Agroforestry Adoption By Smallholders

Agroforestry is a joint forest production system whereby land, labor, and capital inputs are combined to produce trees and agricultural crops (and/or livestock) on the same unit of land. Although existing for centuries (maybe millennia) as an array of traditional land use practices in the tropics, agroforestry emerged in the late 1970s as a modern, improved tropical land use system suitable for scientific study, replete with its own international research center, the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) and journal, Agroforestry Systems. During the 199Os, interest in agroforestry in temperate regions increased rapidly when the scientific community discovered the complex land management systems developed by rural landowners in North America and Europe, including forest farming, alley cropping, shelterbelts, riparian buffers, and silvopastural systems (Lassoie and Buck 1999). Despite some impressive scientific and technological advances, agroforestry rural development efforts in the 1980s and 1990s were frequently unsuccessful (Nair 1996). Although agroforestry projects failed for a number of different reasons, one common factor was the inadequate attention given to socioeconomics in the development of systems and projects (Current et al. 1995). Beginning in the mid-1990s, agroforestry leaders argued for increased emphasis on research to understand the agroforestry adoption decision process (Mercer and Miller 1998, Sanchez 1995). For example, former Director General of ICRAF, Pedro Sanchez (1995: 24), stated that “the need to develop predictive understanding of how farm households make decisions regarding land use is as essential as developing a predictive understanding of the competition between tree and crop roots.”