documented not only within descriptions of the human rights implications, but also in contemporary conceptual analyses of conservation strategies (Gomez-Pompa and Kaus, 1992). The establishment of one of the forerunners of the protected area concept, Yellowstone National Park in the USA, involved the exclusion of the Crow and Blackfoot and in part removal of the Tukarika Shoshone in order to meet the strict criteria of the existing concept of wilderness area (Stevens, 1997). The resulting idealised concept of an area excluding all but limited human visitors has persisted to the present day. In Africa the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania followed a similar pattern when, in 1959, the indigenous Maasai and their cattle were forced to leave the protected area (Homewood and Rogers, 1991). In Asia, a comparable approach has been taken in some protected areas. Nepal, by example, removed and relocated the entirety of the indigenous peoples from the Rara National Park in 1976 (Stevens, 1997).

Policies of gazetting land and the subsequent removal of human communities persist and international conservation programmes still primarily favour limited human involvement in protected areas (perhaps for research, monitoring and tourism within strictly controlled parameters). Even programmes designed to acknowledge the human relationship with the environment tend to secure a central zone within protected domains in which human activities are excluded and other concessions to human requirements are often restricted to protected area margins (Parker and Amin, 1983).

There are always exceptions to the rule but in this context these are few in number. A prime example of a different approach is the renowned Ngorongoro crater protected area which was formally established by the Tanzanian Ngorongoro Conservation Area Ordinance in 1959. From the outset it was designed to conserve the natural and archaeological resources of the area and to protect the interests of Maasai living there (Chausi, 1996).

Although humans are rarely permitted to carry out unmodified versions of their traditional lifestyles in protected areas there has been a debate for some time concerning human participation within them, stakeholder involvement and the equitable sharing of benefits derived from exploiting ancestral lands and traditional knowledge (Pimbert and Pretty, 1995). In many instances the natural resources within a protected area may have previously met most of a traditional community's subsistence needs (Fabricus and Koch, 2004). However, realisation of this fact has not necessarily resulted in regulatory support for areas where humans may continue to live within their uninhibited, traditional lifestyles. Instead, in some instances, local communities have begun to participate in management and other aspects of protected area operation but this tends to be within the imposed paradigm and subject to the overriding priority to protect non-human natural resources.

This failure to fully embrace and support traditional lifestyles may be explained, in part, by the expansion of all societies beyond the traditional carrying capacity of some ancestral lands. In other cases, the territories of ancestral lands available for traditional communities are so eroded by many pressures that traditional ways of life are no longer viable.

Nevertheless, where territories that are capable of supporting traditional lifestyles still persist, the emphasis on the exclusion of humans living traditional lifestyles within protected areas may be seriously misguided in some instances. Humans contribute significantly to the shaping of ecosystems to the extent that very few examples of wilderness within the biosphere are free of our influence. Indeed there is evidence that some of the world's wild ecosystems are the result of intelligent cooperation between humans and the biosphere. Posey (1998), by example, argued that areas within apparently pristine tropical rainforest in his Brazilian rainforest research areas were in part created by the practices of indigenous peoples intent on securing guaranteed access to their extensive portfolio of medicinal and other useful plants. Posey (1998) specifically indicated that many bio-diverse areas within the Amazon basin contain gardens indivisible from the forest wilderness to the untrained eye. These gardens contain specific concentrations of key plants used and carefully maintained, in accordance with ancient and still developing knowledge, by the local native peoples (Posey, 1998).

In some cases the impact on land, diversity and species differentiation by humans has been so dramatic that biodiversity management plans have had to mimic agricultural practices that once had a purpose but are now confined to historical archives Harrop (2005a).

This strategy is common in countries that no longer have obvious communities living within traditional lifestyles such as the United Kingdom: a land with a surfeit of ecosystems affected and created by human activities. One such activity, known as coppicing, involves the rotational cutting of trees to a base root carried out originally in order to supply natural materials for a variety of human uses. The wood grows from the base and when it reaches a certain height is repeatedly and thus sustainably cut again. Coppicing in its traditional form was not carried out to preserve rare species but was an element of a portfolio of agricultural practices carried out to provide resources to support the essential needs of human communities (Maylam, 2002). In protected areas in the South of England the traditional practice is mimicked in contemporary conservation management plans to secure the persistence of rare species that depend upon the human-induced habitat. Although this method is based on a tradition, in this form it adds to the cost of conservation collected either through public taxation or through other public fund sources.

To mimic traditional practices and to construct legal frameworks to support them involves the imposition of artificial and costly regimes. Pragmatically, where traditional practices still flourish it makes much more financial, political and regulatory sense to encourage their continuance. Conservation can then operate without a negative impact on the public purse. Coppicing in the UK is no longer an extant traditional practice but there any many traditional systems operating around the world (Altieri, 2004) which are very much alive and not only support resilient ecosystems and the concomitant biodiversity without imposing public costs (Toledo et al., 2003) but also have the potential to provide solutions to food security and water shortage problems addition to improving soil health, reducing pesticide use and assisting to provide benefits to the rural poor (Pretty et al., 2003). In many cases, as a result of unclear land tenure or as a result of other land-use pressures (Altieri, 2004), these traditional practices are not supported by regulatory regimes and when they operate near or in protected areas they may subsist on the edge of toleration by the authorities or be positively discriminated against (Martin et al., 2006).objective of this analysis is to ascertain the extent to which international law and policy support and prioritise the protection of the systems and the land areas comprised in traditional agricultural landscapes. In particular instruments dealing with protected area management are emphasised herein.

Section snippets

Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems

The importance of the systems within traditional agricultural landscapes has recently been emphasised at the international, institutional level by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation through the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) project. This is currently examining the manner in which agriculturally generated biological diversity may be protected. The definition of GIAHS currently used within this evolving project is as follows:

Remarkable Land Use Systems

The international regulations and policy

The protection of the sites contemplated herein requires a number of emphases within international law and policy. Without these emphases, expressed in unequivocal language, the lack of support for traditional agricultural landscapes may mean that the priorities of other global initiatives will cause these landscapes to disappear or be relegated to frozen examples of history. The area of focus in this analysis, within the wider scope of international law and policy, is restricted to the

Conclusion

Much research has been carried out to demonstrate the value of traditional agricultural systems but the international regulatory regime does not provide a coherent framework of protection. The concept of traditional agricultural landscape is supported in principle at the international policy level and by a number of soft law instruments that all require further, detailed regulation to secure a legislative impact. The record of more detailed implementation is not, however, impressive. Agenda 21,

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