59impact on agricultural productivity is more and
more becoming obvious in the more fragile tropical
environmental situations of the developing world.
The environmental degradation and linked declin-
ing crop productivity that the two large Asian coun-
tries, namely, India and China are facing today and
the emerging concerns for sustainable agriculture
(Ramakrishnan, 2008 unpublished) are indicative of
the emerging global food security concerns, and eq-
uitable distribution of what is available so that all
sections of the society are able to benefit. This is the
context in which the still existing traditional agricul-
tural systems conserved by many traditional farming
societies (those living close to nature and natural
resources) largely confined to the developing trop-
ics have an important role to play. Rather than being
seen as an industrial activity as modern agriculture
tends to be, traditional agricultural systems are
organized and managed through highly adapted
social and cultural practices and institutions wherein
the concerns are for food security linked with eq-
uitable sharing of what is available. Equity is en-
sured through locally relevant technologies that are
cheap since they are based on effective utilization of
the continually evolving traditional wisdom linked
with locally available natural resources and their
effective management that is community participatory.
Indeed, traditional agricultural and ecological
knowledge and the derived traditional technologies
that societies have developed through an experien-
tial process form the basis for addressing productiv-
ity consideration with equitability concerns in mind.
In this process they manipulate natural and human-
managed biodiversity in a variety of different ways
towards sustainable production with concerns also
for coping with the environmental uncertainties that
they have to face from time to time. FAO’s GIAHS ini-
tiative is seeking to identify outstanding traditional
agricultural systems and support their dynamic con-
servation as well as sustainable evolution.GIAHS can
be viewed as benchmark systems for international
and national strategies for sustainable agricultural
development and addressing the rising demand to
meet food and livelihood needs of poor and remote
populations. Dynamic conservation implies what
the traditional farmers have always practised,
namely, adaptive management of their systems
under changing environmental considerations,both in
time and space. GIAHS have always faced many
challenges in adapting to rapid environmental and
socio-economic changes in the context of weak
agricultural and environmental policies, climate
variability and fluctuating economic and cultural
pressures (Altieri and Koohafkan, 2008). There is no
doubt, these threats vary from one country to another,
but there are common denominators that are rap-
idly emerging in the global scene: (a) “global
change” in an ecological sense, involving land use
land cover changes, biodiversity depletion, biologi-
cal invasion and of course the emerging climate
change and linkedglobal warming; and (b) economic
“globalization” that would accentuate the problem
of landscape homogenization arising from the im-
plication that globalization implies, namely, intensive
management of vast areas of the land through
monocropping practices. These global threats em-
phasize the need to ensure dynamic conservation of
selected systems which could then form the basis
for conserving both agricultural and linked natural
biodiversity, at the same time using such systems
as learning grounds towards addressing the di-
verse viewpoints of “sustainable agriculture”.
Once lost, the unique agricultural legacy and the
associated eco-agricultural heritage will also be
lost forever. Hence, there is a need to carefully
identify agricultural heritage systems wherever
they exist, with a view to dynamically conserve them
and thereby promote the basic goods and services
humanity needs today and for the future genera-
tions. The GIAHS initiative is conceived as being in-
clusive and forward looking with agricultural
patrimony serving as models for agricultural devel-
opment in similar environments, i.e. uplands, dry-
lands, wetlands management etc. based on the
experience and learning from the pilot projects. The
GIAHS initiative is not just a collection of local proj-