WP3 will focus on current agricultural activities (mainly AFS and food-crops) contributing to food security by providing:

•  a combination of products (food, cash crops, fruits, timber, medicines...) used by farmers for their subsistence and income generation,
• a set of ecosystem services contributing to the long term sustainability of the productive capacities and adaptation to climatic and market changes trough biodiversity and soil fertility.

AFS and food-crops are closely associated with various combinations in space and time at three different scales:

1. At plot level, food crops contribute to the mixture of plants cultivated together in the AFS fields, with spatial arrangements varying according to the field stage, farmers’ objectives and agro-ecological conditions;
2. At farm level, AFS and food crop plots are combined to achieve specific objectives in terms of food and income generation, according to socio-economic conditions and household strategy;
3. At landscape level, it results in a matrix that mixes agricultural and non-agricultural elements of the farms and the community.

Our hypothesis is that these combinations will vary according to household strategies analysed by WP2. Based on their typology, WP3 will build an adequate plot and farm sampling at three scales (plot, farm and landscape) in a range of various household strategies to assess the productive and environmental performances of the cropping systems, and their respective contribution to food security and livelihood. Remote sensing surveys will help characterizing those combinations and their respective location into the landscape matrix, and guiding the plot sample built in WP3.

WP3 will also contribute to strengthen the partners’ research capacities by favouring methodological exchanges on multi-scale assessment of crop productivity and environmental performance. It will provide indicators and data to assess the expected contributions of AFS and food crops, and their synergetic effects, for farmers’ food security and income generation. Finally, it will allow identifying management options that improve this synergy at plot, farm and landscape levels.

WP3 will provide results to be used by other WPs to produce recommendations to farmers and policy makers, and results that will be published in scientific journals.