2012-2013 - user account | world agroforestry centre intranet

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2012-2013Transforming lives and landscapes with trees

Our visionOur vision is a rural transformation in the developing world as smallholder households increase their use of trees in agricultural landscapes to improve food security, nutrition, income, health, shelter, social cohesion, energy resources and environmental sustainability.

Our missionThe Centre’s mission is to generate science-based knowledge about the diverse roles that trees play in agricultural landscapes, and to use its research to advance policies and practices, and their implementation that benefit the poor and the environment.

Our core values• Professionalism • Mutual respect• Creativity• Inclusiveness

Our strategic goals• Building livelihoods by generating knowledge, choice and opportunities• Improving landscapes and their sustainability by better managing their complexity • Transforming agroforestry impacts to large-scale through policy, innovation and partnerships

Our partnersThe World Agroforestry Centre has always implemented much of its work in partnership with a range of public, private and international bodies. Our partnerships are based on a clear recognition of the value that is added through working jointly with partners and sharing strengths to achieve specific outcomes. We partner with universities, advanced research institutions, national agricultural research organizations, private sector organizations, and government and non-government agencies in the fields of agriculture, forestry, environment, conservation and climate change.

© World Agroforestry Centre, Nairobi, Kenya, 2013

ISSN 1995-6851

World Agroforestry Centre. 2013. Annual Report 2012-2013: Transforming Lives and Landscapes with Trees. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre

Articles appearing in this publication may be quoted or reproduced without charge, provided the source is acknowledged. No use of this publication may be made for resale or other commercial purposes. The geographic designation employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the World Agroforestry Centre concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. All images remain the sole property of their source and may not be used for any purpose without written permission of the source.

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0201 Message from the Chair

Message from the Director General

ICRAF Strategy 2013-2022

The right trees for the right place

Trees and the changing climate

Biodiversity, health and food security

The living earth

Market matters

How we work

Annexes

pg 02

pg 04

pg 06

pg 08

pg 12

pg 24

pg 30

pg 36

pg 44

pg 54

Contents

2 Annual Report 2012-2013

Message fromthe ChairThe year 2012 saw the final phases of the reform process launched by the

Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). All the

CGIAR Research Programmes (CRPs) became fully operational during the year

and I believe our scientists are now confident about the direction in which they

are moving.

I welcome the fact that we have established closer collaboration with the

Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and our other partners

within the framework of CRP 6, which focuses on forests, trees and agroforestry.

Although the bulk of our future research will take place under this programme,

we will also be making important contributions to several other CRPs, including

those related to water, land and ecosystems; climate change; health and nutrition;

institutions and markets; and, more generally, agriculture and food security.

During the course of the year, the Board of Trustees approved a refreshed

strategy developed by staff and our partners. This was a major event. The Board

also gave its approval to the establishment of a new biofuels facility with the

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). This will lead to new

types of research and public-private partnerships on tree-based biofuels. We also

launched a new GeoScience Lab, which will enable our scientists to significantly

improve their storage, management and analysis of spatial data.

Our West and Central Africa office in Yaoundé, Cameroon, celebrated its 25th

anniversary in 2012, and the November Board meeting was held there. Zac

Tchoundjeu, the regional coordinator, received the 2012 Buffett Award for

Leadership in African Conservation from the National Geographic Society for

his work on tree domestication. We are all proud about that.

The staff satisfaction survey held during Science Week in 2012 confirmed what I

have always intuitively believed. The World Agroforestry Centre is a great place

to work! Over 90 per cent of staff participated in the survey, and their feedback

was largely positive.

Transforming lives and landscapes with trees 3

From a financial perspective, this was another successful year, and we managed to close without a deficit. This

is my last message as chair, as I am leaving the Board in 2013. I personally feel rather sad as it has been such

a challenge, but at the same time I have a feeling of fulfilment and accomplishment, not only for myself, but

for the Board, the Board secretariat, the senior leadership team, and for the whole institution and its many

partners. So much has been achieved since I joined the Board in 2006. Many challenges remain, but the Centre

has never been in better shape to meet these challenges than it is now.

Eric Tollens

Chair of the Board of Trustees

The World Agroforestry Centre is a great place to work!“ “

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Board member Dr Hector Cisneros receiving a gift from regional coordinator Zac Tchoundjeu during the World Agroforestry Centre’s 25th anniversary celebrations in Cameroon.


Transforming lives and landscapes with trees:the Strategy of the World Agroforestry Centre 2013-2022A refreshed corporate strategy was developed during 2012 and received final approval from the Board of Trustees early in 2013. The vision of the World Agroforestry Centre is a rural transformation in the developing world as smallholder households increase their use of trees in agricultural landscapes to improve food security, nutrition, income, health, shelter, social cohesion, energy resources and environmental sustainability.

The new direction in the Strategy includes five operational goals: enhancing science quality; increasing operational efficiency; building and maintaining strong partnerships, accelerating the use and impact of our research; and greater cohesion, interdependence and alignment.

The Strategy also lays out roles for the Centre, which are: • Generating and validating knowledge as

International Public Goods (IPGs)• Building robust evidence for higher level decisions

on policies and investments• Working with partners at multiple scales to

translate IPGs into actionable knowledge• Developing and mobilizing capacity at institutional

and individual levels• Demonstrating proof of application of knowledge to

accelerate impact and advance the science of scaling up• Convening, advocacy and interfacing amongst a

wide range of partners to be co-responsible for development outcomes and better engaged with realities faced by development agencies.

The roles and operational goals derive from the mission of the World Agroforestry Centre, which is to harness the best science, people and partnerships within a framework of research for development to fully exploit and extend the positive effects of trees and agroforestry in landscapes across the developing world.

Considering the trends and challenges in the global environment, the emerging research needs and opportunities, as well as the comparative advantages of

the Centre led to the development of three innovative new strategic goals in a programme of research for development impact. These are:• Build livelihoods by generating knowledge, choice

and opportunities• Improve landscapes and their sustainability by better

managing their complexity • Transform agroforestry impacts to large-scale

through policies, innovation and partnerships.

Each strategic goal is accompanied by a series of broad-scale objectives that form the core of our business.

1. Build livelihoods by generating knowledge, choice and opportunities:

• Generate knowledge and viable agroforestry technologies to support livelihoods with trees, particularly for the poor and women

• Provide information relevant for all land users, managers and planners

• Explore different ways and implementation mechanisms of how to turn knowledge and materials into livelihood benefits

• Identify livelihood options and choices • Generate options for enhancing greater self-

determination• Enhance the contribution of trees to human diets

and income• Enable tomorrows smallholders to adapt and

prosper through tree-based options• Provide smallholders with locally relevant options to

increase the productivity and profitability of farming systems through sustainable intensification with trees

• Strengthen tree product value chains enabling the poor and women to have greater access to lucrative markets.

2. Improve landscapes and their sustainability by better managing their complexity:

• Integrate trees into landscapes for sustainable intensification of agriculture


• Reduce deforestation and forest degradation in mixed agriculture-forest landscapes

• Increase the multi-functionality of agricultural landscapes, and understanding of trade-offs and synergies

• Prevent and reverse landscape degradation with better soil structure and water holding capacity

• Enhance or maintain biodiversity in agricultural and associated landscapes

• Avoid eutrophication of water bodies, siltation of reservoirs and disruption of hydrological cycles

• Develop natural asset accounting and valuation/pricing of externalities

• Model and monitor the land use and land cover changes in tree-based landscapes

• Raise awareness on ecosystem services and map, monitor and value these and devise policies that create the incentives to preserve this natural capital.

3. Transform agroforestry impacts to large-scale through policies, innovation and partnerships:

• Highlight and mainstream agroforestry into international, regional, national and local policies

• Participate in, convene and communicate about pilot development initiatives that use agroforestry innovations to go beyond proof of concept to proof of application

• Support development initiatives concerning agroforestry with tools and information

• Make information and evidence context specific• Conceive and test innovative extension approaches • Develop frameworks for and build knowledge on

the science of scaling up• Better target resources and technologies for

specified agroforestry systems and technologies• Help catalyse provision of inputs and materials (e.g.

germplasm) for successful testing and adoption of agroforestry practices at scale

• Determine how to scale up the benefits of value chain development interventions so as to benefit large numbers of smallholders and other poor value chain actors

• Take responsibility for delivery of information in ways that diverse audiences can assess, understand and use.

To implement this programme, six new Science Domains (SDs) were established. These are: • SD1-AgroforestrySystems seeks to understand how agroforestry systems can

function better, be more productive, more attractive for investments and be more ecologically sustainable in the long term

• SD2-TreeProductsandMarkets encompasses the science behind understanding

and developing value chains for agroforestry tree products as well as the institutions that support and participate in tree product markets

• SD3-TreeDiversity,DomesticationandDelivery

involves identifying, delivering and conserving quality tree germplasm as well as supporting the optimal use of the right tree in the right place for the right purpose

• SD4-LandHealth concerned with understanding land degradation

and how it can be prevented, reversed and its significance better communicated and recognized

• SD5-EnvironmentalServices focused on understanding and promoting the

benefits and sustenance of key environmental services associated with tree-based landscapes including water, soil stabilization, carbon and biodiversity

• SD6-ClimateChange concerned with the vulnerability of smallholders

and developing countries to the negative effects of climate change.

These SDs are based in the headquarters in Nairobi, but the bulk of the implementation will be done in the Centre’s five Regional Programmes:• East and Southern Africa • West and Central Africa • Southeast and East Asia • South Asia • Latin America.

The budget of the Centre is estimated to grow consistently year by year from US$59 million in 2013 to US$100 million by 2022. This ambitious growth target will allow us to make significant progress in achieving large-scale impact in the developing countries.


The right tree for the right place

Choosing the right treesErosion in the hills surrounding Lake Tanganyika is not only depriving farmers of fertile topsoil, it is leading to sedimentation and nutrient enrichment, which threatens fish stocks and the livelihoods of communities along the shoreline. To tackle these problems, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) funded a 4-year programme to identify the hotspots of degradation and promote practices to control erosion and improve local livelihoods. By the time it came to an end in 2012, much had been achieved.

In Tanzania and Zambia, the project was managed by government departments. In DRC, in contrast, the lack of any coherent government meant that the task of managing the project was awarded to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) East Africa, which benefited from technical advice from the World Agroforestry Centre. The Centre was also involved in the project in Tanzania and Zambia.

Remote sensing revealed that about 40 per cent of the lake basin had lost some of its vegetation over the past 30 years, and 5 per cent had suffered serious degradation. In DRC, research focused on the remote mountains of Kivu District. Emilie Smith Dumont, a scientist from the World Agroforestry Centre, identified the hotspots of degradation, which had been largely

caused by poor agricultural practices and charcoal burning. Besides leading to serious erosion, the loss of trees had deprived the local population of a significant source of food, fodder and fuelwood.

“Once we had identified the worst affected areas, we began to think about the sort of agroforestry interventions which could help to reduce erosion,” says Smith Dumont. She and her colleagues interviewed farmers to find out what they knew about local tree species, and what sort of products and services they wanted the trees to provide. It was the knowledge gathered during this process that shaped the villagers’ tree-planting strategies.

Makingthemostoflocalknowledge

Combining scientific knowledge with the information gathered from farmers, the scientists developed an electronic tool which enables extension workers and farmers to assess which species work best in different locations. The Useful Trees for the Lake Tanganyika Basin Toolkit was published in 2012, with a user guide and field manuals for DRC, Tanzania and Zambia. “Let’s say a farmer wants to grow trees which provide timber, but is also keen on getting honey,” says Smith Dumont. “Using the toolkit, he or she can identify which species produce timber and good forage for bees.”

Farmers in Bas-Sassandra are enthusiastic about the idea of planting native trees in their cocoa gardens © IC

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When Smith Dumont revisited Kivu area in early 2013, she was encouraged to find that local communities had established nurseries with a wide range of trees, mostly native, tailored to suit their needs.

An independent evaluation of the project was carried out by Saskia Marijnissen at the end of 2012. “The approach used by this project demonstrates that techniques do not have to be rudimentary to be useful at the local level,” she wrote. While most extension manuals recommend a few ‘priority’ tree species, the tree selection tool was more sophisticated and

“far more effective because farmers receive more customized and therefore locally relevant advice.”

The tree selection tool puts farmers at the centre of decision-making when it comes to tackling environmental degradation and adopting measures to improve soil fertility. However, Fergus Sinclair, who leads the World Agroforestry Centre’s research on agroforestry systems, stresses that the tool alone is not enough. “You also need people – like Emilie – with the right mix of knowledge, enthusiasm and skills to work with local communities,” he says.

Trees with your cocoa?When Philippe Vaast returned to western Côte d’Ivoire in 2012, having last been there in the 1980s, he was astonished by the changes which had taken place. “When I was last there, the Bas-Sassandra region was covered with dense forest,” he recalls. “Now, it’s nearly all been replaced by perennial tree crops.”

From 1980 onwards, there was a massive wave of migration from the other regions of the country, as well as Burkina Faso and Mali, towards the west, with the newcomers clearing the forest to make way for cocoa, coffee, oil-palm and rubber. The conventional wisdom was that cocoa was most productive when grown in full sun. “Initially, farmers got decent yields, but since many could not afford to buy fertilizers the soils became progressively poorer and yields declined,” explains Vaast, who leads the World Agroforestry Centre’s research on multi-strata tree crop systems.

