An item on the website of Conservation Magazine describes how best to buy ecosystem services. It distinguishes “payments for action” from “payments for results”.
Farmers in Europe, it says, are paid to mow their hayfields to create habitat for birds, and get the cash regardless of how many birds use the grasslands. That’s payment for action.
In Cambodia, by contrast, villagers are paid to conserve forests, “but only if visiting birdwatchers see certain unusual species”. Payment for results.
Most current schemes to pay for ecosystem services apparently reward actions, rather than results. But which method actually delivers better results?
In general, “payment by action is favored where there is a clear action” that will clearly benefit biodiversity and is relatively easy to measure, they concluded. So paying to increase wetland habitat for birds known to frequent marshes would make sense.
In contrast, in degraded landscapes, or in places where conservationists aren’t sure which actions will bring the most benefit, it might make more sense to pay for results.
The conclusions emerge not from any kind of field study but from a theoretical model “consisting of one conservation agency, one land manager and one patch of habitat. The model assumed that the land manager wanted to maximize income from the patch. The agency, meanwhile, had a limited budget and wanted to get the biggest biodiversity boost for its buck.”
How to apply this to on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity? It’s complex. Research is currently going on at Bioversity and elsewhere, with some nifty approaches that, for example, allow different communities to bid for the payments, establishing a market that economist Adam Drucker says allows you to get more conservation for the same amount of money. He has also been exploring the tensions between economic efficiency and social equity; do members of the community resent some being paid more than others for the “same” conservation. A peer-reviewed journal has accepted a paper for publication; we’ll bring you news of an “easier” version of the story when we have it.
I am a bit at sea as to just how we got into the situation of paying farmers to conserve their own genetic resources, especially as the money could be better spent on evaluation of existing and future ex-situ collections and breeding (of benefit to all). If local varieties are of value to farmers then farmers will maintain them out of self-interest. If on-farm maintenance is of wider value, then the wider community might pay for it. But are there any details whatever of varieties conserved on farm that have developed (evolved) characters of wider use to the global community that were not present at the beginning of the project? Surely a review of this question is needed across all past on-farm projects. If nothing new and useful evolves within the term of the project, collection, ex-situ maintenance, and of-farm evaluation would be more useful. I remember the fanfare of the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Programme (CBDC). What were the results? I suggest not much. Unless features of subsequent value evolve under on-farm conservation (and can be recognized) project funding may actually hold back development by preventing the ingress and adoption of new varieties and crops.
And in-situ wildlife conservation should not be a model or partner for crop genetic resources. The mega-buck agencies in developed countries are not interested in farmers and farming – quite the reverse. Until recently farmers have been thrown out of vast swathes of protected areas at unknown cost to crop genetic erosion. And there are malign side effects – the `Rachel Carson’ effect with up to millions of people dead of malaria to conserve birds migrating to North America. Nobody died or starved because of ex-situ crop genetic resource conservation.
The main reason to pay farmers to conserve local biodiversity is, I believe, to help them make longer-term decisions. I think past experience suggests that, offered a go-go package of seeds, fertilizers etc farmers adopt it. They’re not stupid, after all. But if and when the package fails to deliver on its promises, the local varieties they grew before have vanished. And the go-go packages seldom if ever collect what the farmers have, just in case it needs to be given back to them.
Personally, I don’t care for the continued evolution angle, but it can’t hurt either.