Recommendations for overcoming barriers to crop diversification towards sustainable agriculture: DiverIMPACTS policy brief

The overall goal of DiverIMPACTS -  Diversification through Rotation, Intercropping, Multiple Cropping, Promoted with Actors and value-Chains towards Sustainability -  is to achieve the full potential of diversification of cropping systems for improved productivity, delivery of ecosystem services and resource-efficient and sustainable value chains by

• assessing performances of crop diversification through rotation, intercropping and multiple cropping,
• providing rural areas actors with those key enablers and innovations that would remove existing barriers and ensure actual uptake of benefits of crop diversification at farm, value chain and territory levels and
• making recommendations to policy-makers to facilitate the coordination of all relevant actors within the value chain.

The policy brief Recommendations for overcoming barriers to crop diversification towards sustainable agriculture’ has several key messages:

• The diversification of cropping systems is still limited due to barriers occurring at the farm level, along value chains as well as in the coordination between actors.
• Different barriers affect niche and mainstream value chains.
• Future policies should address barriers using a systems approach and should differentiate between innovations in niche and mainstream value chains.
• Barriers can be addressed by monitoring the uptake of crop diversification, reallocating public and private resources towards agroecological practices and value chains based on minor crops, providing financial support to actor networks to mitigate innovation risks, and communication campaigns to promote minor crops.