The Vision for Change project – a public-private partnership launched by the World Agroforestry Centre and Mars Inc, and described on page 11 – is helping farmers to increase their yields and incomes by rehabilitating old cocoa gardens. This is to be

welcomed, says Vaast. However, he also believes there is scope for the project to encourage farmers to plant native species in their cocoa gardens. There is evidence to suggest that cocoa can still produce high yields under what Vaast describes as “managed shade.”

But are farmers interested? Preliminary surveys conducted by Vaast’s colleague Emilie Smith Dumont, in collaboration with her local colleagues, suggest they are. In October 2012, they interviewed 355 farmers in Bas-Sassandra region. Despite the massive levels of deforestation, they identified 139 species growing on their land. Around 95 per cent of farmers were enthusiastic about the idea of planting native species in their cocoa gardens. These, they believe, could provide them with a range of products, including fruit and timber. They also mentioned that these could help to improve soil fertility and reduce heat stress, a threat to the cocoa bushes.

This is work in progress. In 2013, the scientists will establish demonstration plots to gain a better understanding of how different trees can be matched to different needs and farm conditions.

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The right tree for the right place

Improving livelihoods and landscapes in SulawesiBetween April and September 2012, some 7000 men and women in Sulawesi received training on a wide range of topics, following the launch of the Agroforestry and Forestry in Sulawesi (AgFor Sulawesi) project. “Over the next few years, the initiative aims to improve rural livelihoods by encouraging better governance and better environmental management and by raising on-farm productivity,” says project leader James Roshetko, a tree and market specialist with the World Agroforestry Centre and Winrock International.

Funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), AgFor Sulawesi is being led by the World Agroforestry Centre, with assistance from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Winrock International, the National Planning and Development Agency of Indonesia and several local partners. The initial focus has been on South and South-east Sulawesi. These provinces were selected on the grounds that they suffer relatively high levels of poverty, have a range of population densities and possess significant tracts of natural forest.

Communities here face a number of challenges. There is a high dependence on exotic crops, such as cocoa, rubber and coffee. This implies a relatively high degree of risk: a fall in commodity prices or the emergence of new pests and diseases could have a catastrophic

impact on incomes. Possible changes in the climate and the variability in weather conditions could also pose a challenge to farmers in the future.

“So far, we’ve done a lot of capacity building, working with farmers to improve their technical knowledge and on-farm management,” says Roshetko. The project is promoting a diverse mix of species in agroforestry systems. Between April and September 2012, 38 ‘nurseries of excellence’ produced almost 200,000 high-quality seedlings. Training exercises have also encouraged farmers to think more carefully about producing crops for which there is an existing market.

Encouragingbettergovernance

A second component of the programme, managed by CIFOR, is raising awareness about the importance of good governance. The project is encouraging local authorities to adopt a participatory approach to decision-making and involve local communities in land-use planning. The third component of AgFor Sulawesi, managed by the World Agroforestry Centre, focuses on improving environmental management across a range of ecosystems and habitats, from intensely managed farmland to natural forest. This component is developing a participatory vulnerability tool to enable farmers to assess threats to their agroforestry systems.

The AgFor Sulawesi project has made strenuous efforts to involve women. © IC

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In many parts of Indonesia, women’s rights are not given adequate attention. “Getting women involved is a priority for all AgFor partners,” says Roshetko, “and I think we’ve done well in achieving our targets for female participation.” A third or more of those involved in project activities have been women. As it can be difficult for women to leave their fields and farms during busy times of the agricultural calendar, Roshetko and his colleagues have done their best to rearrange

activities to suit the women. “We’ve also found that women are more focused on growing annual crops than men, so we’ve designed training sessions to meet their specific interests and time constraints,” says Roshetko.

It is too early to say whether the project has had any significant impact on incomes and livelihoods. However, Roshetko is confident that after another year or so, households will begin to see tangible benefits from activities promoted by the project.

A public-private partnership involving the World Agroforestry Centre, Mars Inc. and a range of national institutions is helping to transform cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire. Launched in 2010, the Vision for Change (V4C) project aims to increase yields and improve incomes. By grafting improved scions of high-yielding, disease- and pest-resistant cultivars onto old trees, and adopting good agricultural practices, farmers will dramatically increase their yields.

Côte d’Ivoire is the world’s leading producer of cocoa. However, farmers in Bas-Sassandra region, the main focus for the V4C project, face many challenges. Their cocoa farms are old and productivity is low. The majority of farmers lack the funds needed to buy fertilizer; as a result the soils have become progressively poorer. Pests and diseases have also depressed yields. Currently, the average farmer harvests around 400 kg per hectare. Interventions by the V4C project should push yields up to 1000 kg per hectare.

In 2012, the project made considerable progress. By the end of the year, 13 new Centres de Développement du Cacao (CDCs) were providing technical advice to some 10,000 smallholder farmers. V4C is also supporting various community development projects, such as the renovation of a school in Kragui. However, the highlight of the year was the opening of the Cocoa Somatic Embryogenesis Laboratory at the headquarters of the Centre National de Recherche Agronomique (CNRA) in Adiopodoumé on 20 November 2012.

Funded by the V4C project, the laboratory will conduct research on the mass propagation of elite cocoa clones using modern tissue culture techniques.

Somatic embryogenesis provides an alternative approach to the clonal propagation of cocoa. Plants derived from somatic embryos are genetically identical to their parental donor cells, and have a taproot system and growth pattern similar to that of seed-derived plants.

Among those present at the opening ceremony were the Ivorian Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the Vice President of Mars Inc., and the director generals of CNRA and the World Agroforestry Centre.

“This ceremony crowns the scientific and technical partnership of this highly credible national institution, CNRA, with a committed private sector partner on one hand and ourselves as an international research institution on the other,” said Tony Simons, the World Agroforestry Centre’s Director General. He pointed out that although somatic embryos for cocoa were first reported in 1977, they remained a scientific curiosity. This laboratory will help to increase the production of high-quality planting materials. “Simply put, from single cells come multiple plants come abundant produce,” he said.

Brave new world for cocoa growers

The opening ceremony at the Cocoa SomaticEmbryogenesis Laboratory.



Agroforestry reduces vulnerability to climate changeClimate models predict rises in temperature, greater variability in rainfall and an increase in extreme weather events that could reduce agricultural productivity in developing countries by 10–20 per cent over the next 40 years. Small-scale farmers in tropical regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change and variability.

It is often claimed that agroforestry can help farmers adapt to climate change, but there has been little quantitative evidence to back this assertion. However, a study by Tannis Thorlakson, a former student at Harvard University, and Henry Neufeldt of the World Agroforestry Centre has provided clear evidence that agroforestry can reduce the vulnerability of farmers to climate change. 1

Their research focused on Kenya’s Nyando Valley, an area which suffered severe drought in 2009 and flooding in 2010. These had a serious impact on many

households. During these periods, 72 per cent of the farmers in Lower Nyando were forced to consume seeds which should have been reserved for planting, 85 per cent reduced the quantity and quality of the food they ate, and 72 per cent were forced to sell some of their assets, including livestock. Such short-term strategies to cope with climatic variability can have serious long-term repercussions. Once farming families fall into the ‘poverty trap’ they may find it difficult to recover lost ground.

Farmers in the Nyando Valley believe the best way to adapt to climate-related shocks is through improving their income. To evaluate agroforestry’s potential to help, the researchers made a comparison between farmers who had been involved for two to four years in an agroforestry project and a control group which had not.

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1Thorlakson T, Neufeldt H. 2012. Reducing subsistence farmers’ vulnerability to climate change: evaluating the potential contributions of agroforestry in Western Kenya. Agriculture & Food Security, 2012.

Agroforestry is good for food security and helps buffer farmers against climatic shocks.


Food security and innovation Why is it that small-scale farmers frequently fail to

adopt new practices and technologies – such as

agroforestry – when there is so much evidence to

suggest that these practices could raise their yields and

incomes? A survey in four East Africa countries, whose

findings have been published in the journal Food Security2,

may have provided an answer.

“The evidence suggests that there is a direct correlation

between food insecurity and a lack of innovation,” says

Henry Neufeldt, head of climate change research at the

World Agroforestry Centre. “This is a very important

finding, and has significant implications for the way we

go about development.”

The research, which was led by the Climate Change,

Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Program,

explored the relationship between food security and

changes in farming practices made by 700 households.

The study found that many households were adapting

to changing circumstances, such as climatic variability

and demographic pressures, although these changes

tended to be marginal, rather than transformational.

There is nothing surprising about this: farmers are

always adapting to change. However, the finding that

the least food secure households – those most likely

to experience food shortages and malnutrition – are

the least likely to introduce changes to their farming

practices is of major importance.

“We can’t say for sure that a lack of food security is

leading to a lack of innovation, rather than vice versa,”

says Neufeldt, “but my feeling is that that is what is

happening.” Poor households are so preoccupied with

the business of day-to-day survival that they have

neither the time nor the funds to invest in farming

practices which, paradoxically, could lift them out of

poverty and ensure they have a better supply of food.3

CCAFS scientist Patti Kristjanson points out that

more research is needed before we can have a full

understanding of the relationship between food

insecurity and innovation. “It is critical that we learn

more about both the factors that enable and facilitate

innovation, and how to lower the often hidden costs

and barriers associated with changing agricultural

practices,” she says.

The findings suggest that development agencies and

governments, as well as organizations like the World

Agroforestry Centre, need to tailor their activities to

meet the needs of different groups. If they want to

reach the poorest households, they will need to think

about improving their access to food before they can

begin promoting new farming practices.

2 Kristjanson P et al. 2012. Are food insecure smallholder households making changes in their farming practices? Evidence from East Africa. Food Security, Vol 4

3 See also: Thorlakson T, Neufeldt H. 2012. Reducing subsistence farmers’ vulnerability to climate change: evaluating the potential contributions of agroforestry in western Kenya, Agriculture & Food Security, 2012 1:15.

The results were revealing. Households involved in agroforestry had significantly improved their well-being through improvements in farm productivity and increases in income, for example from the sale of seedlings, timber, fuelwood and fruit. Agroforestry projects also reduced the amount of time women spent collecting fuelwood.

Households practising agroforestry also experienced less hunger when there were droughts, floods or other

significant climatic events. “We found that the level of food insecurity during those periods – the amount of time during the year when people were hungry – was reduced by approximately one month for households practising agroforestry,” says Neufeldt. He adds that by combining agroforestry with index-based insurance, farmers could protect themselves against risk and invest in higher-yielding but less hardy crop varieties.



Tackling Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissionsIndonesia is one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2005, these amounted to 2.05 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), some 80 per cent of which came from deforestation and other forms of land-use change. This compared with 5.95 Gt for the US and 5.06 Gt for China, making Indonesia the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases at the time.

In 2009, a Presidential Decree pledged to reduce Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26 per cent, relative to a business-as-usual trajectory, by 2020; and by 41 per cent if international finance was made available. “Indonesia is the only developing country to make a clear and measured commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” says Sonya Dewi, a scientist with the World Agroforestry Centre.

The Centre has been working with the government to make the commitment a reality, rather than just an aspiration. This has involved establishing baseline datasets for greenhouse gas emissions and providing training and technical assistance to the national and provincial governments on a range of subjects, such as

the establishment of baseline and mitigation scenarios and the potential for reducing emissions from land-use change.

The Presidential Decree requires all provincial governments to submit locally appropriate mitigation actions – known as LAMAs – to the country’s National Development Planning Board. During 2012, Dewi and her colleagues produced guidelines for developing action plans and conducted numerous trainings to help provincial staff draw up their plans, using its LUWES (Land Use Planning for Low Emission Development Strategy) decision-making platform.

Land-use activities that generate economic benefits, such as forestry enterprises and palm oil plantations, can cause considerable carbon loss if developed in carbon-rich areas. However, halting these activities could lead to serious economic losses if not carefully planned. LUWES provides a set of tools and principles which enable those involved in land-use planning to work out how best to reduce emissions without causing undue economic hardship.

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Large areas of forest have been cleared to make way for oil palm plantations in Indonesia.


Some provinces required more thorough training – and several training sessions – than others. “We found there were variations in both technical capacities and available data across provinces in Indonesia,” says Dewi. “Capacity tends to be much lower as you move towards the eastern part of Indonesia. However, we found that when a handful of individuals are willing to champion the process, it can make a big difference.” By the end of 2012, more than half of the provinces had submitted their LAMA plans.

Working out the levels of current emissions and projecting what they will be in future if no action is taken is a pre-requisite to establishing measurable

reductions in emissions. To enable provinces to do this, Dewi produced technical guidelines, published in the local language, Bahasa Indonesia. The World Agroforestry Centre also published a complete manual for LUWES in Bahasa Indonesia.

In response to local demand, the Centre also conducted training sessions on developing LAMAs, using LUWES, in Viet Nam and Cameroon. Similar sessions have been planned for Peru. During the course of 2012, the software developed within LUWES, known as ABACUS, was translated from English into Bahasa Indonesia and Vietnamese. A French version will be published in 2013.

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The clearance of forests releases large quantities of carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas in terms of its impact on the climate.



Making climate finance work for small farmersAgriculture is both a cause of climate change – directly responsible for 10-12 per cent of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions – and a victim, with increases in temperature, changing patterns of rainfall and more extreme weather events already having an impact on food production.

