Sustainability of agroecosystems in a Rural Reserve Area of Pradera, Valle del Cauca, Colombia

Abstract

In the San Isidro district of the municipality of Pradera, Valle del Cauca, Colombia, communities have organized themselves to care for, cultivate, protect and defend life through the establishment of a Rural Reserve Area (RRA) that promotes agroecological practices based on peasant lifestyles, that is, in ways of inhabiting the world, which allow us to cultivate and affirm life. An assessment of the sustainability of these practices is required, however, the MESMIS type methods -Framework for the Evaluation of Natural Resource Management Systems incorporating Sustainability Indicators-, although they provide short-, medium- and long-term information for decision-making by the farmer, they have failed to identify the indicators that have the greatest weight in each assessed attribute. This research allows to identify the indicators with the greatest weight in each attribute, that is, the most relevant ones when structuring a management proposal that allows the sustainability of the agroecosystems. The objective was to evaluate the sustainability of the agroecosystems in the Rural Reserve Area (RRA) of Pradera, Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Methodologically, a semi-structured survey and 26 indicators, which were built with farmers using Participatory Action Research techniques, were considered. The units of study included 14 agroecosystems. Statistically, multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis were used. The results revealed that the agroecosystems of the RRA of Pradera, Valle del Cauca, presented significant differences for the attributes evaluated, namely productivity, stability, resilience and reliability, adaptability, equity and self-management; it was also found that the cluster analysis collected 62.82% of the observed variability in the three main dimensions. It was concluded that there are three types of agroecosystems, namely sustainable, in transition, and not sustainable.