Food, monetary, energy, and socio-environmental features of a post-cacao agroforestry system in the Ecuadorian Amazonia: the case of Rukullakta

Abstract

Indigenous agroforestry systems are far from being fully understood. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the social and environmental functions performed by the Amazonian Indigenous (specifically, Kichwa) agroforestry systems (called chacras) by applying a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative research methodology. The qualitative component is concerned with understanding the chacra’s systems of management, its market and self-consumption focus, the organisation of labour, the sources of monetary income, and the prevailing eating habits of the families. The quantitative element translates into a set of objective scientific indicators of its most salient elements, which allows for an integrated assessment of the chacra’s nutritional, agronomic, economic, and environmental issues. The results show that chacras are complex agrarian systems with several crops (cacao, guayusa, coffee, plantains, cassava, etc.) that have both a market and self-consumption orientation. From a market perspective, chacras are associated with monetary poverty, with an average annual income for families of less than US$2,000 per year. However, 32.1% of production is directed toward self-consumption, and while this is in the lower limit for the satisfaction of the basic food needs of farmers’ families, the chacras play an important role in the families’ food security. Moreover, chacras are particularly resilient to changes in their socio-environmental and market conditions, and they stand out because of their capacity to respond to potential increases in food demand without a large increase in cropped area. Finally, far from their slash-and-burn origins, progressively they have been spatially stabilised.