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Sara J. Scherr

Sara J. Scherr is an agricultural and natural resource economist specializing in land and forest management policy in tropical developing countries. She is Director of Ecoagriculture Partners, an international partnership to promote increased productivity jointly with enhanced natural biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. She also serves as Director of Ecosystem Services for Forest Trends, an NGO that promotes forest conservation through improved markets for forest products and ecosystem services. She is a member of the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger, and a member of the Board of Directors of the World Agroforestry Centre.

 

Dr. Scherr's previous positions include: Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA; Co-Leader of the CGIAR Gender Program; Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C.; and Principal Researcher at the World Agroforestry Centre, in Nairobi, Kenya. She was previously a Fulbright Scholar (1976), and a Rockefeller Social Science Fellow (1985-87).

 

Dr. Scherr received her B.A. in Economics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in International Economics and Development at Cornell University in New York.

Farming with Nature

Farming with Nature

The Science and Practice of Ecoagriculture

A growing body of evidence shows that agricultural landscapes can be managed not only to produce crops but also to support biodiversity and promote ecosystem health. Innovative farmers and scientists, as well as indigenous land managers, are developing diverse types of “ecoagriculture” landscapes to generate cobenefits for production, biodiversity, and local people.

Farming with Nature offers a synthesis of the state of knowledge of key topics in ecoagriculture.
Ecoagriculture

Ecoagriculture

Strategies to Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity

Although food-production systems for the world's rural poor typically have had devastating effects on the planet's wealth of genes, species, and ecosystems, that need not be the case in the future. In Ecoagriculture, two of the world's leading experts on conservation and development examine the idea that agricultural landscapes can be designed more creatively to take the needs of human populations into account while also protecting, or even enhancing, biodiversity.