Piloting innovative approaches to technical assistance in support of the Peruvian Agroforestry Concessions Scheme

In Peru, more than 120,000 vulnerable, non-indigenous small-scale farming families have established their farms in uncategorized State forest land. Marginalized, largely unattended by the State, and hitherto ineligible for legal land titles, their varied livelihood strategies reflect their precarious situations (Robiglio et al, 2018). Their production systems typically rely on cleared forest land as an initial source of fertile, pest-free soil for agriculture. As such, their activities contribute significantly to deforestation and to greenhouse gas emissions emissions from land use, land use change and forestry, the country's highest-emitting sector (>50% of national total), and threaten Peru's national and international commitments on reducing deforestation, restoring degraded land and on Sustainable Development Goals. The project addresses the lack of resilience of the farming families occupying state forest land — through research that will contribute to the successful scaling of the Agroforestry Concessions regulation. This innovative scheme aims at promoting ecosystems services restoration on deforested state forest land and at conserving remnant forest in farmers' landholdings by 'formalizing' occupation through a lease-type, 40-year usufruct title over land. It is conditional on adoption of integrated sustainable land management and forest conservation practices at the farm level. The project is nested within the piloting of the Agroforestry Concessions scheme that the Government of San Martin Region plans to initiate from mid-2018 and informs subsequent regional and national scaling-up by identifying context-tailored and cost-efficient rural advisory services to promote integrated sustainable land management interventions and successful implementation of the scheme. The project focuses on the development of the rural advisory services component of the regional Agroforestry Concessions scaling strategy, based on co-generation, with the Government of San Martin and other key partners, of knowledge on (a) the socio-technical feasibility and likely impacts of alternative rural advisory services models; (b) contextual scaling ingredients and local governance aspects that will interact with the advisory services, and additional support required to ensure scaling of the Scheme (c) tailored knowledge on which specific integrated sustainable land management practices work best where, for whom, and at what cost.