Abstract
During the late 20th century, the ‘Green Revolution’ attained wide-ranging poverty alleviation, food security and improved nutrition across rural Asia. As these achievements were often reached at large environmental costs, ‘greener’ trajectories urgently need to be traced for Asia’s agri-food systems. In this sense, agro-ecological and biodiversity-based (ABB) farming systems can provide sufficient food, lift resource-use efficiencies and lower fossil-fuel dependencies while safeguarding the environment. Here, we systematically assess past progress and prospects for biodiversity-based pest management -or biological control (BC)- in 5 Asian countries. We characterize the extent to which BC science has matured, translated into practice and attained “real-world”outcomes within the prevailing farming systems of each country. To achieve this, we revert to the world-view of the 18th century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Doing so, we represent the extent to which BC science has progressed along a 6-step ‘impact pathway’ - from a description of on-farm biodiversity, over ecosystem service delivery to verifiable socio-economic outcomes. Our work pinpoints ways to strategize ABB science for an accelerated, evidence-based uptake by end-users within local agri-food systems. By entwining our Humboldtian ‘nature-culture’ perspective with farmer-scientist co-innovation, bolstered awareness-raising and supportive policies, ABB farming transitions could be initiated that are prone to deliver concrete, desirable agro-ecological outcomes at local and regional scales.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Agroecology and Ecosystem Services, a section of the journal
We systematically assess past progress and prospects for biodiversity-based pest management -or biological control (BC)- in five Asian countries
We represent the extent to which BC science has progressed along a six-step “impact pathway” –from a description of on-farm biodiversity, over ecosystem service delivery to verifiable socio-economic outcomes
Summary
Can be curbed while sustaining or even increasing yield, food output or farm revenue (Matteson, 2000; Pretty and Bharucha, 2015; Gurr et al, 2016). We provide a retrospective assessment of the extent to which biological control science has facilitated the necessary knowledge and tools to deliver such concrete, measurable agro-ecological outcomes in Asian farming systems. Experiences with “farmer first” training approaches in various Asian countries provide compelling evidence of how agro-chemical use in rice systems Within this extensive literature base, each individual publication was screened to determine the exact research focus. (4) service providing protocols (SPP), (5) delivery systems and implementation pathways, and (6) socio-ecological outcomes The latter theme accounts for agro-ecological practices (e.g., flower strips, intercrops) that have a clear impact in the socioeconomic domain, i.e., farmer income and farm-level revenue while including crop yield as an imperfect proxy of those measures. Perspective permits identifying shortcomings in the integrative social-ecological research that revolves around ABB farming systems, and helps draw trajectories to foment transformational change in local agri-food systems
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