The village territory and its woody agrobiodiversity -like components of the buffer zones: An idea against nature?

The management of the peripheries of protected parks remains an important environmental challenge. Two objectives are advanced: a limitation of the anthropogenic pressures, in particular agricultural expansion, and the participation of local populations so that buffer zones can be effective and sustainable. A buffer zone is often installed to constitute a ¿barrier¿ of protection, that generally encroaches on part of the bordering village territories. If it is considered a means to satisfy the first objective, it can constitute an impediment to the second objective. Indeed, it adds only one lawful protection zone. Other land managers, in the minority, recommend the use of agroforestry systems, remarkable for their landscape and ecological structure, such as the agroforests. This is one step better but not sufficient. A change of paradigm would suggest that the presence of the territories adjacent to the protected area is not regarded any more permanent a threat, but as a land of potential agrarian and landscape transformations. In the case of the agroforests, a major fact is forgotten in the analysis: systemic and spatial interactions between the various components of the landscapes. To want at any costs to preserve the agroforests as an entity can bring to the opposite effect, insofar as the whole of the territory and the different changes which take place there are not taken into account. It is the landscape mosaic on a territory scale which should be recommended, like buffer zone, for a new role: a space of ecological gradients between the protected area and the remainder of the peripheral zone. This change, recommended for future plans of management for protected parks, accompanies other major institutional dynamics: political decentralization and scientific action research. Agroforestry examples of different tropical zones will be used to argue this point. (Texte intégral