For years, it has been a bit of conventional wisdom among researchers and development experts: The loss of ecosystem services, especially those provided by forests, will have a profound impact on the poor, as deforestation and forest degradation decrease human well-being.
The EverGreen Agriculture Parnership is hosting a side event at the upcoming FARA African Agricultural Science Week in Accra, Ghana.
The event will update participants on recent developments and foster discussion on new partnership opportunities to support EverGreen Agricultures broad-based effort for transformative change. Speakers will present the global context that is driving EverGreen Agriculture as well as on ground experiences of the spread of EverGreen agricultural practices such as farmer-managed natural regeneration in West Africa, the use of fertilizer trees in Southern Africa, and the scaling up approaches that have contributed to these successes. Senior discussants will share their perspectives and suggestions on the process of scaling-up and the planning imperative for accelerated expansion. Participants will be invited in the Q&A plenary discussion to query about the ways forward in the creation of an EverGreen Agriculture system in their own contexts.
Speakers will include Dr. Dennis Garrity, ICRAF, Abasse Tougiani, NRAN, Niger, Norbert Akolbila, World Vision, Ghana and Jonathan Muriuki, ICRAF, in addition to an exciting panel of senior discussants.
Please find attached the event program for more information.
The UN General Assembly held its 3rd Session for the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals last week in New York. Participants discussed a range of topics including food security and nutrition, sustainable agriculture, desertification, land degradation and drought, to progress the development of the sustainable development goals. Dr. Dennis Garrity, UNCCD Drylands Ambassador, addressed the Assembly on these matters and presented his ideas for a SDG on Land Regeneration and the opportunities EverGreen Agriculture provides in the achievement of such a goal.
You can watch a full recording of the presentations made by both Dr. Garrity and Professor Hans Herron, and the discussion that followed here: UN WebTV
Download a copy of the remarks made by Dr. Dennis Garrity below.
A new case study and video clip on EverGreen Agriculture has been produced by WRENmedia with support from EIARD. These new products describe EverGreen Agriculture and its role in restoring exhausted soils with richer sources of organic nutrients, helping smallholders increase crop yields and incomes, and adapt to climate change.
You can watch the video here on our website and read the case study attached below.
Boab tree and crops in Burkina Faso
By
Treeless fields of wheat haven’t always been the common image of agriculture. For most of human history, agriculture took place amidst trees. It’s time to put the trees back, say Meine van Noordwijk, Dennis Garrity and Delia Catacutan
The trouble started when a tree-less, tillage-addicted form of agriculture became the norm and the image worldwide as what agriculture is, and should be, and was extended to parts of the world with less benign climates than where it originated.
Long before this concept took hold, agricultural practices in many parts of the world included the retention of valuable trees in cropped fields. This kind of agriculture employed only superficial soil tillage, usually in combination with a controlled fire that cleared the land but did not kill the larger trees.
In temperate zones with relatively mild climates, however, a different approach to growing crops emerged—‘non-conservation agriculture without trees’—which was successful because it was readily expanded: horse-drawn ploughs replaced human tillage then tractors replaced horses, drawing on much more horsepower to drag ever-deeper ploughs through soils that responded by mineralizing a substantial part of their organic matter, thereby providing nutrients for the crops.
This yield benefit, however, was not sustainable because it depleted the resource base: chemical fertilizer had to become the basis of plant nutrition. Because excessive tillage had killed many of the worms and other minute soil engineers, it became ‘necessary’ to create a structure compatible with crop roots.
By the mid-1970s, it had become clear that the ‘green revolution’ approach of intensifying crop production in the manner described above had worked well in some (particularly irrigated) environments, but not elsewhere.
A parallel approach to large-scale forestry had success in some limited areas but it ran into major social conflicts and issues over land rights elsewhere.
Out of this polarisation, a new—but also very old—concept emerged: ‘agroforestry’, which was most simply described as ‘agriculture with trees’.
