Indigenous chagras
How to fund chagras under the #SexyTrees methodology
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Authentic Indigenous chagras are the perfect systems to provide a real-world anchor to the 'chaos' end of the good-agroforestry spectrum (see Fig. C).
We need to be humble about our ability to understand these systems, and have included Miguel Chindoy as a qualified Indigenous practitioner for a harmonizing voice. However, we include the outsiders' perspective for reference.
Chagras and money
To talk about rewarding chagras with money is essentially a bicultural endeavor. There are strong arguments for and against undertaking this.
The majority of traditional chagra systems we reviewed use social capital, minga, or other means of non-monetary compensation for maintenance. Adding external compensation is a change, and might not be a good one, depending on how the community views what is already occurring.
We'll summarize the arguments we heard over the past year from traditional leaders across Latin America and the Carribean:
'For' argument: Chagras and chagra science are at risk of being degraded or lost, and many communities have authentically asked for financial compensation and funding to keep them active and preserve endangered traditional crops.
'Against' argument: Chagras are a living symbol of collective living for traditional cultures that do not operate on money but on barter and collective contribution. Offering money for work in a chagra is a cultural contamination.
We are not in a position to make the final decision on this. Communities have to make it themselves with their internal guidance. We do appreciate that it's not a simple decision for many leaders concerned about preserving culture.
Instead, we sat down to figure out if we did negotiate for the communities who asked to receive financial compensation, how could that compensation be arranged to achieve the maximum benefit in fair trade, with the least cultural dilution or reductionism.
Thus, we present an outsider's impression of chagras as a black-box funding system, followed by an authentic, independent traditional voice.
Chagras, reductionism, and black boxes
Our outsiders' understanding of chagras and the strength of the debate came when we first realized they had a role as schools to teach Nature to children (Miguel Chindoy, Agropueblos pers. Communication, 13 January 2026). We finally understood that chagras had a unique esoteric dimension.
By observation, they are typically run by abuelas (elder women of high esteem) in the community, often co-occurring with childcare. An early attempt to review them for physical characterization under this stacking protocol revealed a production system consistent with the literature that was as impossibly complex as it was productive — place-based, with a variety of unquantified species, elegant mixed food production cycles, and plant knowledge (González and Kröger 2020).
Our team was entirely stumped until we realized they could not be quantified at all. Any more than taking a sample of water from a stream characterizes a river. Furthermore, we realized that the attempt was disrespectful (with or without invitation) in the same way such an attempt would be out of place in a monastery of Japanese monks tending a zen garden. Instead, we have decided to share our understanding that they are a practical and systematic experience of Nature, co-occurring with spirituality, culture, and tradition.
While some peers have attempted to measure biocultural credits for chagras, Savimbo has a core policy that culture is not for sale. Instead, we have decided to approach chagras like wind on water, acknowledging that one can never capture the wind.
There is plenty of scientific precedent for such a system; most notably, machine learning (ML). A black box system in science, computing, and engineering has internal workings that are too tangled to interpret — so it can only be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (Bunge 1963). There is robust theory and processes for working with these systems, and no reason not to apply them in rewarding chagras.
Figure K: Indigenous chagras as a black box system
Ethics and episemic reasoning both point to the same conclusion: attempts to understand chagras internal workings are both unnecessarily invasive and likely inaccurate.
Compensating chagras for genetic conservation
One easy way to compensate chagras, without attempting to reduce them, is as a conservation system for rare crops. A core pillar of our previous conservation work has been the observation that one does not have to quantify to conserve.
There are pros and cons to various markets:
Charity funding often relies on external NGOs for storytelling, advocacy, reporting, and negotiating. As a result, its not uncommon to observe mistranslation of culture, interrupted funding cycles, or financial intermediation.
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) such as Peru's Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS) schemes, have been implemented by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT in Peru's Puno region (Drucker and Ramirez 2020). But require direct transactions with institutions and attendant complexity — including disrupted funding cycles.
Area-based climate credits like nature-based carbon credits have traditionally been the primary vehicle for climate finance, yet they differ fundamentally from gene-based models such as agrobiodiversity or seed banks in scope and collateral. These models focus on land tenure and titling as the primary financial collateral because they are often priced by the hectare, generating revenue from the physical extent of the land. However, are relatively small areas, often only 1-2 hectares or less, as compared to industrial cultivation with outsized value.
Economically, there is a significant difference in the relationship to host nations between selling outcomes (consulting or commodities transaction) or payments for ecosystem services (employment transaction). We believe that paying for tangible outcomes preserves communities' privacy, autonomy, and independence in how results are delivered. Given the esoteric nature of chagras, the minimum invasiveness for a fair trade is ideal.
Furthermore, this unit, which could be easily produced from the number and variety of species in a chagra, could be translated to the Agrobiodiversity Index (Jones et al. 2021) with a minimum of fuss.
For outcomes-based payments to the chagras, we have tentatively concluded the best market to access is the agrobiodiversity market that incentivizes the preservation of biological diversity related to agriculture (Ducros et al. in prep.), including neglected underutilized species (NUS; (Talucder et al. 2024).
The development of gene-based units will need to be aligned with several emerging international standards. For instance, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has an internationally negotiated mechanism aimed at fair and equitable benefit-sharing from the use of Digital Sequence Information (DSI) on genetic resources. This is operationalized as the Cali Fund, a multilateral financial mechanism for the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits from the Use of Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources.
How this fund will be compliant with Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) the field of translation of Indigenous rights to data and IP rights, is still unclear. But what is clear is that in the past, genetic information such as Digital Sequence Information (DSI) has been treated as a “free” raw resource to be mined for global markets (including the pharmaceutical industry). Now, this process is termed digital colonialism or biopiracy. These ethics are under intense scrutiny, and genetic data are being negotiated as an inherent biocultural asset (TDG 2024; Flores 2025). A gene-based unit does not require the physical alienation or "fencing" of land to generate value. While land tenure is a prerequisite for security, the Agrobiodiversity Index Unit (AIU) derives its value from the information density and genetic diversity within that land. It shall allow for “genetic data sovereign exports” where the economic input is control over data (IDSov) rather than the physical extraction of resources.
By using a simplified peer-rating algorithm for cultural authenticity of chagras, we could obviate the need to seek Western approval for intact esoteric traditions. However, we still need accessible measurement and operationalization of more tangible characteristics. These claims ideally aim at genetic diversity to meet climate resilience, climate adaptation, or food security funding. We think DSI information might be unnecessary, and ethically problematic to obtain, house, or measure. Thus, this protocol is still under active negotiation with representative Indigenous communities, scientists, and certifying bodies in several countries.
It’s of interest to us that these two real-world holistic agricultural systems have ended up accessing radically different markets with different units (area-based vs gene-based). However, we note that over the course of our community feedback period, most grassroots AFS fall somewhere in the middle of these two systems on a spectrum, so two overlapping protocols for the two ends of the spectrum could be adapted to a wide variety of agricultural sites as needed and fit several different place-based AFS.
To narrow the scope of this chapter, we will only address area-based crediting from standardized systems in the following sections. But we do hope to add gene units to further discussions.
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