February eXpanded Forest Team Meeting

***************** Presentation: Incentives for Landuse Practices that Benefit Both Livelihoods and Biodiversity: Speakers: Edward Millard and Goetz Schroth, Conservation International, Washington DC ***************** ***************** Background: If farmers are to apply land use methods that conserve biodiversity and the environment while advancing their private livelihoods objectives, more is needed than just technical solutions to agronomic problems. Most of all, land users must share in the benefits of the environmental services that they help to conserve in such a way that they are willing to incur the extra costs of using environment friendly land use practices and foregoing options that would be more profitable but also more destructive to the environment. CI works with a range of approaches to providing rural populations with incentives to use land use practices that meet these goals. We will present experiences from a partnership with Starbucks Coffee Company in Mexico to provide producers of high quality coffee with price premiums for meeting certain social and environmental standards. The success of this project contrasts with project experiences in other countries where for various reasons this specific price premium could not be obtained, pointing to the need for a broader portfolio of incentives both as an insurance strategy and for addressing a broader range of land uses within the same landscape. In some cases, price premiums for sustainably-produced agricultural or forest products may be too weak an incentive to compete with alternative developments. Therefore, in the second part of the presentation, we will take these lessons learned to discuss how we intend to design our next agroforestry project in Ghana.

What	Meeting
When	Feb 01, 2006 from 09:00 AM to 10:15 AM
Where	1325 G. St. NW, 4th Floor, Nile Confr. Rm, Washington, DC
Contact Name	Jean Brennan or CJ Elron
Contact Phone	(CJ - 202-712-1381)
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