Worldwide, location-specific agricultural systems within the given landscape context have been created, shaped and maintained by generations of farmers and herders based on diverse natural resources that they have in the surrounding landscape. Building upon the traditional ecological knowledge that they have refined over time and space, these ingenious agricultural systems reflect the evolution of humankind in harmony with 'nature'. Until recent times, before the modern 'industrial' societies stepped in and started large-scale intensive exploitation of natural resources, these traditional agricultural systems as part of a culturespecific natural landscape unit ensured not only food security to the local communities, but also intangible benefits that contributed towards a cultural identity that they valued.
These traditional agricultural systems do not exist in isolation, but are an integral component of natural cultural landscapes that humans have carved out around them from the natural ecosystems such as typologies of forest, grasslands or mangrove systems, with which they may be closely associated.
Many of these ingenious systems maintained by traditional societies (those living close to nature and natural resources around) have already been lost, and what still exists in different parts of the world, particularly the developing tropics are being drastically altered and/or being lost arising from deforestation and drastic alterations in the landscape systems. Whilst traditional societies and weaker sections of the societies living in biodiversity-rich natural landscape situations as in forested areas, for e.g., are often blamed for large-scale landscape alterations, we do know now that human actions that are far removed from the site, often caused by modern industrial societies, are responsible for large-scale alterations of the landscape deforestation and linked land degradation (Indian National Science Academy et al, 2001; Lambin et al, 2001).
These traditional agroecosystems being sustained by the rich landscape level biodiversity on which they are dependant, in the contemporary context of large-scale land degradation, have already lost and continue to lose much of the traditional agricultural systems and the linked rich crop diversity contained therein.
To compound these problems that humans face, we are now confronted with two major threats of a global magnitude - ever-increasing environmental uncertainties linked with two major phenomena 'global change' (climate change linked global warming, land use and cover changes and linked land degradation, biodiversity depletion and biological invasion) in an ecological sense, and economic 'globalization'. In the Indian context, we are now faced with the threat of declining food security arising from the ill-effects linked with intensive land management practices in the name of 'green revolution'.
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