Authors: Katya Perez Guzman (IIASA), Charlotte Gonzalez Abraham (FABLE Mexico), Sarah Jones (Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT, FABLE Secretariat), in collaboration with the Defensores de la Naturaleza (FDN) and Centro para la Educación y Acción Ecológica, Naturalez (CEDAE).
Can agriculture feed the world without destroying the planet?
Food production and land-use systems are being managed unsustainably across most regions of the world, limiting opportunities for green and equitable growth. This is especially evident in the production of coffee, banana, and cocoa—sectors highly vulnerable to climate change, territorial constraints, and unequal international trade. These realities disproportionately affect smallholder farmers, who often live in poverty, face food insecurity, and are exposed to the volatility of international prices.
Smallholder farms represent 90% of all agricultural units worldwide and provide livelihoods, directly or indirectly, for up to 2.5 billion people. BioFinCas takes on this challenge with a clear goal: to support key smallholder farmers in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in building a path toward sustainable agriculture. Achieving this goal requires dialogue and collaboration with government and civil society actors in each country. Strategic tools such as the FABLE Calculator (FABLE-C) enable stakeholders to explore the potential impacts of different food system futures and to minimize trade-offs between sectoral objectives.
Imagine María, a cocoa farmer in the Dominican Republic. Her harvest depends increasingly on unpredictable rains, and her income fluctuates year after year. María may not decide her country’s agricultural policies, but her livelihood depends on them.
As part of the BioFinCas project, the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, in collaboration with FDN and CEDAE, are convening scenario development workshops with multiple stakeholders. Together, and using FABLE-C, they are defining and modeling strategies to scale up biodiversity-friendly interventions at the farm level in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Mexico.
The modeling results will be used to compare the impacts of at least three possible food system futures on nutrition, biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and socioeconomic outcomes (employment, production costs). These three futures include:
- The continuation of current trends
- The full implementation of national policy commitments based on an analysis of national development policies, agricultural policies, dietary guidelines, and commitments to global agendas such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and Land Degradation Neutrality
- Sustainable practices for the production of national crops including cocoa, banana, and coffee. For these three crops, emphasis will be placed on organic production and agroforestry as means to promote biodiversity without compromising farmers’ incomes.
Model assumptions and parameters will be co-developed and refined iteratively through stakeholder workshops and direct engagement with farmer associations, civil society, and government ministries in the BioFinCas focal landscapes across the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Mexico.
Over the coming months, the team is particularly interested in exploring:
- What would scaling up biodiversity-friendly practices such as organic agriculture mean in terms of production costs, carbon sequestration, and productivity changes?
- How would shifting to biodiversity-friendly practices affect agricultural expansion rates and national biodiversity conservation goals?
- Where is the optimal space to expand biodiversity-friendly agriculture in ways that minimize trade-offs between agricultural productivity and biodiversity conservation at farm, landscape, and national levels?
Through this work, BioFinCas seeks to co-create knowledge grounded in local realities and scientific evidence about ways for banana, cocoa, and coffee production to contribute to reducing smallholder poverty while building a more sustainable agricultural future.
This work is being carried out as part of the IKI-funded BioFinCas project led by Oro Verde.