A range of practices that come under the heading of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ can help farmers reduce their emissions, become more resilient to climate change and increase food production. But there’s a catch: if the world’s smallholder farmers are to adopt low-carbon practices such as agroforestry there must be some incentive, financial or otherwise. “The big challenge at present is how to connect small-scale farmers to international climate finance,” says Henry Neufeldt of the World Agroforestry Centre.

This is the subject of a policy brief – ‘Climate Finance for Agriculture and Livelihoods’ – published by the World Agroforestry Centre in 2013. 4 This issue was also explored in depth during the 18th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 18), held in Doha in November 2012. Jointly organized by the World Agroforestry Centre, CARE International and the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Program, a roundtable session on climate finance was held as part of Agriculture, Landscapes and Livelihoods Day.

During the session, Neufeldt drew on an analysis of seven biocarbon schemes in East Africa, all of which seek to link smallholders to the carbon market. “Carbon is the currency that pays for many projects, but only a small amount of the money actually reaches farmers,” he says. “Most goes on setting up the projects and on measuring and verifying carbon stocks. Nevertheless, farmers gain in other ways.”

To give just one example, the Sustainable Agriculture in a Changing Climate (SACC) project, managed by CARE International in western Kenya, estimates that farmers will receive an average carbon payment of just US$3 per year over the project’s 25-year lifespan – hardly an incentive. However, the income from tree products such as timber, firewood and building poles is estimated to be 50 times greater, and therefore highly significant. Farmers also stand to benefit from the provision of free tree seedlings, the sale of fruit and fuelwood, and higher crop yields that result from improved farming practices.

Smallholder carbon projects invariably require upfront public finance. There is a long lag time between setting up projects and gaining a significant income from carbon. In the case of the SACC project, Phil Franks of CARE International told the meeting that the project’s breakeven point would be around year 15, and that was being optimistic. This inevitably deters private investors.

However, there is scope for public-private partnerships. “There is plenty of evidence that there is private money looking to invest in sustainable land management, but the investors will need to make a return to do so,” says Neufeldt. This theme was explored by Lou Munden, who described the Munden Project’s ‘Inari’ approach to financing sustainable land-use initiatives. This involves leveraging risk across a wide range of investments, spanning countries, landscapes and land-use activities, in order to provide long-term, low-cost credit to producers, with better returns to investors.

Another speaker, Rachel Diro of Colombia University, talked about the importance of providing incentives to help farmers adapt to climate change. These include index-based insurance schemes which buffer farmers against the risks they take when investing in technologies and practices which are designed to increase productivity.

4Foster K, Neufeldt H, Franks P, Diro R, Munden L, Wyatt M, Anand M, Wollenberg E. 2013. Climate Finance for Agriculture and Livelihoods. ICRAF Policy Brief 15. Nairobi, Kenya. World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)


Whereas conventional crop or livestock insurance involves the direct measurement of losses in farmers’ field, which can be difficult and costly, payments made under index-based insurance schemes are triggered when an agreed parameter – such as rainfall – falls below a certain level.

More information can be found about this and other aspects of climate finance in the policy brief. It stresses the importance of seeing the subject through the lens of livelihoods – and not just carbon sequestration – and underlines the need for an innovative and integrated approach that connects rural farmers to public and private finance at the global level.

Going carbon neutralThe World Agroforestry Centre is the first CGIAR institution to make a rigorous assessment of its carbon emissions and in January 2013 its headquarters in Nairobi was officially certified as carbon neutral.

Greenhouse gas emissions for the Nairobi headquarters amounted to approximately 2600 t of carbon dioxide equivalent for 20115. Approximately half the emissions came from staff travel and ground transport; most of the rest came from the consumption of electricity and individual commuting.

In December 2012, the Centre bought carbon credits, based on the 2011 figures, to offset its emissions for the next two years via the CarbonNeutral Company. The first tranche of credits was bought from the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project in Kenya. This is helping to protect over 200,000 ha of forest, an important wildlife

migration route, between East and West Tsavo national parks.

“We put out a call to tender and looked at 10 different projects in East Africa,” explains Audrey Chenevoy, who is responsible for overseeing the Centre’s carbon offsetting programme. “We wanted to make sure that the projects we chose were really benefiting local communities.” The Kasigau Corridor is creating jobs, improving education and providing direct financial benefits from carbon finance to over 100,000 local people.

As well as offsetting its emissions, the Centre is reducing its carbon footprint by encouraging better recycling, switching to energy-saving lighting and improving video-conferencing as a way of cutting down on travel. Over the coming years, the regional offices will also be assessing their emissions and reducing their carbon footprint.

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5Following the accounting rules of the WBCSD/WRI

The Centre’s first tranche of carbon credits was bought from the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project in Kenya.



Promoting carbon-rich agriculture in PeruInternational climate change negotiations have been much preoccupied with Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). Since deforestation is responsible for 15 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, this makes sense. However, scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre have pointed out that more could be achieved by reducing emissions from all land uses (REALU), as carbon emissions outside areas officially defined as forests are often highly significant.

Take, for example, the Ucayali region in Peru. Since the 1930s, this once remote area in the upper Amazon has seen wave upon wave of migration. This led to a rubber boom and, much later, the building of a new highway to link the region with the capital, Lima. “Since then migrants from the Andes and elsewhere have continued to convert forest into farmland,” says Claudia Silva of the World Agroforestry Centre. While many have practised shifting cultivation, others have made a

living from highly profitable coca – the raw material for cocaine – and, more recently, cocoa and oil palm.

In 2012, the ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins initiated a REALU project in Ucayali’s Padre Abad province, one of the most deforested regions in the Amazon. The research is exploring ways of working with farmers to enhance carbon stocks in a range of land-use systems. Scientists are also conducting research on the design of payment schemes which could encourage farmers to increase carbon stocks.

Frombusttoboom

Many families who migrated to Padre Abad during the 1980s and 1990s cleared forest to make way for coca bushes. As part of a programme to reduce production of coca, farmers have been encouraged to plant crops such as cocoa and oil palm. The US-funded Alternative Development Programme, known by its Spanish acronym PDA, was particularly influential in shaping the

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Slash-and-burn farming practices have turned Padre Abad province into one of the most deforested regions in the Amazon.

Farmers are being encouraged to increase carbon stocks by planting native species in their cocoa gardens.


land-use systems – and encouraging the conversion of forest to farmland – in Padre Abad.

The PDA also helped to establish farmer cooperatives. One of these – the Asociación de Cacaoteros Tecnificados de Padre Abad (ACATPA) – is now working with the World

Agroforestry Centre on REALU. Scientists from the Centre had previously collaborated with ACATPA on a project which involved, among other things, planting shade trees in cocoa gardens. “Because of our past relationship, we knew about environmental services,” says ACATPA’s chief executive officer, Ranfol Cárdenas. “When Claudia told us about the possibility of getting carbon payments, the idea immediately appealed to us.”

In 2012, Claudia’s team, which included technicians from ACATPA, conducted socio-economic surveys of 30 farms covering 931 ha, 128 ha of which were devoted to cocoa. The surveys provided information about every aspect of management, from the crops grown to the length of fallows, from the use of trees on farmland to methods of tackling pests and diseases. At the same time, scientists measured carbon stocks for a range of land-use systems, from high forest to tree crops and degraded pasture.

Layingoutthechoices

“By the end of the year, we had come up with a menu of options for farmers, each with different implications for storing and trapping carbon,” says Silva. At one end of the spectrum is ‘business as usual’. In this scenario, smallholders will continue to emit carbon by clearing forests and older fallows to make way for crops. At the other end are farming systems which involve a range of different options which will increase carbon stocks.

“We’ve calculated that by planting trees, farmers could increase carbon stocks in their cocoa gardens from an average of 75–90 t of carbon to 120 t, without reducing productivity,” explains Silva. Scientists are currently assessing the sort of measures, and legal arrangements, which will enable smallholders to receive payments for their carbon enrichment activities under the voluntary carbon market.

Many of ACATPA’s members have high hopes for the project. “I think this scheme could provide us with some income,” says Nicolas Agüero, who manages 9 ha of cocoa gardens with one of his sons. “It may not be much, but it will help.” He says he would be happy to plant more trees in his cocoa gardens; even if the payments are modest, the trees will provide him with timber and fruit. Agüero also knows that better management could increase the productivity of his cocoa gardens. This, stresses Silva, is an important part of the project. “It’s not just about carbon,” she says. “It’s about creating sustainable and productive farming systems.”

Nicolas Agüero is one of many farmers who hope to benefit from the REALU project.



Adapting to climate change in the West African SahelClimate models suggest that the West African Sahel is likely to become hotter and drier, with a more variable climate, during the next century. This has serious implications for rural communities. Strengthening their ability to analyse vulnerability to climate change and develop plans to adapt to change is one of the priorities of a World Agroforestry Centre project funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

A participatory methodology to analyse the vulnerability of livelihoods was developed and applied in villages in one region in Mali, another in Niger and two in Burkina Faso. Using the methodology, scientists were able to gather information about how the landscape has changed, the major threats to natural resources, and the villagers’ plans – if any – to reduce their vulnerability to climate change.

Villagers typically cited a number of changes to the landscape. Woodlands had disappeared as a result of over-harvesting for fuel and fodder; many native tree species had disappeared, especially in drier regions; most wild animals had become locally extinct, largely because of over-hunting; and constant cropping had led to soil degradation and the loss of fertility. Many villagers also said that rainfall had become more meagre and less predictable; they attributed this to changes in the climate, rather than any human activities.

“The fact that most villagers recognized that they themselves, and their ancestors, are responsible for the negative changes in the landscape is crucial for any climate change adaptation plan,” says John Weber, who led the research with Carmen Sotelo Montes. “If they accept responsibility for causing change, then they know that they can alter certain practices to reverse the trends and adapt to a hotter, drier and more variable climate.”

However, Weber points out that relatively few villagers understood the effect of tree cover on local rainfall and water table levels. This highlights the need for extension and education programmes to explain why the retention of tree cover is important.

During subsequent discussions, the villagers highlighted practices which could help them adapt to climate change. These included farmer-managed natural regeneration, which has helped to re-green large expanses of once degraded parklands in Niger, and the planting and protecting of drought-tolerant tree species, and provenances within species, especially in drier areas.

Ageandgendermatter

The methodology also involved interviews and discussions with different gender and age groups: adult men, young men, adult women and young women. Members of each group began by listing the principal activities – including agriculture, animal herding, the sale of food products from trees and fuelwood collection – which contributed to their livelihoods, and the threats to these activities. Having assessed the vulnerability of each activity on a scale of 0 to 3, they then discussed specific adaptation plans for each of them.

“The gender group analysis illustrated the importance of developing adaptation plans that respond to the specific vulnerability issues of each group,” says Sotelo Montes. “Our research suggests that livelihoods of different gender and age groups may be vulnerable to different factors that are directly or indirectly affected by climate change. Vulnerability should therefore be assessed not only by region, but by gender and age groups within each region when developing climate change adaptation plans.”

In several villages, adult women identified two major threats to the livelihood activities of all groups: a large number of children who cannot be properly fed, clothed and educated; and limited farm size, especially in the drier and hotter regions. Their solution: family planning.

Many traditionally-minded men refused to listen to these discussions. However, there were also many young men and women who clearly understood the need for family planning as part of their strategy to adapt to climate change. “We need to recognize


Researchers in Burkina Faso investigating villagers’ adaptation strategies to climate change.

that human beings are also natural resources, and that managing the size of the human population is an essential component of a natural resource management plan,” says Weber.

Obviously, the World Agroforestry Centre and other institutions conducting research on natural resource

management should not become involved in developing management plans for the human population. However, Weber believes they should promote dialogue about these issues both within and among governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in resource management and climate change adaptation planning.

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Adapting to climate change in Viet NamHow are small-scale farmers in Viet Nam and the Philippines adapting to extreme weather events, such as floods and typhoons? And to what extent are agroforestry practices helping them to cope? These are among the questions which scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre are putting to farmers in a research project assessing adaptive strategies to climate change in Southeast Asian watersheds. Under another project, conducted in parallel, scientists are providing support to local governments so that they can develop policies for climate change adaptation.

“Most of the farmers we’ve talked to say that even though there were extreme weather events in the past, they tended to be regular,” says World Agroforestry Centre scientist Elisabeth Simelton, who is responsible for overseeing research activities in Viet Nam. “Now, they say that there are more extreme events and they are less predictable.”

In Viet Nam, the projects have focused on two districts: Yen Bai, a mountainous area near the border with China; and Ky Anh, a coastal area which is frequently hit by typhoons. Prior to conducting interviews with

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Extension worker Hoang Thi Thuy Ha interviewing a local farmer, Tich Thi Dang, in Yen Bai province.


farmers, local extension workers received training in the use of participatory tools – these will be published in 2013 – specifically designed to guide discussions about extreme weather events, climate change adaptation, and the role of trees. Together with Simelton, they subsequently held focus group discussions, involving some 90 people, in 18 villages.

They found that farmers are exposed to at least five types of extreme weather events, and these contribute – along with other factors, such as pests and diseases – to crop failures, livestock deaths and the loss of income. “Where extreme weather was not the direct cause of harvest failure, it was often the final nail in the coffin,” says Simelton.

Most of the coping strategies identified by the research were reactive, with farmers taking measures after the events, rather than before. Knowledge about agroforestry and its potential to buffer farmers against climatic shocks, for example by preventing landslides, was scanty.

