Focus Issue: Family Farming in Mountains—Institutional and Organizational Arrangements in the Context of Globalization

in Hainan, China, Xianzhao Liu and co-authors illustrate how self-restoration has been fairly successful in promoting native tropical forest regeneration, but point out the need for management interventions to achieve greater species diversity and functional complexity.

In the MountainDevelopment section, Mauro Varotto and Luca Lodatti show how a traditional terraced landscape in the Italian Alps has been revitalized through innovation in social management creating new forms of community and solidarity, combined with farming practices oriented towards multifunctionality and relations characterized by multiscalarity. The authors emphasize the need for innovative forms of governance and partnership between city and mountain residents in order to improve and scale out this small-scale initiative.
In the MountainResearch section, the first 3 papers address institutional issues and arrangements related to mountain pastoralism. Coming from an ethnographic perspective, Giulia Fassio and her colleagues analyze the structural and cultural continuities of mountain pastoral families in the western Italian Alps, where the current of change has been strong in the past decades; they conclude that family structures have changed considerably and that access to communal resources may prove crucial in future for their survival. The case study in the Ukranian Carpathians by Agata Warchalska-Troll and Mateusz Troll investigates 5 types of summer livestock farming practices and corresponding organizational forms of animal husbandry to assess which are best suited to deal with modern challenges in an unique environment. In the next paper, Elena Katia Villarroel and co-authors show that despite increasing individual decision-making at the family level in Andean wetlands in Bolivia, the allyu-a key indigenous and traditional collective institution-is still significant for managing camelid grazing in these unique bofedal landscapes in a sustainable way.
In their paper about reciprocity in the Florida Province, Bolivia, Florence Bétrisey and Christophe Mager draw similar conclusions and show that traditional reciprocal norms in this mountain area still play an essential role in decision-making on local water management systems; the use of reciprocity arrangements is in fact a token of small farmers' agency in an increasingly neoliberal world. The last paper focusing on family farming in this issue of MRD illustrates that family farms in a mountain region in Galicia (Spain) are struggling to adapt their strategies to remain viable, despite fairly supportive European agricultural policies: neither extensification nor diversification of agricultural activities have been particularly successful, due to the small size of farms, the lack of workforce, and the age factor; pluriactivity has been a more successful strategy.
In addition to these papers focusing on family farming, this issue offers an article in the MountainDevelopment section presenting a feasible method of analyzing post-disaster bark beetle outbreaks in the forests of the Tatra Mountains, Slovakia (by Christo Nikolov et al).
In the MountainResearch section, analyzing historical material and ''witness trees'', Carolyn Copenheaver and co-authors access land prices from 1786 to 1830 in a small Appalachian county of southwestern Virginia, USA, and show that both environmental and social factors influenced land sale patterns during early European settlement in this mountain area. Finally, reporting on the results of a 7-year field experiment in Hainan, China, Xianzhao Liu and co-authors illustrate how self-restoration has been fairly successful in promoting native tropical forest regeneration, but point out the need for management interventions to achieve greater species diversity and functional complexity.

Editorial Mountain Research and Development (MRD)
An international, peer-reviewed open access journal published by the International Mountain Society (IMS) www.mrd-journal.org MRD chose to focus on family farming as a contribution to the IYFF 2014. This international year has highlighted the key role family farmers play in ensuring food and nutrition security, in managing natural resources and ecosystems, and in advancing economic development in rural areas (FAO, Committee on Agriculture 2014; Lowder et al 2014). The many regional and national dialogues and numerous civil society initiatives that took place in the context of the IYFF have emphasized the need for further actions, specific policies, programs, and partnerships to empower family farmers and support them in overcoming challenges and constraints. On 27-28 October 2014, the Global Dialogue on Family Farming will synthesize the outcomes of these efforts and develop a pro-family farming agenda for post-2014 action (http://www.fao.org/about/meetings/global-dialogue-on-family-farming/en/). Hopefully this agenda will address the specific challenges faced by mountain farmers and thereby contribute to more sustainable agriculture and equitable livelihoods in mountains, to the benefit not only of mountain people but also of people in the adjacent lowlands.
MRD will continue contributing to the debate about this important aspect of family farming in upcoming issues.
We close this Editorial on a sad note: as we were completing this issue, we heard from our former International Editorial Board member Fausto Sarmiento that his Venezuelan colleague Gerardo Budowski had just passed away. Dr. Budowski, a respected conservationist and key scientist in the field of tropical mountain studies, served as an MRD Editorial Advisory Board Member for many years (Sarmiento 2002). We would like to express our sympathy to his bereaved family.
Hans Hurni, David Molden, Susanne Wymann von Dach, and Anne B. Zimmermann Open access article: please credit the authors and the full source.