Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services: An Overview of Latin American experiences, Lessons Learned and Upscaling Challenges

Many developing countries face a major challenge today: how to safeguard the biodiversity maintained in the fields of the rural poor - which constitute a national and global public good - whilst meeting those same people's development needs and rights? A solution to this dilemma has thus been sought in adapting the design and implementation of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) concepts to the conservation of agrobiodiversity. This paper reviews the application of nine such Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation (PACS) schemes that have been applied to date in four Latin American countries over the period 2010-2018. These covered 130 threatened varieties across a number of major food crops, and involved over 100 farming communities and 1,100 farmers (45% of which were women).