The information gathered during the focus group discussions will help local governments to develop and refine their land-use plans. Although some district staff

had received training on climate change issues, most had never worked on mainstreaming climate change into land-use plans. To improve their knowledge and skills, Simelton and her colleagues organized a number of workshops, which included feedback from the focus group discussions and an introduction to climate-smart agriculture and the role of agroforestry.

Local government officials showed considerable interest in developing their knowledge. “That’s partly because the districts are legally obliged to develop climate change adaptation plans, and the government has to pay compensation for some losses of crops and livestock,” says Simelton. “But they’ve also heard the testimony of farmers, and that has encouraged them to take a greater interest in climate-change adaptation.”

During the second year of these three-year projects, Simelton and her colleagues will analyse household surveys, existing meteorological data and farmers’ perceptions about changes in the climate. This will help them to assess vulnerability to climate shocks at the household level. The project will also continue to help local governments develop their land-use plans.



Trees, biodiversity and healthThere may be 60–100,000 species of tree in the world. Between them, they offer an astonishing array of products and services. They provide us with timber, fuelwood, fruit, medicines, livestock fodder and much else, and they help to maintain the health of landscapes and ecosystems. The future of humankind depends, to a considerable degree, on our ability to safeguard this rich source of biodiversity.

In October 2012, the World Agroforestry Centre played a prominent role at the 11th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which attracted some 5000 policymakers, scientists and environmental activists to Hyderabad, India. “This was the first time we have attended a biodiversity COP,” says Ramni Jamnadass, head of the research programme on domestication, “and it provided an excellent platform for discussing the roles and importance of trees on farms.”

One of the main side events during the week was Tree Diversity Day, which the World Agroforestry Centre co-hosted with Bioversity International, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). “There is always a strong focus on policy during international COPs like this, but Tree Diversity Day helped to create some space to describe some of the

scientific issues of importance,” says Stepha McMullin, who coordinated the event.

Meine van Noordwijk from the World Agroforestry Centre’s Southeast Asia office opened the morning session by describing the importance of tree diversity in the UN conventions on biological diversity, climate change and desertification. Ramni Jamnadass discussed the role of trees for food, health and nutrition; Eike Luedeling contributed to the discussion about biodiversity and climate change; and Roeland Kindt spoke about vegetation mapping (see page 45) in a session on restoring biodiversity to landscapes.

What’scooking?

An evening event organized by the World Agroforestry Centre – ‘What’s cooking on farms? Trees for health, fuel and nutrition’ – proved so popular that, in the words of the organizer, Stepha McMullin, “there were people hanging out of the doors and windows.” Speakers talked about the contribution of medicinal trees and shrubs to human health, the importance of domesticating wild fruit trees, and health issues related to the use of fuelwood.

According to Tony Cunningham, a senior associate with the World Agroforestry Centre, some 2.4 billion people in developing countries rely on wood, charcoal and animal dung for cooking and heating. In Africa, 90 per cent of the rural population use these solid fuels, and they would be lost without them. You cannot eat raw beans; it would be dangerous to eat raw chicken or pork. In short, much of the food we eat must be cooked.

While many types of fuelwood do the job they’re supposed to do without significantly damaging human health, others pose – or could pose – a serious health risk. Cunningham gave the example of Euclea divinorum, whose local name in Africa – ichitamuzi – means “to split the family.” Any use of the wood is thought to lead to family arguments, so it is never used for cooking. This is just as well, said Cunningham. “Not only does Euclea wood produce a lot of smoke, it contains diterpenes

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Mangoes and maize in Kenya.


that can have serious health consequences when inhaled.”

Some tree species contain aromatic hydrocarbons that are carcinogenic when inhaled; and certain metal ions, released when wood is burned, can lead to eye cataracts. With charcoal and fuelwood becoming more expensive, many poorer families find they can no longer afford to buy non-toxic fuelwood, and end up using whatever they can.

One way of tackling this problem is through the cultivation of trees that produce good quality fuelwood on farms. Cunningham recommended using participatory processes that combine modern science and local knowledge to select tree species with low toxins.

The World Agroforestry Centre already has considerable experience of participatory tree domestication, a practice which it pioneered in West and Central Africa. This was the focus of a presentation by Roger Leakey, the author of Living with the Trees of Life, a book which draws heavily on his long experience as a former research scientist with the Centre.

Diverse agroforestry systems, argued Leakey during the ‘What’s cooking?’ event, could help to stem the loss of biodiversity, and at the same time tackle land degradation and social deprivation. Participatory domestication can play an important role in improving the profitability and productivity of smallholder farming systems.

A new dealDuring the 11th Conference of the Parties in Hyderabad, the World Agroforestry Centre and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) signed an agreement which aims to improve smallholders’ livelihoods. The agreement will do this “through the development and application of knowledge on the use of trees to diversify farming systems.” It will contribute directly to the CBD Strategic Plan for Biodiversity and a series of targets – known as the Aichi Nogoya targets – to protect the world’s biodiversity. So far, 197 countries have signed up to these.

“Agriculture should no longer be seen as the enemy of biodiversity,” said Ravi Prabhu, the Centre’s Deputy Director General for Research, as he signed the new Memorandum of Understanding with CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Ferreria de Souza Dias. During the same event, the CBD Secretariat signed another MoU with the CGIAR Research Programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, in which the World Agroforestry Centre is a major partner.

The vast majority of families in rural Africa rely on wood for cooking.

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Agroforestry and tree conservationThe IUCN Red List of Threatened Species estimates that 1200 trees and shrubs are ‘critically endangered’, 1700 are ‘endangered’ and another 3700 are ‘vulnerable’. The decline in availability of many tree species, and the loss of habitats in which they are found, is of particular concern to rural communities who depend on them for their sustenance and livelihoods.

It is frequently claimed that agroforestry, now practised by an estimated 1.2 billion people, has a significant role to play when it comes to conserving trees and shrubs. But to what extent is this true? A review published in Biodiversity and Conservation in 2013 sifted the evidence.6 “What we tried to do – for the first time, I think – was bring together into a single consideration the different mechanisms of tree conservation, and explore the linkages between them,” says the review’s leading author, Ian Dawson, an Associate Fellow with the World Agroforestry Centre.

Agroforestry systems frequently boast high tree species diversity, and they can therefore make a significant contribution to conservation. However, the review points out that in some situations this is a transitory state of affairs. For example, an agroforest may contain

trees which are remnants of the old forest cover, and these may not be replaced when they die. If we are to successfully conserve trees on farmland we need to understand how to promote connectivity among individual trees in low-density populations.

“We also need to understand how issues such as climate change will affect pollination, and potentially reduce connectivity,” says Dawson. This is particularly important when it comes to conserving trees whose main function is the provision of fruit. If particular fruit tree species are found at such low densities that their pollination becomes problematic, and hence little fruit is produced, farmers will gain little from keeping them.

Conventional wisdom suggests that cultivating trees on farms, or in plantations, helps to take pressure off nearby natural forests. However, the review suggests that there is little hard evidence for this. Indeed, the opposite may be true if cultivation increases markets or eases access to resources. The conditions under which cultivation can promote forest protection are being explored more fully in partnership with Bioversity International and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

6Dawson IK, Guariguata MR, Loo J, Weber JC, Lengkeek A, Bush D, Cornelius JP, Guarino L, Kindt R., Orwa C, Russell J, Jamnadass RH. 2013. What is the relevance of smallholders’ agroforestry systems for conserving tropical tree species and genetic diversity in circa situm, in situ and ex situ settings? A review. Biodiversity and Conservation, Vol 22, No 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10531-012-0429-5

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Dawson and his co-authors believe that the presence of tree seeds in collections held by commercial dealers, research institutes, national tree seed centres and ‘genebanks’ may lead to a false sense of security, promoting the belief that the species are being conserved and will be available for future use. However, these ex situ collections do not necessarily represent the best way of conserving many species, not least because of the high costs of regenerating stored seed, and the fact that many species are represented only once or a few times and may be lost as commercial

demands and research trends change.

Ultimately, conservation relies on a combination of forest, farm and ex situ approaches. According to the authors, conservation will increasingly rely on retaining a diverse range of tree species on smallholders’ farms. However, concerns about the long-term effectiveness of this strategy need to be properly quantified and addressed. More research is also needed on the stability of tree seed collections held by dealers, researchers and seed centres.

Safeguarding the genetic heritageIn 2012, the World Agroforestry Centre’s Genetic Resources Unit received the first tranche of a grant which will lead to major improvements in the conservation and storage of tree germplasm. This will strengthen its ability to provide the genetic material required for research and conservation, and for programmes involving domestication. The five-year grant will be divided between the long- and medium-term storage of seeds at low temperatures and conservation in field genebanks.

Over the years, the Centre has established an ex situ collection of around 3700 accessions of some 300 agroforestry species in medium-term storage at its headquarters in Nairobi. It also has over 1500 accessions in the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK and over 750 accessions in Kunming, in China, in long-term storage. About 770 accessions are in safety duplication at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

“We aim to conserve as many different varieties of the priority agroforestry tree species as possible, to represent their range of genetic diversity,” says genebank manager Alice Muchugi. “The new grant means that we can now expand our ex situ collections and improve the seed research and storage facilities at our headquarters.”

Many agroforestry tree species valued by farmers, including many important fruit trees, are recalcitrant;

that is, they produce seeds which cannot be conserved in cold, dry conditions. Instead, they must be grown from either seeds or clones in field genebanks, where they can be used for multiplication and distribution, as well as for conservation.

The World Agroforestry Centre has some 60 field genebanks in over 20 countries. “Most of these were established for evaluation and multiplication of indigenous tree germplasm in domestication projects with national partners in the respective countries,” explains Ramni Jamnadass. “However, once projects were completed they tended to suffer from neglect, even though they still contain important genetic variation.” The new grant will help the Centre to restore and expand these field genebanks and make better use of them to develop new cultivars for use on farmers’ fields.

Lab assistant Grace Nyambura conducting a seed germination test.



Herbal medicine: good for health, bad for the environment?According to the World Health Organization, 70–80 per cent of people in developing countries use herbal medicines, with thousands of plant species – many of them trees – providing the raw material. However, despite their importance, there has been relatively little research on medicinal trees and shrubs.

“It’s not an easy subject to explore,” says Stepha McMullin, a scientist with the World Agroforestry Centre. “Transactions tend to be informal, the quantities and species traded don’t appear in government statistics, and traders tend to lack formal education.” Furthermore, there has been a paucity of research on the bio-chemical properties of species used in traditional health care.

To gain a better understanding of the trade in Kenya, McMullin conducted surveys in traditional medicine markets in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, the largest cities in the country. Her study, published in 2012, provides one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of the use of medicinal trees and shrubs in Kenya and the impact of the trade on wild populations. 7

McMullin interviewed 91 traders. Between them, they were buying and selling bark, roots, leaves and other material harvested from 53 species of trees and shrubs. Some of these were bought and sold in relatively small quantities. However, others were traded in large amounts. These included Warburgia ugandensis, which is widely used as a cure for malaria, stomach ache and a variety of other ailments.

The vast majority of material sold in the markets came from wild harvesting, either by traders or collectors. Many traders said there had been a significant decline in the availability of many species during the two years prior to the study. The reasons varied, with 30 per cent citing overharvesting, 23 per cent changing environmental conditions and 19 per cent restrictions

on access. Almost two out of three traders said they no longer had enough material to satisfy demand.

McMullin also interviewed over 180 consumers while she was in the markets. Getting to the truth wasn’t always easy. “Many people are reluctant to speak about traditional medicines, especially in urban areas, because there is a stigma attached to their use,” she says. “The perception is that it’s more modern to use conventional medicine.”

According to some of the medical doctors McMullin spoke to, this is a major concern. Although many were sympathetic to the use of traditional medicines, they were worried about the reluctance of patients to admit to their use. “Potentially, combining traditional and conventional treatments could have a lethal effect,” says McMullin. She suggests that consumers would be more willing to acknowledge their use of herbal medicines if traditional medicine was recognized as a legitimate form of health care by the government.

Overharvesting has reduced wild populations of Warburgia ugandensis, which has important

antimalarial properties.

7McMullin S, Phelan J, Jamnadass R, Iiyama M, Franzel S, Nieuwenhuis M.2012. Trade in medicinal tree and shrub products in three urban centres in Kenya. Forests, Trees and Livelihoods 21, 3: 188-206. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14728028.2012.733559

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McMullin’s research confirms what many suspected: the demand for medicinal trees and shrubs is leading to significant levels of overharvesting. The increasing rarity of Warburgia ugandensis, to give just one example, has led to it being classified as ‘vulnerable’ on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species. “Although some of the traders said that they were cultivating medicinal trees, this was happening on a very small scale,” says McMullin.

Future research, she suggests, should focus on further evaluation of the threat to natural populations of priority species; on analysing value chains for sustainable production and marketing; and on assessing the economic and ecological benefits of cultivating medicinal trees and shrubs on smallholder farms.

A domestication primerDuring the last two decades, the World Agroforestry Centre has pioneered the practice of participatory tree domestication, and this has become one of the great agroforestry success stories. Scientists and farmers have worked together to bring wild trees out of the forests and onto farmland and develop superior, high-yielding varieties of indigenous trees like African plum, Bush mango and kola nut. This has helped to increase the incomes of tens of thousands of small-scale farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

2012 saw the publication of Agroforestry Tree Domestication: A Primer. “It’s a sort of bible,” says Ramni Jamnadass, one of the co-authors. “It pulls together all the elements of domestication in ways which will be useful to universities, research institutes and extension agencies.”

