“Food forests are everything”: Creation of edible landscapes helps nature in Afro-detail countries | America

ASA Save years, covered head to toe with only her eyes and the nose exposed. “Imagine a forest in which huge mosquitoes are in abundance,” recalls the 53 -year -old bristle González of your childhood on her family's ancestral farm.

Her grandfather, her uncle and her grandmother cut up every cocoa fruits, and broke González with her grandmother closed to remove the pulp and the seeds from the case, which would then be used as a fertilizer.

The agricultural landscape, in which its farm embedded in southern columbia, has been maintained by Afro-college communities since the colonial period.

Briche González followed her grandmother in the forest, where her family also built various trees for wood, medicinal plants, coffee, spices and herbs to cook.

“I only enchanted myself from all,” she says. Today Briche González is part of the basic organization Black communities process (PCN), which is committed to the rights and recognition of Afro-detail peoples in South Colombia.

Afro-descendant communities in Latin America have long been cultivating “edible landscapes” that grow in the midst of natural forests and imitate the surrounding flora. All over the region, Afro-descendant peoples manage around 200 million hectares (2m km² or 494 m hectares) of these agroforStS systems in hotspots with biological diversity, only 5% of which are legally recognized as “Territories”.

For decades, these communities have argued that they play a crucial role in protecting biological diversity and therefore need legal protection over their country. Until recently there was little scientific data to support their claims.

New research changes. A paper recently published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment is the first study examined by experts that quantified the role of the contributions of the Afro-Dekendanten on biodiversity, carbon binding and reducing the steward, says Martha Cecilia Roseno-Peña, co-autor and environmental phyologist.

The researchers analyzed formally recognized Afro descendant areas in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Suriname and covered around 9.9 million hectares. They found that more than half of this country (56%) overlap with the highest 5% of the biological diversity of the earth. In Ecuador, the number is striking: 99% of all Afro descendant lands are hotspots in biological diversity, while in Colombia almost 92% of Afro descendant areas are in the top 5% of areas for biological diversity.

The study also showed that the deforestation rates in Afro-detail countries were 29% lower than in protected areas and 55% lower than land on the edge of a protected area.

Klaudia Cárdenas Botero, an environmental thermalthropologist at the Humboldt Institute in Colombia, which was not involved in the study, says: “This means that practices that were historically classified as” subsistence “are actually conservation strategies that are so effective or even more effective than many state politics for protection areas.”

In order to understand why the Afro descendant communities kept the forest so well, Roseno-Peña has shown in scientific records that have decreased until the 1500s. What she found was a hidden side effect of the European plantation model in America.

“Science always focuses on the history of plantations and the enslaved people,” says Rosero-Peña. “But it rarely tells us what they eaten.”

In contrast to the Europeans who did not know how to grow food in the tropics, most Africans were adopted from one tropical region to another. They were responsible for food production on plantations and adapted agricultural systems from Africa, with local and African plants such as Yams, Okra, Taubenerbsen, cooking bananas and millet, says Roseno-Peña.

Agricultural knowledge was also a lifeline for freedom: hidden plants would grow along the escape routes, which the African enslaved Africans often crossed and traveled, which were hidden in their braids. Escape had to mimic the forest to remain hidden, which meant planting different plants, minimizing the land pillar and avoiding fire. West African women adapted the rice connection to drought -ranging regions by being planned with river times.

“These forests and this paper clearly have it together-with the congregations that live them,” says Johana Herrera Arango, director of the observatory for ethnic and rural areas at the Javeriana University of Bogotá, which was not involved in the study. “The biological diversity is also a human creation.”

As soon as slavery ended, many Afro-ducks turned to agriculture, and some became mighty cocoa producers. In contrast to plantations, these farms survived as edible forests.

When Break González was a child, Echos remained the cocoa boom. The cocoa and coffee beans of the farm made it possible for her grandmother to educate nine children and their descendants. And although many Afro descendant families lost most of their country in the 1940s during the forced land reforms, it was the expansion of sugar plantations in the 1960s and 1970s, which caused the greatest decline, says Briche González.

Hard pesticides drove in ancestors and reduced productivity. Many families sold or rent their country to plantation owners. “When my grandmother died, the sugar mill rented our country,” says Briche González. “Now the house is completely walled into sugar cane.”

Only a handful of ancestry is still 250,000 hectares of sugar cane plantations. In the middle of them, however, researchers have found that at least 128 plant species are still growing in the remaining series of trees, bushes, herbs and animals. Cárdenas Botero from the Humboldt Institute found a similar astonishing number of species in the farms of black communities in northern Colombia: 272 plant species and 151 types of insect.

The efforts to keep this inheritance on life are underway. Break González, an ecology technician, helped design a university diploma program for agro-ecological companies for those who are able to tend to family businesses. The PCN presses Colombia's Ministry of Culture to recognize its farms as part of the national heritage. Other groups control an “Afro food corridor” of 1,640 hectares.

The food forests, broke González, says: “Are everything. They are living, no matter where they grow.”

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