Local Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation in Ethiopian Agriculture

katedewally
May 5, 2023
4 min read

“My involvement in the research project was motivated by doing something that benefits people (including farmers), and conservation.”

Sophie Jago is a research assistant at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew working on the ‘Incentive mechanisms for agrobiodiversity conservation in Ethiopia’ project with Dr James Borrell. In this short interview, we discussed the project (conservation of rare landraces of Enset) and its implications for farmers and conservation.

You can read all about her and the teams research here: https://www.kew.org/science/our-science/projects/agrobiodiversity-conservation-ethiopia

*All text in this interview is paraphrased and adapted from a conversation with Sophie

What motivated you to work in your project and work within the intersection between plant biodiversity and agriculture? Why do you think it is important for people to work in this field?

I've always been torn between going into biodiversity conservation and going into social research , education, or charity work. I haven't really had a chance to bring these interests together before (social development vs conservation) and always have thought they should interlink. Therefore my involvement in the research project was motivated by doing something that benefits both.

In this research you have worked alongside farmers. Do you have an example of a time that working with these farmers taught you something new such as changing the way you approached a research problem or tackled a conservation issue?

Before starting this research, I had no previous experience of working in an agricultural setting and so I have learned a lot from working with farmers during this project. Visiting these places challenged my presumption of what farming was like, from an automatic image of large monocultural fields of wheat to seeing the amazing crop diversity that is part of the Ethiopian smallholder farming system. It has also improved my understanding of the importance of traditional management practices as I have seen first-hand how these farmers work to make the most of every single part of the crops they grow. With Enset, different parts are used for different food products, rope, packaging, hand wipes and animal fodder.

In terms of research, we are interested in the conservation of rare landraces of Enset. My thoughts on how to identify rare landraces before starting the project would have been to survey how many landraces were in each farm. Instead, we decided to use local farmer knowledge and did 22 workshops with over 500 farmers where we asked farmers about all the landraces they knew of, and whether they were grown in many or few farms in the community as well as whether they were grown in large or small quantities. This knowledge allowed us to create an index of rarity for the landraces. We managed to obtain information from over 500 farms just from those 22 workshops, demonstrating to me that there was a much quicker way to collect this sort of data through using local farmer knowledge rather than manual identification.

How did you get so many farmers to participate in this research?

This was done through the assistance of local researchers who understood the area and the people in the communities very well. Whilst doing this, we found out how important it is to fully explain the project to the farmers, including what the outputs of the project are going to be. As the farmers could see the benefits of the project, they were keen to participate. It started off with just a few farmers talking to us about it and from there we relied on the farmers to encourage the participation of their communities.

From conducting the workshops, did you get a sense of what the key difficulties were for collaboration between the farmers and conservation researchers? How might these be overcome?

One of the main things is to compare between other projects that are going on in the area. Our project is fairly low budget and is predominantly research focussed. At the same time as this project, you have big aid projects in the same area. Therefore, it was necessary to make it clear of our intentions with the project and that we were not there to supply aid, we were there to increase the diversity of Enset and made participants aware of the benefits that this would have for them. When discussing with the farmers, they were already aware that having a high diversity of Enset is important for food security and resilience which made conveying the message of our research relevant to their current viewpoints.

A few of the farmers also mentioned that there had been previous projects that started out really well and then disappeared, meaning that there was no continuation of that project in the local area. This is a massive problem in research in general most research is grant based, meaning that it can be difficult to sustain the involvement in the local community beyond the grant period. Projects could try thinking about whether there is potential for the project to continue to benefit the local people beyond the research ending.

Leading on from the discussion from the farmers, did you find that there were some farmers who were pressured to lose their Enset diversity on farm?

There’s one particular landrace (Nobo) which at the moment is the most popular one because it is big and resistant to drought. A lot of the farmers want to grow more of that, so if that continues their farms may lose some of their diversity. The point of this project is to look into the future and encourage farmers to keep their diversity as in the long term this provides security to the farmer and could ensure enset continues to thrive in a changing climate.

From the project, what do you hope will be gained from both a conservation and from a farming perspective?

We hope to see an increase in rare landraces grown in the region. We would also hope that this is sustained going forward with the farmers finding it easy to grow the crop and it being a successful crop. In terms of the farmers themselves, we hope that this research will provide food security going forward if there are climatic changes. One of the farmers from the project summarised this point very well “its not about the short term rewards we get from the project, its about making sure that their grandchildren will still be able to grow Enset”.