The urban area, a center of agrobiodiversity in the Negro River region (Amazonas, Brazil)?

Despite its isolation from land communications networks and colonization frontiers, the regions of the Upper and Middle Negro River are characterized by increasing connectivity between rural or forest areas, pertaining to communities, and urban areas, i.e. small towns along the river. Population movement between these two poles, on a temporary or permanent basis, results in expanded periurban agriculture, in the context of new social and ecological arrangements. A comparative approach is proposed to cultivated plants diversity, based on a sample of 14 and 18 families in these urban and forest contexts. Relations among the diversity of managed spaces, biological diversity and social networks involved in access to phytogenetic resources were analyzed. The analysis shows a recomposition of agricultural systems with high crop diversity, at times higher than in the context of forests, albeit subject to more system vulnerability due to reduced fallow periods and available manual labor. In urban areas, traditional agricultural resource management strategies are combined with another objective, farmed lands access. This analysis also points out the need for reflection about the conservation of a biocultural heritage

ROLE DES DYNAMIQUES SPATIO-TEMPORELLES DANS LA CONSERVATION DE L'AGROBIODIVERSITE DES SYSTEMES AGRICOLES AMERINDIENS DU BAS RIO NEGRO (AMAZONAS, BRESIL)

International audienceIn Amazonia, shifting cultivation is the main farming system, and it is practiced in heterogeneous environments and with different degrees of sustainability. In the lower Rio Negro (Amazonas, Brasil), nearby the city of Manaus, the complex swidden-fallow systems need adaptations to cope with the lack of land rights and of labor force, wich is due to rural-urban mobility, extractivism, schooling and turism. We analyze the innovations developed by indigenous people in order to maintain their production and the flexibility of their agricultural system, by conserving agrobiodiversity and influencing the spatiotemporal dynamics of their cultivated areas within these permanent instability conditions

Firing up:Policy, politics and polemics under new and old burning regimes

International audienc

Roldan Muradian and Esteve Corbera:: “The Simplicity of PES is Very Alluring, but We Cannot Use Simple Solutions to Solve Complex Problems”

Although there is currently a boom of Payment of Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives in Latin America, including Brazil, little evidence about their effects or implications has been generated so far. In this sense, the application of policies without evidence is dangerous, alerts Roldan Muradian, a senior researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Esteve Corbera, a senior research fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in his turn emphasizes the importance of visualizing in which ways the rules that accompany PES implementation may or may not undermine the livelihood strategies of participants and non-participants. Muradian and Corbera - both of whom have spent the past 10 years researching on PES - have been internationally recognized due to their innovative approach to the matter, which goes beyond the conventional economic approach. Frequently coauthoring scientific articles on PES, both researchers use an institutional economy and political economy approach to analyze the origins, impacts and games of power associated with the implementation of PES in developing countries. While Muradian tries to better characterize market instruments and incentives for conservation, Corbera seeks to identify innovative and more effective ways to improve the implementation of PES. Corbera and Muradian were invited by Ludivine Eloy and Emilie Coudel to give an email interview to Sustainability in Debate. The main excerpts of the interview follow below