Making Sense of Agrobiodiversity, Diet, and Intensification of Smallholder Family Farming in the Highland Andes of Ecuador

Abstract

Methods are needed for helping researchers and farmers to interactively describe and analyze local practices in search of opportunities for improving health, environment, and economy. The authors worked with smallholder family farmers in five Andean villages in Ecuador to apply participatory four-cell analysis (PFCA) in characterizing agrobiodiversity. Margelef and Shannon indices examined ecological richness and evenness, and a simplified 24-hour dietary recall characterized food consumption. Cross-analysis tested interactions among agrobiodiversity, farm size, and diet. Overall trends appeared to work against sustainable intensification, with notable heterogeneity and positive deviance found in the practices of relatively smaller enterprises, representing a potential resource for sustainable intensification. The suite of methods was determined useful for initiating researcher-farmer explorations of promising innovation pathways.

Keywords:

• agrobiodiversity
• Ecuador
• family farming
• sustainable intensification

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors express their gratitude to the families participating in this study from the communities of Paquibug, Vaquería, Tzimbuto, Monjas, and Guangopud. We thank Conny Almekinders and Peter Berti for comments on an earlier version of this article. This research was supported by grants from the McKnight Foundation and the Swift Foundation.

Notes

¹See for example, Ecuador's 2009 Organic Law of Food Sovereignty (LORSA) and its ensuing legislation, such as the law proposals for land and territories and agro-biodiversity, seeds, and promotion of agro-ecology, http://www.soberaniaalimentaria.gob.ec.

²This activity was part of a McKnight Foundation Collaborative Crop Research Program-supported project, “Enabling Seed Systems: The Biological Foundation of Food Security in the Andes”. For further information, see http://mcknight.ccrp.cornell.edu.