Abstract:
Agricultural development, worldwide, is a major cause for the loss of
natural forest and, consequently, of the planet’s biodiversity. In Sri Lanka,
a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot, what amounts to over half of its
natural forest cover was lost during the last century, and this was largely
due to agricultural expansion (including raising commercial crops). Hence
agricultural expansion is generally seen to be in conflict with conserving
biodiversity. On the other hand, the benefits to agriculture from natural
forests through their role in providing ecosystem services should be
recognized – pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling, soil enrichment,
water conservation. Moreover, the natural forest is a store house of genetic
material that would in the future prove to be extremely valuable in the
fields of agriculture and medicine. In this context, agriculture and food
production and maintaining its link to conservation of biodiversity call for
approaches in which agricultural systems are designed and managed giving
due consideration to the conservation of biodiversity. In Sri Lanka there
are several measures that could be adopted. Establishing “habitat
corridors” across agricultural landscapes is important for maintaining
habitat connectivity between isolated forests; this is particularly important
in Sri Lanka where much of the natural forest in many parts of the country
has been broken up into separate patches. The paper also goes on to
describe a range of practices that can be adopted within agricultural
landscapes for promoting biodiversity conservation.
