Trade-offs Between Ecosystem Services and Opportunity Costs in Maintaining the Tonle Sap Lake Agro-ecosystem (Cambodia)

Summary

The usefulness of the ecosystem services framework (ESF) to emphasize relationships between agriculture and ecosystems has received little attention, and studies applying ESF to understand links between ecosystem services and rice production systems are lacking. This chapter tries to fill this gap by combining the ecosystem services (ES) and dis-services (EDS) approach suggested in 2007 by Zhang, Ricketts, Kremen, Carney, and Swinton and with agrarian system analysis and diagnosis methodology to identify ES and EDS provided by rice production systems adopted by farmers on the agro-ecosystem of Tonle Sap Lake (TSL) floodplain. Our findings show that organic rice production systems do not perform well economically or ecologically in ES provisions. In contrast, rainy-season rice, floating rice in particular, has the best performance for ES provision. This study proposes three choices to reconcile economic and ecological performance: (1) to promote production systems with medium performance for ES but low opportunity cost, promote adoption of rainy-season rice, excluding floating rice, in combination with short-term rice; (2) for medium performance for ES and medium opportunity cost, promote adoption of rainy-season rice, including floating rice, in combination with short-term rice; and (3) for high performance for ES and high opportunity cost, promote adoption of floating rice alone.