The primer consists of five modules on key topics related to tree domestication. These include basic principles; choosing the right tree; evaluating variation

within species; obtaining high-quality germplasm; and delivering the results to farmers. Written in a lively, non-technical language, and illustrated with case studies and photographs, the primer will be updated at regular intervals, providing readers with the latest information on the subject.

Medicinal plant traders in Kisumu.

Grafting cocoa in Papua, Indonesia

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The living earth


Linking life above ground with life belowBefore he joined the World Agroforestry Centre in 2010, Edmundo Barrios conducted extensive research on the Quesungual slash-and-mulch agroforestry system in Honduras. This involves farmers pruning trees interspersed among annual crops and spreading the green matter to decompose on the soil. Barrios found significantly higher concentrations of biological activity, more carbon and nutrients and greater availability of water in the soil under the influence of trees than in the soil in nearby fields without trees.

This and other studies confirm that trees can play a major role in maintaining and enhancing fertility by acting as a refuge for soil organisms, improving soil structure and increasing the supply and availability of nutrients. But which particular tree species, and what mixtures of species, do the most to promote biological activity in the soil? It is questions such as these that Barrios and his colleagues now seek to answer.

“We are currently assessing the impact of trees on soil biodiversity at the landscape level, building on the soil and vegetation characterization work which has been done by the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS),” says Barrios. This four-year project, which comes to an end in 2013, conducted a systematic evaluation of soil health at 61 sentinel sites in 21 countries. At random plots within each site, scientists took soil samples and recorded data on key plant and soil parameters, including erosion risk, tree cover and land use.

Working at sentinel sites in four countries – Malawi, Kenya, Uganda and Mali – Barrios and his colleagues have been sampling life below ground, thus adding another layer of information to the AfSIS data. Soil macro-organisms which are visible to the naked eye, such as earthworms and centipedes, are hand-sorted and taxonomically classified; micro-organisms are investigated using novel DNA fingerprinting techniques. This is providing scientists with a better understanding of the interactions between trees and soil biodiversity,

and the impact of trees on below-ground biological activity that is beneficial to agriculture.

Diggingdeeper

But the research doesn’t end there. To evaluate the precise impact which particular tree species have on soil organisms, Barrios is enlisting the help of local farmers. At the Kiberashi sentinel site in Tanzania, scientists organized a workshop with seven local communities (See box: Blending local and scientific knowledge). The farmers were able to share their knowledge and experience with scientists on specific trees which were having an influence on biological activity below the soil – either for better or for worse.

“We then selected a number of plots for intensive sampling, and analysed soil biodiversity at various distances around and beyond these trees,” says Barrios. At the time of going to press, the data was still being analysed, but Barrios is convinced that the information gathered here, and at other sites, will provide valuable guidance to farmers, national research and extension services, agricultural ministries, policymakers and others interested in soil health. Among other things, soil biodiversity information will act as an early warning system, providing evidence of degradation before it is visually obvious.

The research at the sentinel sites will also be useful for organizations and individuals who wish to manage landscapes for their ecosystem services. The more we know about the links between vegetation and the biological activity underpinning key soil functions, the easier it will be to evaluate the role specific landscapes play in sequestering carbon, storing clean water and controlling pests and diseases. Barrios stresses that this is work in progress. However, there’s no doubt that we are gaining a much better understanding about the relationships between life above and below ground.


Blending local and scientific knowledgeIn May 2012, a five-day workshop organized by the World Agroforestry Centre, the Brazilian Agricultural

Research Corporation (Embrapa) and Mozambique’s National Institute of Agronomic Research (IIAM) explored the benefits of linking local knowledge with scientific expertise when assessing soil health. Researchers, extension workers and some 50 farmers from eight communities in Rapale District used a methodological guide8 developed through a collaboration involving the World Agroforestry Centre, Embrapa and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

“One of the aims of the guide is to provide tools

that facilitate communication between scientists and farmers, so they can develop a shared view about which soil fertility constraints should be tackled first, and what agroecology principles and integrated soil fertility management options should be used to address such constraints,” says Edmundo Barrios.

The Mozambique workshop involved training on the systematic identification, classification and prioritization of local knowledge with farmers, and the use of tools to integrate local knowledge with science. “Agroforestry is usually high on the list of options because it can simultaneously address several constraints, given its multifunctional character,” says Barrios.

The workshop was part of a new South-South initiative, ‘Fostering Knowledge Sharing for Integrated Natural Resource Management in Agricultural Landscapes of Southern Africa’. This is funded by the Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace and led by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) and Embrapa. “I think it was a huge success,” says Barrios, “and it was a good example of effective collaboration between Latin America and Africa.”

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8Barrios E et al. 2012. InPaC-S: Participatory Knowledge Integration on Indicators of Soil Quality – Methodological Guide. ICRAF, Embrapa, CIAT.

The living earth


In search of stable crop yields

As rural populations have increased in sub-Saharan Africa, the average size of land holdings has shrunk and soils have become exhausted through continuous cropping, with most small-scale farmers unable to afford mineral fertilizers. As a result, maize yields have stagnated at a meagre 1 tonne per hectare. This is one of the reasons why Africa suffers from such high levels of malnutrition.

But it needn’t be like this. Research by the World Agroforestry Centre has shown that farmers can increase their yields, and improve soil fertility, by integrating leguminous trees in their cropping systems. Evidence suggests that the greatest response to the use of ‘fertilizer trees’ is on nutrient-poor soils.

However, until recently little work had been done on the stability of these yields. Led by agro-ecologist Gudeta Sileshi, senior scientists from the Centre compared the stability of maize yields in three long-term trials in Malawi and Zambia under three different regimes: the maize-gliricidia systems promoted by the World Agroforestry Centre; monoculture maize grown with mineral fertilizers – the option favoured by many better off farmers; and maize grown without either fertilizer trees or mineral fertilizers, the practice of most poor farming families.9

As expected, the intercropping of maize with gliricidia significantly increased maize yields when compared

with maize grown without any external inputs. At the Makoka research site in Malawi, for example, the green leaves and twigs of gliricidia added up to 302 kg of nitrogen per hectare per year. This is highly significant, bearing in mind that the average amount of nitrogen fertilizer used by African farmers is a meagre 10 kg per hectare.

The experimental plots of maize grown with mineral fertilizers also produced high yields. However, in contrast to the maize-gliricidia systems, yields were unstable in all three trials; in other words, they did not remain constant year after year. “This highlights the fact that high yield is not necessarily an indicator of sustained productivity,” says Sileshi. “The application of mineral fertilizers without the addition of organic matter may fail to yield long-term benefits for farmers.” Leguminous plants, in contrast, help to increase soil carbon, nourish living organisms in the soil and help to retain soil moisture.

This is the first study to analyse long-term trends in crop yield stability in cereal-legume associations in southern Africa. “The research has some significant long-term implications for crop production and food security on the continent,” says Sileshi. To get the best deal, farmers on poor soils should intercrop their maize with leguminous trees and use small doses of mineral fertilizer.

Maize intercropped with gliricidia

9Sileshi GW, Debusho LK, Akinnifesi FK. 2012. Can integration of legume trees increase yield stability in rain-fed maize cropping systems in southern Africa? Agronomy Journal 104:1392-1398.

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Water harvesting - what works and what doesn’tDuring the 1970s and 1980s, frequent droughts in sub-Saharan Africa stimulated an interest in small-scale water harvesting technologies. A great array of different initiatives were undertaken, frequently driven by non-governmental organizations and supported by drought-relief funds. However, there was relatively little collaboration, or sharing of knowledge, among the different projects.

Now, some 25 years on, water harvesting experts have revisited the subject. Their findings have been published in Water Harvesting in Sub-Saharan Africa, which pulls together research conducted under a four-year project funded by the EU.10 “We looked at a total of 12 different water harvesting technologies that had been implemented 20 or more years ago to see which ones had worked best, and why,” explains Maimbo Malesu of the World Agroforestry Centre.

Case studies included a wide array of different technologies, from the traditional zaϊ practice in Burkina Faso and Niger, which involves digging 20 cm deep pits to capture field run-off, to relatively large-scale farm ponds covering up to 1000 m² in Ethiopia and Kenya. In each case, scientists used a methodology developed by the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) to assess the impact on crop productivity, livelihoods and the environment.

“Certain technologies have stood the test of time, especially those which are knowledge-based, like the zaϊ pits in Niger,” says Malesu. “Because they require little or no capital, these practices have often spread over large areas.” In contrast, capital intensive techniques involving large earth-moving equipment – Malesu cites the case of tractor-built contour ridges in Baringo, Kenya – have failed to move beyond the areas where they were introduced.

The book’s editors, John Gowing and William Critchley, suggest that water harvesting techniques have been successfully introduced when based on local traditions, and in places where governments have taken water harvesting seriously. The latter was the case for most countries studied, apart from Zimbabwe. Site visits which have enabled organizations and individuals to get first-hand experience of successful projects in other countries have also had a significant impact.

“The study shows that successful water harvesting projects can have a major impact on small-scale farming communities,” says Malesu. They lead to increases in crop productivity and higher incomes, which farming families can spend on education, health care and other activities that improve their well-being.

Rain water harvested in a pond in Machakos county, Kenya

10Critchley W, Gowing J (eds) 2012. Water Harvesting in Sub-Saharan Africa. Earthscan - Routledge

The living earth


Strengthening landcare in AfricaIn the late 1980s, a group of farmers in Victoria, Australia, realized that the soil erosion on their properties had become so severe that they needed to band together and tackle the problem collectively. This was the beginning of the Landcare movement, which has since spread to over 15 countries.

The World Agroforestry Centre acts as a Secretariat for Landcare International, which is chaired by the Centre’s former director general, Dennis Garrity. The Centre also plays a key role in providing coordination for the Africa Landcare Network. “The precise nature of Landcare projects varies from one country to another,” explains Mieke Bourne, an Australian environmental scientist who facilitates the Landcare Secretariat in Nairobi. “But the principle is always the same: Landcare provides a framework to develop networks and strengthen community social action.”

Landcare adds value to existing initiatives and programmes, many of which are run by local governments or NGOs. It works at the landscape level, frequently over large areas, and encourages community members, most of whom are farmers, to adopt appropriate technologies, for example to reduce erosion on steep slopes, harvest water sustainably or improve soil fertility. Landcare encourages communities to establish networks not only with one another, but with local and national policymakers.

In March 2012, Africa Landcare Network held a master class in Mbale, Uganda. The site was selected to showcase the work of the Kapchorwa District Landcare Chapter, a key partner of the World Agroforestry Centre on the flanks of Mt Elgon. Led by experts from Australia and South Africa, the class brought together 25 current and potential Landcare practitioners from Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Malawi. As well as discussions and workshops, there were field visits to communities involved in activities with Kapchorwa Landcare.

Some of the participants also attended a Landcare conference held in Mafeking, South Africa, in November 2012, and here they provided testimony about the

influence of the Ugandan master class. “Many said they now felt they were part of a proper network, and that the master class had motivated them to expand activities on the ground,” says Bourne.

The conference in Mafeking provided an opportunity for delegates to share ideas and approaches. “It also gave me the understanding that Landcare could be carried out where we used to think it could not be applied, such as the dry pastoral lands in the northern parts of Uganda,” said Awadh Chemangi of the Kapchorwa District Landcare Chapter. Another delegate, Joseph Mutua from Kenya, highlighted the importance of seeing Landcare in action in other countries. “The biggest steps in establishing Landcare in Kenya have happened after seeing other places and after sharing experiences,” he said.

Landcare sites and principles have been incorporated into many research projects in East Africa as a way of strengthening rural grassroots institutions and as an extension approach for Evergreen Agriculture.

Master class field trip to see the work of the Kapchorwa District Landcare Chapter.

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The Far East’s fungal futures

“If you go to any small village in Yunnan Province during the monsoons, you’ll find women out in the countryside, harvesting mushrooms two or three days a week,” says Peter Mortimer, a soil biologist based at the World Agroforestry Centre’s office in Kunming, China.

Indeed, mushrooms are big business. In 2010, to give just one example, Yunnan Province exported over 10,000 tonnes of Boletus edulis – known as cep or porcini in Europe – worth US$71.83 million. The volume was 15 per cent higher than the previous year, and the increase in demand led to significant overharvesting of natural stocks in some areas. A similar story can be told for many other mushroom species. The implications are serious: a decline in the diversity and availability of mushrooms could have a negative impact on the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people.

Despite the economic importance of mushrooms – some 700 species are used as food or medicine in Yunnan Province – surprisingly little is known about their status or the management practices required to ensure their survival. “That’s why we have launched a project to gain a better understanding of the links

between different species of mushrooms, land use types and vegetation cover,” says Xu Jianchu, the World Agroforestry Centre’s Coordinator for its China and East Asia node. This long-term project, launched in 2012, is exploring the influence of trees on fungi from Tibet to Thailand, along a transect of different ecosystems.

Mortimer and Jianchu are co-authors of a paper published in Fungal Diversity which examines the most sought-after edible mushrooms in the Greater Mekong region in terms of their value, ecology and conservation. 11 The study – this will be the first of many – provides baseline data for nine species, many of which are suffering from overharvesting and habitat loss. Mortimer believes that a better understanding of the relationships between agroforestry systems and mushrooms could help to stem some of the more destructive collecting practices. For example, in Northern Thailand, villagers frequently burn areas of forest and scrub to encourage the growth of certain species of mushroom. “If we can come up with some alternative options, and identify ways of promoting and conserving these species, then it could help to reduce destructive practices such as burning,” suggests Mortimer.

