Agriculture must provide food to a growing world population, including today’s 840 million hungry people. Protected areas can contribute to food security and poverty alleviation within, but especially around, their boundaries. Poor land use, careless agricultural management and wrong policy incentives damage natural habitats and accelerate the loss of plants, animals and ecological processes that serve as the foundation of agricultural productivity. Farmers, pastoralists and forest dwellers, including a large proportion of indigenous people, are the main inhabitants and users of protected areas, as well as of lands connecting these areas. They manage genes, species and ecosystems by their decisions on what to produce and how to produce food. Protected areas today occupy 11 percent of Earth cover, in a landscape dominated by the agriculture sector; in fact, more than 40 percent of the land’s surface is occupied by croplands and pastures. Despite this high interdependence between nature conservation and agriculture, community approaches to protected areas management touch on the periphery of agricultural activities.