Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) needs your help to protect one of Earth’s last biodiversity strongholds – the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica – and support the livelihoods of its inhabitants.
For this campaign, SAN needs support in collecting funds to conduct training and capacity building with 100 farmers and their families on environmentally friendly agricultural production practices, biodiversity protection, and forest restoration on the Osa Peninsula.
The Osa Peninsula is “the most biologically intense place on earth” (National Geographic) and it hosts the Corcovado National Park, known as the “jewel of the National Parks System of Costa Rica”. While the peninsula is one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the world – hosting 2.5% of the entire biodiversity of the planet, on a mere 0.000001% of the earth’s total surface – it is home to some of the poorest people – with 35% of its inhabitants living in poverty.
It is one of the final strongholds of the jaguar within Central America. It contains the largest mesic rainforest remaining on the Pacific slope of Central America. Bird diversity on the peninsula accounts for 40% of the world’s bird species and they migrate as far as from Siberia and New Zealand. Its remoteness has sheltered the peninsula from some of the large-scale destructive developments that have been going on in the northern parts of the country.
Sustainable agriculture that is in harmony with nature – is crucial for ensuring local food security and biodiversity conservation, because food production is the single largest driver of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. To conserve endangered places like the Osa Peninsula, our focus must therefore be directly on improving human-wellbeing and environmentally friendly agriculture to reduce environmental pressure and increase conservation efforts.
SAN wants to show that the 100 farmers (30% women) can become game changers – supporting sustainable livelihoods, proving to the world that already small investments & local capacity building can contribute significantly to natural resource protection while improving human wellbeing.
Agriculture as a driver of positive change
Do you now wonder how SAN can support farmers to protect & restore biodiversity while ensuring their livelihoods? This is how.
During a unique 1-year sustainable development approach – owned & driven by the community – SAN will put family farmers at the forefront of defining the best actions for biodiversity conservation and farms’ resilience and productivity. SAN will be working with the members of the Osacoop – the local farmer organisation. The women and men of the Osacoop – who are farming in the buffer zone around the Corcovado National Park – want to contribute to biodiversity protection, but they need more skills and knowledge on some of the important sustainable agricultural practices.
SAN will be conducting training and running assessments of crop production practices that affect local biodiversity together with the farmers themselves. Therefore learning effects will be potentiated. This approach also ensures that greater awareness is created about how important it is to not affect the integrity of the local agro-ecosystems and maximize integrated pest management through nature’s services: with wasps, ladybugs, frogs, birds, bats, and other local fauna – that act as biological pest control. Investing less in chemical inputs will also help increase profits for the small family farms.
SAN’s trainings will equip the farmers with the needed knowledge and skills that enable them to develop their own solutions for biodiversity conservation while having better farm productivity and income. The training will be on good agricultural practices, biodiversity protection, integrated pest management, forest restoration techniques, income diversification, collective action, and smallholder business development.
Protecting and restoring biodiversity while ensuring farmer’s livelihoods ensures a healthy ecosystem where people, plants and animals of Osa can thrive – for generations to come.
For the first time, SAN is participating in the GlobalGiving Accelerator campaign. GlobalGiving is the world’s largest crowdfunding platform for nonprofits.
You can support SAN by donating and sharing in this mission https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/protect-endangered-biodiversity-and-100-farmer-lives/
Read More: Anveya: In harmony with Nature
