ABSTRACT

Inland valleys, which are seasonally to permanently flooded stream valleys, provide a range of ecosystem services (ESS). These landscapes play a strategic role in the regional efforts to attain food security and alleviate poverty. Besides agricultural production (mainly rice), inland valleys are also important suppliers of water, forest, forage, hunting and fishing resources to local communities and these ecosystems often harbour a high degree of plant and animal biodiversity, worthy of conservation. Only a fraction of the total inland valley area in West Africa should suffice to provide enough rice to feed the entire region and the remaining part could then be managed with other ESS as a priority, thereby addressing the needs for biodiversity conservation, protection against downstream flooding, natural buffers for excess water or for other livelihoods like pastoralism. This chapter describes approaches to achieve this, based on 40 years of experience of AfricaRice and partners, in particular through the work carried out under the umbrella of the Inland Valley Consortium (IVC) (currently Inland Valley Community of Practice). It is essential to use a systematic analysis approach for the selection of ‘best-bet’ inland valleys for rice production and to implement conservation regulations, and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, for the protection of those valleys that are either too vulnerable or too valuable for agricultural development. Selection criteria for such ‘best-bet’ production valleys should include economic, social and biophysical characteristics and the selection of valleys should be broadly supported by the local communities depending on them. The same approach could be used to identify locations within the valley that could be used for crop production and those that should continue to fulfil other ecosystem functions, so that a specific valley has a multifunctional pattern of land use which will help ensure sustainability.