However, the idea that crops and trees were compatible was dangerously revolutionary for academically trained agronomists and at the same time their colleagues, the trained foresters, had a hard time in seeing local people as partners, not as their major problem.
Yet in many parts of the tropics, the compatibility of crops and trees and people and forests appeared to be self-evident, if only one opened one’s eyes. Trees and crops, farmers and forests could work together.
And so the advances of agroforestry in understanding the biophysical, ecological, social and economic aspects of tree–soil–crop interactions were slow to be accepted in the world of ‘development’ and ‘modernization’.
But after some time and much work, new forms of agroforestry, compatible with mechanization and focussed on trees of high value, finally emerged in Europe, North America and Australia, which challenged the rules and regulations that had been formed around the concept of segregating trees and crops.
Agroforestry and its close relative, ‘conservation agriculture with trees’, has demonstrated the ability to adapt crop productivity to climate variability and change, and provide greater yield buffering under increasing temperatures and more frequent and severe droughts.
Depending upon which woody species are used, and how they are managed, their incorporation into crop fields and agricultural landscapes can contribute to maintaining vegetative soil cover year-round; bolstering nutrient supply through nitrogen fixation and nutrient cycling; enhancing suppression of insect pests and weeds; improving soil structure and water infiltration; increasing direct production of food, fuel, fibre and income from products from the intercropped trees; enhancing carbon storage, both above- and belowground; increasing quantities of organic matter in soil surface residues; and more effectively conserving above- and belowground biodiversity.
There are still many critical research issues to be explored. These include the choice of appropriate tree species for varied agroecologies, higher quality tree germplasm, better tree seed dissemination systems, and further improvements in tree propagation and establishment methods. The optimum tree densities for different systems have yet to be fully understood, and the best practices in exploiting the soil fertility synergies between organic and inorganic nutrient sources need to be elucidated.
Integrated systems pose a pioneering research agenda with enormous implications for so-called ‘climate smart’ agriculture.
The World Agroforestry Centre is working on this ecologically sustainable agriculture with a number of key partners from national research institutes, universities and NGOs in projects across the developing world so that we can all enjoy the fruits of trees in agricultural landscapes for a long time to come.
Edited by Robert Finlayson
Read the chapter
By Godfrey Chisusu for Transformations Bi-weekly Vol 6 Issue 7
The “Building a Large EverGreen Agriculture Network in Southern Africa” (BLEANSA) project was officially launched in Salima, Malawi on 5 April 2013 in a ceremony graced by the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Hon. Jermoth Ulemu Chilapondwa, MP.
Funded by the Flemish Government and dedicated to promoting agroforestry and exploiting its potential, this initiative will focus on creating a network of organizations and innovation platforms to coordinate research and development in agroforestry. It will also review experiences gained from past research to refine and optimize evergreen agriculture. The initiative will also distil experiences into policy recommendations, and share these widely to encourage policy makers to develop policies which facilitate the widescale promotion and adoption of evergreen agriculture.
In his keynote address, Hon. Chilapondwa, mentioned that building strong networks targeting famers especially in the dry zones, requires innovations that can increase agricultural production and at the same time ensure sustainability in the face of climate change. This is the key to meeting the food needs of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, he said. “The Government of Flanders has been expanding its development assistance programmes in the region to improve livelihoods by supporting sustainable food production. It has, for example, supported tree seed production by smallholder farmers in the districts of Angonia and Tsangano in Mozambique and Kasungu and Mzimba in Malawi to meet the increasing demand for agroforestry tree seed,” noted Hon. Chilapondwa.
Prof. Temu, ICRAF’s Deputy Director General – Regions, Partnerships and Impact, encouraged partners to focus on transforming agriculture to evergreen agriculture. He noted that the demand for new agricultural land, fuelled by population growth and demand for food, fodder and timber, will continue over the next decades. ICRAF will continue to apply its research findings to stimulate agricultural and forest growth, raise farmers’ incomes and protect the environment, he said.
Participants at the launch were drawn from Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, South Africa and the host, Malawi.
