THE ROLE OF DIVERSITY AND DIVERSIFICATIONFOR RESILIENT AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

Biodiversity is a unique and precious heritage: generic but also cultural, social and economic. Its drasticcurtailment, however, puts at risk the survival of local farming systems, and this is even more so in fragilesocio-economic contexts where it risks translating into conditions of food insecurity and poverty. From theelementary level of the gene, rising in complexity up to the ecosystem, it is therefore a central element indefining first the resistance and then the resilience of the system, and by the first term meaning the degreeof resistance to a disruption that distances it from the initial state of equilibrium and by the second thecapacity of a system to return to guaranteeing minimum standards following a disturbance, the capacity toget back on ones feet after a fall.It seems to be crucial, then, at a time when cooperation development projects that operate in various waysto safeguard and promote biodiversity are far more numerous, to intervene to preserve and restore thelocal biodiversity in order to avert future problems, and even curb them ahead of time, using resilience asan approach for managing the system we are dealing with (natural or heavily affected by human activity).In any event, this is a passage that is not routine, which makes it necessary to look at the ecosystem, at itsvarious components, both natural and human. In the light of these preliminary remarks, the article willanalyse the potentiality for applying, also in the field of development cooperation, the theoretical approachincluding empirical methods and instruments represented by the Diversified Farming Systems DFS),where the starting point is diversity and diversification as functional elements in the construction ofresilient farming systems.