11Mortimer Peter et al. 2012. Prized edible Asian mushrooms: ecology, conservation and sustainability, Fungal Diversity, 56(1): 31

A fruiting body of Termitomyces eurhizus

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Market matters


Who’s importing forest products from Africa to China?China’s demand for natural resources – and especially oil, minerals and timber – is having a significant impact on commodity prices and trade flows. Between 1999 and 2009, the value of trade between Africa and China increased by a factor of 15, from US$4.8 billion to US$72 billion. During the same period, China doubled its imports of African forest products.

According to various environmental groups and academics, China’s demand for resources and the behaviour of its companies in Africa has had a negative impact on the environment and local communities, encouraged illegal logging and corruption, and undermined good forest governance. However, some of these concerns are better substantiated than others, say scientists who have been involved in a three-year project, ‘China’s trade and investment in Africa’, managed by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

“Western rhetoric tends to support the idea that Chinese influence is bad, whereas that of companies from European nations is not,” says CIFOR scientist Paolo Cerutti. He believes that many Western companies with positions of privilege in the African extractive sector feel threatened by China’s economic ascendancy, and exaggerate the negative impact of Chinese companies in Africa.

Nevertheless, when it comes to global market trends, it is true that timber exports to the EU and US are subject to regulations designed to curb illegal trade and improve forest management, whereas no such regulations exist for the timber exported to China. If the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan leads to decreased levels of illegal timber trade and better forest management, then there is a good argument in favour of encouraging China, and Chinese companies abroad, to adopt similar standards.

But who exactly are they, and what are their attitudes towards regulation? A study by scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre and Forest Trends, conducted under the auspices of the ‘China in Africa’ project, provides some of the answers.12

12 Huang W, Wilkes A, Sun X, Terheggen A. 2012. Who is importing forest products from Africa to China? An analysis of implications for initiatives to enhance legality and sustainability. Environment Development and Sustainability, 11/2012.

Logging activities in Cameroon have had a major impact on the country’s primary forests. ©

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Whomattersmost?

“Our research found that there has been a rapid increase in the number of Chinese companies which are active in the Africa timber trade, but a relatively small number of companies dominate the trade,” explains Anne Terheggen, a development economist who recently joined the World Agroforestry Centre, having spent several years studying Chinese investment in the forestry sector in Gabon.

In 1994, just 16 Chinese companies imported timber from Africa. This figure had risen to 323 by 2010. However, in any one year, the top five enterprises accounted for over 40 per cent of the timber traded by volume, and 30 enterprises accounted for over 80 per cent. The vast majority are clustered around a small number of locations in four provinces near China’s eastern seaboard, where there are good transport links and a poor supply of local timber.

The trend towards increased regulation in developed countries has prompted some Chinese firms to join

internationally recognized certification schemes, such as those run by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). However, an increasing proportion of China’s timber products are being sold locally and the majority of processing companies are unlikely to be influenced by consumer demands abroad. Influencing these companies requires a different approach – one of gentle persuasion.

This will not be easy, admits Terheggen. “Engaging with the Chinese timber industry is difficult, not least because there are so many levels to engage with,” she says. “There is the State Forestry Administration, the district-level forestry administrations, and then the industry itself.” However, we now have a much better idea about which companies are involved in the timber trade with Africa and their relative importance. Initiatives which seek to engage Chinese importers in sustainable forest management can now target Chinese companies which have the most influence.

Market matters


Ripe for reform?In sub-Saharan Africa, markets for agricultural produce tend to be disorganized and inefficient, with smallholder farmers – and especially women – being the most marginalized group. More often than not, women farmers have little or no control over productive resources, such as land and capital. Lacking collateral, they find it difficult to get credit. They also have less access than men to training and extension services.

“There is an urgent need to integrate women better into agricultural value chains,” says Judith Oduol, a market specialist at the World Agroforestry Centre, “but to do that we need to identify the factors which are limiting their participation.”

This is precisely what Oduol and her colleagues have done in Kenya, focusing on the production and marketing of avocados. Based on the findings of an earlier project funded by the Ford Foundation, they selected two districts where the majority of smallholders grow avocados. In Kandara, to the north of Nairobi, farmers are strongly focused on the export market. In contrast, most of the avocados produced in Marani district, in the hill country to the east of Lake Victoria, are sold locally.

In Kandara, women are mostly involved in production. The men tend to control capital for buying inputs and dominate training exercises. It is only in female-headed households that women assume total responsibility for the avocado trees on their farms. Avocado production in Marani is less profitable – most farms grow low-yielding local varieties, rather than the Hass and Fuerte varieties favoured for the export market – and low returns mean that men take relatively little interest in the business. Here, women do most of the production, sorting and selling of avocados.

The research suggests that avocado has the potential to be a much higher value commercial crop in Kenya than it is at present. But if that’s to happen, the markets need to be better structured. Oduol and her colleagues have also found that there are opportunities to enhance the role women play in avocado value chains. “We can’t expect to see women participate at every stage, particularly in production for the export market, but we have identified areas where they could be more involved,” she says.

At present, export companies focus their training programmes for sorting and grading on male farmers. This is frequently wasted, as the men will often get their women to do the sorting, even though they are the ones who have been trained. “It would be much better if the companies provided training directly to women,” says Oduol. This would help to improve the quality of sorting and grading, and provide women with an opportunity to increase their income.

The research also suggests that women would fare better if they had access to credit and therefore the means to buy fertilizers and other inputs. However, this is not a simple matter. In male-headed households, men tend to control the flows of capital and credit. Improving the availability of credit would work best for female-headed households, where women have control over the land, and therefore a source of collateral.

“Our research suggests that targeting women – for example, with training programmes and access to credit – could significantly strengthen their participation in agricultural value chains, and increase household incomes and welfare,” concludes Oduol.


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Value chain development aims to build mutually beneficial links between smallholder farmers and downstream businesses, including processors, importers, retailers and every other link between field and fork. They tend to be market-led, with the private sector playing a central role in their development and success. The development of value chains with smallholder farmers has been championed as a way of stimulating economic growth and tackling rural poverty.

There are numerous guides and tools that provide advice on how to analyse value chains, with a view to determining where and how to intervene to make them more efficient and inclusive of smallholder farmers. However, there is considerable confusion about the strengths and limitations of the guides for different objectives and contexts.

To evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre, led by Jason Donovan, conducted a study titled ‘Review of Guides for Value Chain Development’. It was commissioned by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Corporation (CTA) and the findings were presented at an international conference – ‘Making

the Connection: Value Chains for Transforming Smallholder Agriculture’ – in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in November 2012. The study was also supported by the CGIAR’s research project on Policies, Institutions and Markets.

“We reviewed 11 guides, and found that their objectives, definitions and user-friendliness varied greatly,” says Donovan. Overall, he and his colleagues found that the guides provided an innovative approach for understanding markets and engaging with the private sector. However, many guides lacked a strong conceptual framework, and provided limited insights into how different types of interventions for developing value chains can contribute to development goals.

The report suggests that the guides need to take much better account of critical aspects of the context that influence the design of strategies for value chain development. It also suggests that future guidelines need to pay greater attention to learning and assessment, gender issues, intra-household decision-making, and what to do if smallholders lack the assets they need to invest in value chain development.

Analysing guides for value chain development

Market matters


Getting the agroforestry message across in Cameroon

13Degrande A, Franzel S, Siohdjie Yeptiep Y, Asaah E, Tsobeng A, Tchoundjeu Z. 2012. Effectiveness of grassroots organizations in the dissemination of agroforestry innovations. In: Kaonga M (ed) Agroforestry for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services - Science and Practice. Rijeka, Croatia: InTech. Chapter 8, p 141-164. Available online: http://www.intechopen.com/books/agroforestry-for-biodiversity-and-ecosystem-services-science-and-practice/effectiveness-of-grassroots-organisations-in-the-dissemination-of-agroforestry-innovations-

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Around three-quarters of the poorest people in developing countries live in rural areas. Strengthening the agricultural sector is one of the best ways of improving their incomes and access to nutritious food. Indeed, investments in agriculture are twice as likely to reduce rural poverty as investments in other sectors, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Following many years of underinvestment, governments and donor agencies have begun to increase the funding available for ‘extension’; in other words, for the processes and services which provide farmers with

the information and skills they need to increase their productivity. However, many dissemination methods have proved relatively ineffectual, resulting in low adoption of agricultural innovations. This is particularly true for agroforestry, which tends to be complex and knowledge intensive, and requires a host of skills, such as nursery management and grafting.

To explore the various factors which determine the success or failure of different dissemination practices, scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre, led by Ann Degrande, looked at the effectiveness of eight relay organizations in Cameroon.13 These organizations

A training session at MIFACIG rural resource centre in Cameroon.


Rural resource centres in Cameroon have helped to introduce farmers to a range of agroforestry practices.

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link research institutes, such as the Centre, with local farming communities, and they provide a forum for the development of new agroforestry technologies, the best known being domestication of wild fruit trees. The relay organizations also establish demonstration plots and nurseries and run training sessions for local farmers.

Degrande and her colleagues hypothesized that their influence depends on both internal and external factors. The former include human and financial resources and the skills of their staff; the latter include access to markets, good roads and farmers’ experience in collective action.

The study found that the relay organizations were successfully diffusing a range of agroforestry innovations to farmers’ groups. This is an important finding, as

they have played a central role in much of the World Agroforestry Centre’s participatory research and development in Cameroon. Though the differences in performance were not statistically significant, the results suggested that relay organizations which had adequate internal resources and relatively good access to markets and opportunities for agroforestry tended to perform best.

“These findings provide us with some indication about the support that might be required to further strengthen relay organizations and increase their extension capacity,” says Degrande. “However, we will need more in-depth studies to gain a better understanding of precisely what factors affect the performance of organizations involved in agricultural innovations.”

Market matters


Why markets matter in the Peruvian AmazonThe World Agroforestry Centre has a long history of working on the development of indigenous fruit trees in the Peruvian Amazon. The rationale is simple enough: over 80 per cent of deforestation is caused by smallholders, most being migrants from the Andes, who practise slash-and-burn farming. Improved production and marketing of indigenous fruit trees could provide them with an alternative source of income, without destroying the forests. Greater availability of fruit trees could also help to promote healthier diets among Peru’s urban consumers.

In the mid-1990s, the National Institute of Agricultural Innovation (INIA) invited scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre to collaborate on projects to develop fruit crops in Loreto region. This involved surveys of farmers’ interests and consumer preferences, as well as work on domesticating a small number of indigenous trees.

In 2012, the Centre launched a research programme to investigate the marketing of indigenous fruits. “This is a new area of research for us in Latin America,” says value chain expert Jason Donovan. The focus is on camu-camu (Myrciaria dubia), a shrub which flourishes on the flooded lands beside the Amazon. Although camu-camu has been subject to over 30 years of research and some

15 years of promotion, its fortunes have been mixed. “We hope our research will help to establish what needs to be done to improve the marketing of camu-camu,” says Donovan. The initiative is supported by the CGIAR’s research programme on Policies, Institutions and Markets.

Apoorrelative?

In an ideal world, camu-camu would become a worldwide success like the Brazilian fruit açaí (Euterpe oleracea), whose juice is promoted as a source of energy. Açaí went from being an indigenous staple in the lower reaches of the Amazon in the 1970s to a fashion food in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro by the 1990s. Nowadays, you can find açaí juice in McDonald’s in Brazil and in supermarkets in Europe.

“If you’d put these two species at the starting line at the same time, who’d have thought that the one that tastes like cabbage, açaí, would be the winner?” asks Jonathan Cornelius, regional coordinator for Latin America. A syrup is sometimes used to disguise the strange taste of açaí, whereas camu-camu juice, with its distinctive sweet-and-sour, raspberry-ish flavour, requires sweetening but no disguise. Furthermore, the fruits contain up to 30 times more vitamin C than oranges.

According to Mario Pinedo of the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP), several factors have led to camu-camu’s up-and-down history. “I think there has been too much emphasis on developing export markets for camu-camu, and not enough effort on developing local markets here in Iquitos, where many of the farmers and harvesters are, and domestic markets elsewhere in Peru,” he says.

During the 1990s, there was a healthy export market to Japan, stimulated by links between Peru and Japan fostered by the then president, Alberto Fujimori, and his family. Although exports almost ceased after Fujimori’s fall from power, they rose swiftly between 2002 and 2008. Subsequently, there was another crash. Pinedo

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Researchers are exploring how to create more stable and profitable markets for camu-camu


attributes this to the world economic crisis – camu-camu is a luxury product in Japan – poor quality control and promises of supply which could not be met.

In contrast, there have been times when supply far exceeded demand, and the price received by farmers fell dramatically. “The producers in this region are now very frustrated, because many of them have planted a shrub which is not providing them with the profits they expected,” says Pinedo. “One of the problems is that most of the research has focused on agronomic issues and processing, and we’ve neglected the marketing

side.”

Understandingthemarketforcamu-camu

Jason Donovan and his colleague Bruno Paino are drawing heavily on Pinedo’s long experience of camu-camu – he first took an interest in the fruit when he went fishing with his father as a 10-year-old in one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon – to design sampling frames and questionnaires for producers in Loreto and Ucayali regions. During 2013, they will also interview processors, government agencies, international donors and non-governmental organizations that have expressed interest in promoting the fruit.

