The Impact of Plantation Farming on the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sustainability in Kenya

Abstract

Contemporarily, agricultural suitability is measured by the level of profitability a land-use system has with an unintended or intended disregard to the system’s sustainability or the direct and indirect impacts a land-use effects on the land resource. The global land resource is a habitat of a rich biodiversity of organisms coexisting in an ecosystem. Among and within these ecosystems exist rich (both complex and non-complex) interactions that at a global view results in a balance that ensures environmental sustainability and resource replication. However, the contemporary evaluation of agricultural sustainability cited above has been an emerging issue in the global environmental sustainability. In the recursive quest of land users to improve their land productivity and profitability both the land biodiversity and its ecosystem sustainability and balance are destabilized and consequently destroyed.

This paper focuses specifically on plantation farming in Kenya. It discusses both the positive and negative effects the land use practice has on land with special emphasis on land’s biodiversity and sustainability. The short-run and long-run hazards of plantation farming to the environmental and the socio-economic livelihood of practicing households are also contained herein. Finally, a sustainable recommendation on a paradigm that can be both ecologically and economically sustainable has been proposed and recommended to offset the negative intended and unintended consequences that the practice results in for the betterment of livelihood.