Summary

There are well over 500 million farm management units in the world, overwhelmingly found in developing countries. FAO's ongoing field work in over 100000 rural communities has found that all those farm managers can understand their farms, fields, forest, rangelands and fisheries as ecosystems. Farmers, even in the poorest and most food-insecure regions of the world, manage genes by their decision on crop varieties, manage species by their decisions on farm animals and manage ecosystems by their decision on soil pollination. This document present the proceedings of a Satellite event organized in October 2002 by FAO's Inter-Departmental Working Group on Biological Diversity for Food and Agriculture.