Adapting family-run production systems to climate change through agroecology in Bolivia

Every year in Bolivia over 200,000 hectares of forest are cleared. The cause: motorised agriculture, widespread livestock farming and small-scale farmers. In fact, deforestation and changes to land uses generate 66% of greenhouse gases.

Despite legislative and political progress toward the sustainable use of natural resources, this agro-industrial model persists. CIPCA, a Bolivian NGO, has been pushing for an alternative agroecology since 2005. It encourages the sustainable management of resources and advocates policies that favour rural family-run and indigenous agriculture in the Andean-Amazonian region. The FFEM is supporting the NGO to complete the actions already underway and allow their results to be capitalised upon and scientifically validated.

The project has four components, FFEM financing being primarily targeted at the second and fourth:

• Consolidating agroecological production systems, both rural and indigenous, implemented by CIPCA in 28 towns across 6 regions of Bolivia.
• Generating and sharing scientific knowledge based on the agroecological models conceived as part of the Productive Economic Proposal (PEP) created by CIPCA.
• Strengthening the participation of civil society actors to mobilise public policies that favour food security and sustainable development at local and national level within the region. 
• Contributing to the promotion of the PEP agroecological model through collaboration with the Bolivian financing system, and their financing through public policies as part of a coordinated regional management effort.

• Boosting annual family income by 30% in the region covered
• Implementation by CIPCA of a coordinated research arrangement with its university partners and a system to monitor the climate impact of agroecological models, as cited in at least eight publications
• 20% increase in public budgets for family-based agriculture in communities within the knowledge and technologies area covered
• Implementation at scale of the agroecological proposal financed by public programmes and additional cooperation with the FFEM and AFD funds

This FFEM project aims to be both exemplary and replicable through the application of innovative approaches to governance and coordination between the rural and indigenous world and public authorities. The project also drives actions, whether local or global, to maximise the ecological impacts. Its work in scientific validation, and the identification of financial products working with institutions and local communities or national projects, should allow agroecological solutions to be more widely applied, with simpler financing, throughout Bolivia.