Pollination and biological control research: are we neglecting two billion smallholders

Food insecurity is a major world problem, with ca. 870 million people in the world being chronically undernourished. Most of these people live in tropical, developing regions and rely on smallholder farming for food security. Solving the problem of food insecurity is thought to depend, in part, on managing ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops and the biological control of crop pests, to enhance or maintain food production. Our knowledge regarding regulating ecosystem services in smallholder-farmed (or dualistic) landscapes is limited and whilst pollination has been the focus of considerable research, the provision of natural enemy services, important for every crop worldwide, has been relatively neglected. In order to assess whether ecosystem-service research adequately represents smallholder-farmed landscapes, whilst also considering climatic region and national economic status, we examined the constituent studies of recent quantitative reviews relevant to biological control and pollination. No regulating ecosystem service meta-analysis, to our knowledge, has focussed on smallholder agriculture despite its importance to billions of peoples’ local food security. We found that whilst smallholdings contributed 16% of global farmland area and 83% of the global agricultural population (estimated using FAO’s World Census of Agriculture 2000) only 22 of 190 studies (12%), overall, came from smallholder-farmed landscapes. These smallholder studies mostly concerned coffee production (16 studies). Individual reviews of biological control were significantly and strongly biased towards data from large-scale farming in temperate regions. In contrast pollination reviews included more smallholder studies and were more balanced for climate regions. The high diversity of smallholder-farmed landscapes implies that more research will be needed to understand them compared to large-scale landscapes but we found far more research from the latter. We highlight that these skews in research effort have implications for sustainable intensification and the food security of billions in the developing world. In particular we urge for balance in future ecosystem-services research and synthesis by greater consideration of a diverse range of smallholder-farmed landscapes in Africa and continental Asia

Conceptualising fields of action for sustainable intensification A systematic literature review and application to regional case studies

[EN] After two decades of research on sustainable intensification (SI), namely securing food production on less environmental cost, heterogeneous understandings and perspectives prevail in a broad and partly fragmented scientific literature. Structuring and consolidating contributions to provide practice-oriented guidelines are lacking. The objectives of this study are to (1) comprehensively explore the academic SI literature, (2) propose an implementation-oriented conceptual framework, and (3) demonstrate its applicability for region-specific problem settings. In a systematic literature review of 349 papers covering the international literature of 20 years of SI research, we identified SI practices and analysed temporal, spatial and disciplinary trends and foci. Based on key SI practices, a conceptual framework was developed differentiating four fields of action from farm to regional and landscape scale and from land use to structural optimisation. Its applicability to derive region specific SI solutions was successfully tested through stakeholder processes in four European case studies. Disciplinary boundaries and the separation of the temporal and spatial strands in the literature prevent a holistic address of SI. This leads to the dominance of research describing SI practices in isolation, mainly on the farm scale. Coordinated actions on the regional scale and the coupling of multiple practices are comparatively un-derrepresented. Results from the case studies demonstrate that implementation is extremely context-sensitive and thus crucially depends on the situational knowledge of farmers and stakeholders. Although, there is no 'one size fits all' solution, practitioners in all regions identified the need for integrated solutions and common action to implement suitable SI strategies at the regional landscape level and in local ecosystems.This research was financially supported by the European Commission under grant agreement 652615 and conducted in the context of the ERA-Net FACCE SURPLUS project VITAL, with the national funders NWO (Netherlands), BMBF (Germany), INIA (Spain), ANR (France).Weltin, M.; Zasada, I.; Piorr, A.; Debolini, M.; Geniaux, G.; Moreno-Pérez, OM.; Scherer, L.... (2018). Conceptualising fields of action for sustainable intensification A systematic literature review and application to regional case studies. Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment. 257:68-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2018.01.023S688025