CONCLUSIONS: LEARNED LESSONS FOR A SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

Agroforestry is about diversified farming systems that represent an important pollinator-friendly alternative to industrial agriculture (IPBES 2016). It is linked to indigenous and local knowledge, and at the same time supported by hard scientific evidence on its potential to increase or maintain system productivity while protecting natural resources and providing ecological services, including pollination, pest control or prevention, carbon sequestration, and the conservation of soil health, water quality, and biodiversity (Muschler 2016).

Driven by the Basin’s meagre nature potential (water scarcity, poor soil) coupled with a highly variable ragged landscape with diversified microclimates, the Mediterranean peoples often adopted mixed-crop agroecosystems blending low vegetation (low scrub or grassland) with shrubs and trees of different stature. In fact, such traditional farming systems simply followed a natural doctrine, combining plants of variable forms, cycles and functional traits, not to mention requirements and benefits. It is not sure whether the traditional farming systems considered pollination requirements and benefits in the frame of setting an effectively productive system. It is only a posteriori that we know that by promoting a mixed cultivation system and employing different types of plants, the resulting pollination system has always been to the benefit of the entire system. And maybe this has been one of the most important cues explaining the high bee and other pollinator diversity in the Mediterranean we enjoy today (Nielsen et al. 2011, Petanidou, unpublished data, Reverté et al. in review).

Currently, vast areas in the entire Mediterranean have been abandoned, as their cultivation was estimated to be non-profitable in the frame of modern agriculture (Petanidou 2021). This applies especially to the intensely terraced islands of the Aegean, which used to bear agroforestry systems to some extent (Images 1-4). Efforts to re-cultivate such areas not only aim at producing quality products of high added value, but also at recuperating the green infrastructure these systems once used to function, for the benefit of biodiversity and to combat the impacts of climate change. Wrapping up my 5-year coordinating experience of the project LIFE TERRACESCAPE, where the re-cultivation effort based on annual crops had very limited success, I conclude that for such a purpose, agroforestry systems should be the top choice.

Image 4. Valonia oakdominated agroforestry systems are widespread in the island of Kea, Cyclades; although the arable land is abandoned nowadays, collection of acorns resumed a few years ago mainly for export. © Theodora Petanidou.