Key highlights:
- With less than 5% of India’s land under protected areas, private lands could play a supplementary role and help reconcile agriculture, conservation, and rural livelihoods
- Authors used the stated-preference choice experiment method to reveal landowner willingness to adopt agroforestry
- The study found that willingness depended on the amount of land to be enrolled, program duration, and incentive amount
- Socio-economic-psychological characteristics also influenced landowner preferences, including perceived benefits from agroforestry, risk perception, social norms, experience with conflict, education, income levels, and family size
- Landowners required ~USD 940 per acre per year to modify their land-use
For nearly five decades, Protected Areas (PAs) have been the cornerstone of India’s conservation success and contributed to the recovery and maintenance of endangered and threatened species’ populations. India’s PA network is, however, limited in its capacity due to challenges of spatial coverage, fragmentation, isolation, pressures from surrounding areas, as well as, its vulnerability to the demands of economic development. Concurrently, marginal farmers living on the periphery of PAs bear the losses associated with crop raiding and livestock depredation by wild animals, while also navigating fluctuating weather patterns and minimal government support. Nature-based solutions, such as adoption of agroforestry, have shown success in contributing to biodiversity conservation as well as rural livelihoods. Modifying land-use, however, can result in lost incomes for farmers. Therefore, the effectiveness of any intervention is contingent on the willingness of farmers to participate. To address this, a new study undertaken by scientists from the University of Florida, University of Georgia, and the Centre For Wildlife Studies, assessed the willingness of farmers to enrol in a voluntary, incentive-based, agroforestry program. The study was based in the buffer area of Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh.
Pench TR harbors some of the highest densities of carnivores, supported by a diverse assemblage of prey species. Pench TR also plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of the central Indian natural landscape which consists of 16 PAs and 35 wildlife corridors. The buffer region of Pench TR is a heterogeneous landscape with multi-use reserve forests and nearly 55,000 acres of land under agriculture, with dominant crops being wheat, rice, maize, sugarcane, pulses, and oilseeds.
The study surveyed 602 private landowners and presented different agroforestry program options to them, with varying proportions of land to be enrolled, the duration of enrollment and the incentive amount. The objective of the study was to determine the various factors that influence landowner preferences, including the design of the program itself, demographic and economic factors, as well as psychological variables.
An overwhelming majority of 88% was interested in at least one of the programs that was offered. Only 12% of respondents rejected all the offered agroforestry programs. These 12% respondents wanted to continue their current agricultural activities and avoid risks associated with land use change, considered the incentive amount to be insufficient, perceived their land to be unsuitable for agroforestry or believed that it would increase conflict with wildlife.
The study found program design to be an important driver of landowner willingness. As one would expect, respondents were more likely to adopt agroforestry as the payment per acre per year for enrolment increased. Respondents were less likely to enrol in agroforestry as the amount of land to be enrolled increased and the duration of enrolment increased. However, there was heterogeneity in these preferences, implying that there were respondents who wanted to commit larger percentage of their land and for longer duration. For example, respondents with lower agricultural incomes preferred to enrol for longer program duration. Larger land enrolment was preferred by respondents with high school education, higher agricultural incomes, small families, prior experience of crop raiding by herbivores and high forest cover surrounding their landholding. Since landowners are under-compensated for losses due to crop raiding in India and often absorb the financial losses themselves, a program that provides incentives to adopt agroforestry was therefore financially attractive to respondents. The study estimated that landowners would have to be paid approximately Rs. 66,000 per acre per year of enrolment as an incentive amount to switch to agroforestry.
While monetary incentives are necessary, the study found that it is not a sufficient condition for uptake of agroforestry programs. Psychological variables such as perceived benefits, social norms, and risk perception also influenced landowner willingness. Capacity building through knowledge-sharing and skill development would be important in addressing landowner’s concerns about viability of any conservation interventions.
India’s conservation policy has largely ignored the need for a complementary strategy of land sharing in human-dominated landscape. Private landowners present a huge opportunity towards realizing this. These areas could supplement the role of existing PAs and provide opportunity for creating stepping-stones and maintaining connectivity for wide ranging species. Collaborating with landowners could also ensure their participation in conservation decision-making, while at the same time possibly alleviating some of the stresses from the ongoing agrarian crisis in India. The authors acknowledge that given India’s complex ground realities, there are several questions regarding implementation that would need to be addressed as well. But the study is an attempt towards assessing the feasibility of alternate models of community buy-in and livelihood conscious conservation efforts that have so far been limited in India.
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