Abstract:
Development, environmental sustainability, agriculture and livelihoods are dimensions
that are often considered antagonistic. By thinking at the landscape level however,
innovative opportunities arise for simultaneity as these entities manifest spatially and
require communication across disciplines. Trans-frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs)
embrace this thinking. These are large areas that cut across two or more international
boundaries, include within them at least one Protected Area (PA) and other multiple
resource use areas, including human dwellings and cultivated areas. Similarly,
ecoagriculture is an innovative approach to land use management as it seeks to spatially
synergise agriculture, livelihoods and biodiversity conservation across space and
requires an awareness of landscape-level issues by land users, a condition which is not
necessarily met. Such landscape thinking stems from the fact that if a piece of land is
subject to rigorous conservation, it will fail if the surrounding areas are degraded.
Additionally, it has been shown that agriculture often benefits from the nearby presence
of natural areas for ecosystem services such as pollination, pest management, and
erosion control. As such, multifunctional landscape mosaics together with small scale
farmers, not large scale monocultures, are the key to global food security, as the former
more effectively links agricultural intensification to hunger reduction. In order to
ascertain an integrated understanding of the landscape concept, necessary for the
formalisation of ecoagriculture, this study assessed the landscape perceptions and
understandings held by local people residing within a TFCA. We employed
participatory methods within the Mathenjwa Tribal Area (MTA), an area falling within
the Lubombo TFCA and identified as holding ecoagriculture potential. Results revealed
that local people perceive landscape as a function of subsistence utility. Local people
perceive land-use multifunctionality, necessary for the formalisation of ecoagriculture, but at a smaller scale than expected depending on both social and biophysical
interpretations. Landscape scale projects should incorporate local landscape
understandings.