There are several reasons, it seems, which help to explain açaí’s success. Unlike camu-camu, the fruit has long been used by indigenous people, and açaí became a major success when it was featured in a Brazilian television soap opera. The chances of camu-camu being promoted on this scale may be slight, but Donovan believes that the Centre’s research programme will help to establish what needs to be done to create a more stable market for the fruit. This would go a long way towards ensuring the success of an agroforestry practice which could benefit tens of thousands of farmers in the Peruvian Amazon.

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Mario Pinedo of the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP), seen here in Belén market, Iquitos, has spent

decades researching and promoting indigenous fruits.

How we work


A revolution in data managementThe new GeoScience Lab, established in early 2012, will transform the way scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre store and analyse data. “Over the years, our research programmes have gathered a large amount of spatial data, on a range of different subjects, but there’s been no clear strategy for handling the data and analysing it,” says the lab’s leader, Tor-Gunnar Vågen. The lab will develop a comprehensive modelling and visualization framework for monitoring and mapping environmental conditions across Africa, and eventually beyond.

It is, as Vågen points out, an idea whose time has come. During recent years, there have been considerable advances in online mapping applications and tools, such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind, and the development of new Web map server technologies. These are helping to revolutionize the way spatial data can be maintained and analysed.

The motivation for developing the GeoScience Lab came from a number of different projects, including the Land Health Surveillance Framework. This was used in the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) project, which analysed soil health at 61 sentinel sites in 21 African countries. The project gathered data on everything from mineral deficiencies to salinity, carbon content to erosion, and made a first-cut map of soil health for the whole continent.

“We have also uploaded a vast range of data from 40 to 50 other sites in Africa where different projects, managed by other organizations, have been working,” says Vågen. Thomas Gumbricht, a former World Agroforestry Centre scientist, developed a prototype of the software for the web geoportal, which was then developed into a full web mapping application by Muhammad Nabi Ahmad and Erick Opiyo. The GeoScience Lab also processes, uploads and maintains significant amounts of publicly available data on climate, topography and much else.

By early 2013, the GeoScience Lab was in a position to go online. Using forms provided by the lab, scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre can now upload and share their spatial data in one place. This is accompanied by descriptions of the datasets and how they were gathered, and details of those involved. “It’s very important to have ownership, because scientists often worry about plagiarism,” says Vågen.

Central storage of spatial data means that scientists will gain a better understanding of the data available within the institute. It will also help them to plan their research activities. “Let’s say you’re going to do some work around Mt Elgon,” says Vågen, clicking onto the map of the mountainous area near the Uganda/Kenya border. “Once you are here, it’s very easy to get all the data we’ve uploaded and made available to your user group – elevation, slope, soil carbon content, vegetation cover, past and present rainfall, erosion maps…”

An estimate of pH for the African continent at500m resolution, for 2011.


Anybody can log onto the GeoScience Lab website – http://geoportal.worldagroforestry.org – but the downloading of images and data is currently restricted to scientists at the Centre. This is partly for reasons of data security, but also because too many users could cause the servers to crash, given the limited capacity at present. As far as security is concerned, there is a system in place which ensures that scientists who upload their data can determine the degree to which they are shared.

The GeoScience Lab’s long-term goal is to become the leading remote sensing and spatial data management centre in Africa. As such, it could play an important role in helping scientists, government departments, NGOs and others harvest the information they need to improve the management of the continent’s natural resources.

If you’re working on a project in East Africa – for example, as an extension agency or NGO – and wondering what trees to plant, and where to get their seeds, your first port of call should be the online maps developed by the Vegetation and Climate Change in East Africa (VECEA) project. These maps, which use an overlay of Google Earth, predict which species will grow well, and where they will grow, under different climatic conditions.

In 2012, Roeland Kindt, a scientist who helped to develop VECEA, added some extra layers of sophistication. Users can now use a selection tool which provides Excel tables listing all the tree species that occur naturally within each vegetation type. Click on the vegetation type, call up the tables, and you will see a list of species and a series of hyperlinks so that you can dig deeper. For example, the PROTA (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa) website provides detailed botanical descriptions of each species, and a scoring system which assesses their importance in terms of providing products and services, such as

fruit, medicines and fuelwood. It also assesses their importance for conservation.

“I see VECEA mainly as a diversification tool,” explains Kindt. To illustrate his point, he describes how it might be used by the Trees for Food Security project, which is encouraging farmers in Ethiopia to use agroforestry as a way of improving the environment and their livelihoods. When Kindt visited the country, he noticed that much of the Highlands is dominated by exotics like eucalyptus. There is tremendous scope for using a range of native species as well. But which ones? “By using the VECEA maps,” says Kindt, “we’ll be able to work with farmers to identify which species they could use to establish agroforestry on their farms.”

The VECEA project was implemented by a team that included botanists from seven African countries and researchers from Forest & Landscape Denmark. Funding was provided by The Rockefeller Foundation. The map and species selection tools are available on www.vegetationmap4africa.org

Tree mapping in East Africa

How we work


Strengthening partnerships in Central AmericaIn 2011, the World Agroforestry Centre established a new office at the headquarters of the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. “We have been working together for around 30 years, but this is the first time we have captured a member of staff from ICRAF,” says John Beer, director of research at CATIE. Jenny Ordoñez, an Ecuadorian agro-ecologist, is now helping to build a joint research programme.

The first agreement between the two organizations was signed in 1983. In the 1990s, CATIE and the World Agroforestry Centre established and co-produced the magazine Agroforesteria en las Américas. They subsequently collaborated on several research programmes, the most recent being the Coffee Agroforestry Network (CAFNET). Their working relationship is now set to become closer still.

“Four years ago, donors challenged members of the CG system [the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research] to prove that the research they were doing was having an impact,” says Beer. He believes this made CATIE highly attractive to organizations like the World Agroforestry Centre. “We have always placed a strong emphasis on carrying out research for development, research which has a real impact on the lives of the rural poor.”

Jonathan Cornelius, the Centre’s Regional Coordinator for Latin America, sees many advantages of working closely with CATIE. A pioneer in agroforestry research, CATIE has considerable experience and influence throughout Latin America. At any one time, there are some 60 master’s and doctoral students in CATIE’s programmes, looking for research opportunities, and they constitute a skilled and motivated resource for visiting scientists.

In 2012, CATIE played a leading role in championing the Nicaragua/Honduras sentinel landscape, one of the sites chosen as a focus for research by the CGIAR Research

Programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (see pages 48). “CATIE has a long history of working in the area, and that’s very helpful from our point of view,” says Cornelius. “There is no way that Jenny Ordoñez could have established our climate-change adaptation project in Central America without CATIE’s support.”

The Nicaragua/Honduras sentinel landscape, which covers some 67,000 square km, encompasses a range of habitats, from primary forest to intensely cultivated farmland and agroforestry systems for producing coffee, cocoa and cattle. In terms of livelihoods, these sectors are particularly important. The main production area in Nicaragua is a relatively small area which CATIE has identified as one of its ‘key territories.’ This lies within the sentinel landscape.

According to Eduardo Somarriba, leader of CATIE’s agroforestry programme and an expert on the management of coffee and cocoa systems, the sentinel landscape approach will prove highly beneficial for CATIE and other organizations working in the area. These include the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Bioversity International and CIRAD, as well as many regional and local organizations. “The sentinel landscape will attract scientists and encourage the sharing of data and information,” says Somarriba.

Deforestation rates in Nicaragua are among the highest in Latin America, with the agricultural frontier already encroaching into the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. This is a major concern for the government, according to Amilcar Aguilar Carrillo, CATIE’s coordinator in its key territory in Nicaragua. However, he believes that research within the sentinel landscape could help to reduce the pace of deforestation. “At the same time,” he says, “research could improve local livelihoods and ensure the sustainable production of crops like coffee and cocoa.”


Honduras and Nicaragua are among the countries most threatened by climate change. Rising temperatures, annual declines in rainfall and an increase in hurricanes have serious implications for farmers, whose ability to adapt to change will do much to determine whether they survive and prosper, or go out of business.

A three-year research programme, managed by Jenny Ordoñez, is exploring how tree diversity could help farmers adapt to climate change at three sites in Nicaragua and one in Costa Rica. Between them, they represent a range of agricultural intensities. At one extreme is Siuna, an area in Nicaragua where farmers are rapidly reducing forest cover to make way for cattle ranching; at the other is Hojancha in Costa Rica, where reforestation projects have helped to reverse forest loss caused by the expansion of livestock farming.

“We’re looking at how trees can help farmers adapt to change from two different points of view,” explains Ordoñez. “We’re exploring how they use trees to increase income, improve their diets and provide a safety net in times of difficulty. We’re also looking at the ecological services which trees provide.” For example, the use of shade trees can help to reduce heat stress in coffee and cocoa gardens and protect crops from extreme weather events, such as storms.

The first phase of the programme, launched in July 2012, involved a baseline survey of 560 households. This used questionnaires developed by the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program, which is funding the research. Ordoñez also benefited from the expertise of scientists working for CATIE and CIRAD, who helped to refine the questionnaire for local use, as well as the direct involvement of CATIE staff in the selection of study areas.

So have climatic factors influenced farming practices? It’s too early to say, according to Ordoñez. There is a lack of hard meteorological data – the project is setting up small meteorological stations to monitor the climate at the three sites in Nicaragua – and she and her colleagues have avoided asking farmers loaded questions about climate change. However, many believe that there have been significant changes. “The rainy season seems shorter than it used to be,” says Felix Mairena López, a cocoa and cattle farmer in the Waslala study area.

Ordoñez is particularly interested in gaining a better understanding, with the help of farmers, of the importance of tree ‘functional diversity’; for example, how trees can provide the services farmers need to cope with change, whether it is related to the climate, market fluctuations or other factors.

Adapting to climate change in Central America

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How we work


Changing the way we workOver the decades, scientists working for institutions which come under the umbrella of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have made a significant contribution to improving the livelihoods and productivity of many millions of people in the developing world. Browse through the websites or annual reports of the World Agroforestry Centre and its sister institutions, and you will get an idea of the depth and scale of their influence.

However, there is still room for improvement, especially when it comes to gathering and sharing data and working in partnership. That is why the CGIAR Research Programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry – CRP 6 – has designed a new approach to research. This will focus on a select number of ‘sentinel landscapes’.

CRP 6 is a key programme for the World Agroforestry Centre, accounting for some 60 per cent of its budget. The partnership is led by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and also involves Bioversity International and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

“The whole idea of sentinel landscapes is to get scientists from different institutions to work together in a multidisciplinary way over extended periods of time in the same areas, and to share their knowledge and data,” explains Anja Gassner, leader of the Research Methods Group at the World Agroforestry Centre. In 2012, she helped to run a series of regional workshops during which scientists agreed on the purpose of sentinel landscapes and established criteria for their selection.

Sentinel landscapes should contain a range of habitats, from primary forest through to agricultural land and agroforests – in other words, all the stages represented by the ‘forest transition curve’. They must be subject to strong and rapid change as a result of human development. There should be adequate security, enabling long-term research, and the possibility of scaling up successful interventions and research programmes over large areas. Just as importantly, sentinel sites should already be the focus of considerable research, both by centres belonging to the CGIAR and other organizations.

The sentinel landscape in Nicaragua contains a rich array of ecosystems and land uses.


“We want to locate as many research projects as we can in the sentinel landscapes,” says Gassner. There will be a strong emphasis on sharing results. “We’re saying to the scientists: this is not about you, it’s about the network, and you must share your data.” Many scientists are not used to doing this, but there are some good precedents. For example, the data gathered during household surveys conducted by the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program in East Africa – this provided the raw material for the story on page 13 – was swiftly made available on the Internet.

In July 2012, scientists met in Nairobi to discuss the merits of 17 sites which had been identified as possible sentinel landscapes. Each had a champion to make its case. At the end of the workshop, the scientists agreed on six ‘Tier 1’ sentinel landscapes: Nicaraguan/Honduras and the Western Amazon in Latin America; the Mekong and Borneo/Sumatra in Asia; South East Mali, South

West Burkina Faso in Northern Ghana, and the Central Africa Humid Tropics Transect in Africa. In addition, they also chose two thematic landscapes – one for oil palm, the other for production forests – which represent different stages of the forest transition curve.

Once the sentinel sites had been identified, teams of scientists set about the task of gathering available data, producing maps and establishing networks with local partners. They also began to identify key research questions which will help to shape their activities in the sentinel sites, and the organizations and individuals they will work with.

“This sort of partnership approach to conducting long-term research in the CGIAR has often failed in the past,” says Gassner. “A more coordinated and collaborative approach across the landscapes is, in itself, a substantial benefit to research on agriculture, development and natural resource management.”

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How we work


Influencing agroforestry policy Around half of all agricultural land has 10 per cent or more tree cover. This suggests that agroforestry – the practice of integrating trees with crops and livestock – is critical to the welfare of hundreds of millions of people. As many stories in this year’s annual report confirm, agroforestry provides a great range of goods, including timber, firewood, fodder, fruit and medicinal plants. It also helps to improve soil fertility, increase crop yields, ensure a more diverse supply of food, and buffer farmers against climate shocks.

Despite its importance, agroforestry faces many challenges. These include a lack of favourable policy support, which is visible in terms of uncertain land tenure, poor coordination between different sectors and the failure to provide farmers with the skills and information needed. In short, agroforestry’s potential has yet to be fully realized.

‘Advancing Agroforestry on the Policy Agenda’, a working paper published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with the World Agroforestry Centre, CATIE and CIRAD, explores how policy-making for agroforestry could be improved.14 “This is the first attempt to summarize important policy issues related to agroforestry and articulate them for a policy audience,” says Frank Place, a scientist with the World Agroforestry Centre.

The guidelines were developed from a review of literature, workshops, interviews with experts and national case studies. They present a set of principles, rather than any prescribed methods. Place and his co-authors believe they will help countries to identify the factors which hinder the uptake of agroforestry and formulate policies appropriate to local conditions. The guidelines are enlivened by stories from the field, some of which draw on research conducted by the World Agroforestry Centre.

The authors identify four critical conditions that promote agroforestry. First, agroforestry must be beneficial to farmers and other land users; it cannot

succeed if it depresses incomes. Second, farmers will only adopt agroforestry practices if they have secure rights of land tenure. Third, the widespread adoption of agroforestry requires collaboration and coordination by high-ranking decision-makers in various sectors, including those involved in agriculture, the environment and forestry. Finally, agroforestry is only likely to take off where there is good governance of natural resources.

The guidelines conclude with 10 ‘tracks’ for policy action. These range from raising awareness about the benefits of agroforestry to clarifying land-use regulations; from strengthening farmers’ access to markets to introducing policies which favour payments for environmental services. “This is not a one-off publication,” says Place. “We’re going to use the guidelines as a way of stimulating discussions at the country level and improving national policy-making for agroforestry.”

14Place F, Gauthier M (eds). 2012. Advancing agroforestry on the policy agenda: a guide for decision-makers. FAO Agroforestry working paper no 1

Farmers in Tanzania’s Shinyanga region have benefited from the government’s support for agroforestry. By planting

nitrogen fixing trees, Kaligilwa Mbasha has significantly increased soil fertility and crop yields.

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Lab technician Bella Wakina analysing soil properties.

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Measuring what matters

Research organizations face a number of important challenges. Given the finite resources, they need to prioritize their activities, focusing on those which do most to achieve their goals. They also need to work out how to monitor and measure their impact, and provide objective proof of the value of their research.

This is no simple matter, as soil scientist Keith Shepherd revealed when he led a review of monitoring systems for the UK Department for International Development (DFID). “We found there had been a distinct lack of impact of monitoring systems when it came to influencing the decisions made by donors, governments and NGOs,” he says. “It was clear that the more systematic approach to identifying what information matters – and what doesn’t – was needed.”

In 2012, the Centre, working in collaboration with Hubbard Decision Research, developed a new ‘intervention decision model’. This will be the basis for prioritizing information systems research, and determining how to measure impact and value, for the CGIAR Research Programme on Water, Land and Ecosystems.

Shepherd and his colleagues are evaluating research

programmes using applied information economics, a method developed to address investment dilemmas which are large, risky and difficult to measure. “All too often, scientists spend lots of time measuring things that don’t have any impact on the outcomes they are seeking, and they miss the things that do,” says Shepherd.

Besides helping scientists to work out what to measure, applied information economics helps them decide how much they can justify spending on measurements or further research. This method of analysis also helps researchers design interventions that can do most to improve the lives of smallholder farmers and reduce risks for both farmers and donors or investors.

In 2013, Shepherd and his colleagues began using the new intervention decision model to evaluate research under the Water, Land and Ecosystems programme. These included projects on irrigation systems for African agriculture, increasing the productivity of rain-fed farming and the development of agro-biodiversity information systems. “We believe that the new intervention decision model could dramatically change the way scientists think, and make the research programmes more cost effective,” says Shepherd.

How we work


Raising food production in the Maldives

The economies of the scattered islands of the Maldives rely heavily on tourism and the fishing industry. Although agriculture is an important activity, much of the food – especially in the tourist resorts – has to be imported, at considerable expense. In 2010, the government of the Maldives and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) launched a programme to stimulate greater home-grown food production. The World Agroforestry Centre was enlisted as a partner.

The main aim of the project was to train agricultural technicians so that they could provide advice to local communities on the production of high-value crops. This was achieved in two stages. First, consultant teachers hired by the World Agroforestry Centre taught a general agricultural course to a large number of high school students over a six-month period.

Subsequently, 11 of the most successful students were selected for a specifically designed agricultural diploma course. The World Agroforestry Centre designed the course in consultation with the government of the Maldives and GB Pant University of Agriculture and

Technology, based in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. Students also benefited from field visits which gave them an insight into agricultural and agroforestry practices. During the course, students were required to develop proposals for the production of certain commodities. Afterwards, they returned to the Maldives to gain a year’s practical experience under the supervision of university professors.

The graduates are now training agricultural technicians throughout the Maldives. As a result, many communities are producing and marketing a range of vegetables. A recent government report suggests that agriculture has recently overtaken the fisheries sector in terms of its contribution to GDP.

Various agencies, including IFAD, have rated the programme as being a highly effective way of improving the technical capacity of countries with relatively few qualified personnel. According to Pal Singh, the Regional Coordinator for South Asia, there have been several requests from other countries in the Pacific region for similar courses.

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The World Agroforestry Centre has been involved in a programme to stimulate food production in the Maldives.


Tackling Sri Lanka’s coconut diseaseIn Sri Lanka, no other tree crop covers such a large area as the coconut. The trees provide the main source of income for hundreds of thousands of farming families, and a wide range of products, from food to pharmaceuticals, cosmetics to construction wood. That is why the outbreak of Weligama coconut wilt leaf disease in 2007 caused such consternation. This fungal disease, which is transmitted by insects, affected over 320,000 trees in the three districts of Galle, Matara and Hambantota.

Pal Singh, the Regional Coordinator of the World Agroforestry Centre’s South Asia Programme, realized that Sri Lanka could benefit from experience in India. “This disease was first observed in Kerala, some 20 years ago, and we decided that it would be a good idea to link the researchers who had been working on the disease here with Sri Lanka’s Coconut Research Institute,” he explains.

With the Centre’s support, Sri Lankan researchers and policy-makers made two visits to the Central Plantation Crops Research Institute in Kerala. This helped them to develop strategies to contain and control the disease. The measures included the creation of a 3-km wide barrier around the three worst affected districts. The Sri Lankan government also supported the felling of diseased palms and the CRI has begun a programme to breed disease-resistant trees.

The World Agroforestry Centre’s contribution to tackling the disease was acknowledged on World Coconut Day, 12 October 2012, when the Sri Lankan Ministry of Coconut Development and Janatha Estate Development presented a special award and certificate of appreciation to Dr Pal Singh and Dr Ravi Prabhu, the Centre’s Deputy Director General for Research.

Pal Singh (right), Regional Coordinator of the World Agroforestry Centre’s South Asia Programme, receives his award.

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Prof. Eric TollensChair

Ex-officioEx-officio

DirectorofHumanResourcesandOrganizational

Development

Ex-officio

DirectorGeneral DeputyDirectorGeneral,Research

DeputyDirectorGeneral,Partnerships,Regions

andImpact

DeputyDirectorGeneral,FinanceandCorporate

Services

Ex-officio

Prof. Tony Simons Mr. John Hudson

Stella KiwangoTony Simons

Dr. Romano Kiome

Ravi Prabhu

Dr. Hosny El-Lakany

August Temu

Dr. Hector Cisneros

Dr. Paco Sereme

Laksiri Abeysekera

Ms. Hilary Wild Dr. John Lynam

Dr. Rita SharmaProf. Olavi Luukkanen

Our people

BoardofTrustees

SeniorLeadershipTeam

Annexes


Management TeamScienceDomainLeadersFergusSinclair – Leader, Agroforestry Systems and CRP 6.1 Component Leader

HenryNeufeldt– Leader, Climate Change

KeithShepherd– Leader, Land Health

MeinevanNoordwijk – Chief Science Advisor and Co-Leader, Environmental Services

PeterMinang– Co-leader, Environmental Services

RamniJamnadass – Leader, Tree Diversity, Domestication and Delivery

SteveFranzel– Acting Leader, Tree Products and Markets

Country,NodeandRegionalCoordinatorsandRepresentativesAnthonyKimaro– Country Representative, Tanzania

AntoineKalinganire– Representative, Sahel Node

AthanaseMukuralinda– Country Representative, Rwanda

ChristopheKouamé– Programme Manager, Côte d’Ivoire

ClementOkia– Country Representative, Uganda

DeliaCatacutan– Country Representative, Viet Nam and Social Scientist

EbenezarAsaah– Country Coordinator, Sierra Leone

JeremiasGasperMowo– Regional Coordinator, Eastern and Southern Africa

JeromeTondoh– Country Coordinator, Mali

JianchuXu– Coordinator, East Asia Node

JonathanCornelius– Regional Coordinator, Latin America

KirosHadgu– Country Representative, Ethiopia

PalSingh– Regional Coordinator, South Asia

RodelLasco– Country Coordinator, Philippines

SileshiGWeldesemayat– Regional Representative, Southern Africa

TomarSanjay– Acting Regional Coordinator, South Asia

UjjwalPradhan– Regional Coordinator, Southeast Asia

ZacTchoundjeu– Regional Coordinator, West and Central Africa

For a full staff list, please go to http://www.worldagroforestry.org/about_us/organisation_and_people/staff


Investors 2012AGROFUTURO GLOBAL SL Agropolis Foundation Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)Australian Aid Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)Belgium Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation BOTH ENDS (Environment and Development Service) Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Education (CATIE)Centre for Development ResearchCentre for International Cooperation Centre for Mountain Ecosystem Studies Centro Internacional de Agricultural Tropical (CIAT) CGIAR Research Programme 1.1 CGIAR Research Programme 1.2 CGIAR Research Programme 2 CGIAR Research Programme 4 CGIAR Research Programme 5 CGIAR Research Programme 6 CGIAR Research Programme 7 China Chinese Academy of Sciences Comart Foundation Common Market For Eastern and Southern Africa Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Concern Worldwide Conseil ouest et centre africain pour la recherche et le développement agricoles/West Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (CORAF/WECARD) Cooperation of Common Fund for Commodities Cornell University Corporacion Colombiana de Investigacion Agropecuaria (CORPOICA) Danish Centre for Forest, Landscape and Planning Department for International Development (DFID) Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) Earth Institute - Columbia University Ebony Enterprises LtdEuropean Union (EU)

Finland Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Ford Foundation Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen Global Crop Diversity Trust Global Food and Farming Futures Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services Government of IndiaGovernors of St. Francis Xavier University (COADY) Harvard University Heifer International HK Logistics Ltd Global Solutions IFAR Wilfried Thalwitz Scholarship Indian Council for Agricultural Research Indonesian Palm Oil CommissionInternational Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) International Cooperation Center for Agricultural Education - Nagoya University (ICCAE)International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) International Development Research Centre (IDRC) International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)International Water Management Institute (IWMI)Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) IrelandJapanJapan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS)Katholic UniversityKenyaKenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI)Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research e.V.LEUSER NOELMacaulay Land Use Research InstituteMargaret A. Cargill FoundationMars, Incorporated

Annexes


McKnight FoundationMillennium Challenge AccountNational Smallholder Farmers’ Association of MalawiNatural Resources CanadaNatural Resources InstituteNetherlandsNorwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD)Overseas Development Institute (ODI)Peru Rainwater Harvesting Implementation Network FoundationRepublic of MaldivesRepublic of South Africa Rights and Resources GroupRoundtable on Sustainable Palm OilRwanda Agricultural Development Authority Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Swiss Development Corporation

Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation Tegemeo Institute of Egerton UniversityThe Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) Unilever United Nations Development ProgrammeUnited Nations Environment Programme United Nations Office for Project Services United Nations University – Int’l Org Center United States Agency for International Development (USAID) United States Department of Agriculture Université Laval University of CopenhagenVrije Universiteit AmsterdamWilliam J. Clinton Foundation World Bank World Conservation Union (IUCN)World VisionWorld Wildlife Fund WorldFish Center


Financial HighlightsSTATEMENTOFFINANCIALPOSITION ASAT31DECEMBER2012(In US Dollars ‘000’)

ASSETS 2012 2011

Currentassets

Cash and cash equivalents 19,800 20,873

Short term investments 5,197 13,450

Accounts receivables

Donor 11,077 7,241

Employees 155 94

Other CGIAR Centres 223 297

Other 3,165 3,462

Inventories - net 96 84

Prepaid expenses 1,178 742

Total current assets 40,891 46,243

Non-currentassets

Property and equipment 5,653 5,350

Long term investments 14,624 3,020

Totalnon-currentassets 20,277 8,370

TOTALASSETS 61,168 54,613

LIABILITIESANDNETASSETS

Currentliabilities

Accounts payable

Donor 17,306 12,389

Employees 688 871


Other 1,919 2,609

Accruals 8,307 6,292

Totalcurrentliabilities 28,600 22,597

Non-currentliabilities

Accounts payable

Employees 5,579 5,263

Totalnon-currentliabilities 5,579 5,263

TOTALLIABILITIES 34,179 27,860

NETASSETS

Unrestricted

Designated 16,658 16,847

Undesignated 10,331 9,906

Totalnetassets 26,989 26,753

TOTALLIABILITIESANDNETASSETS 61,168 54,613

The financial statements were approved by the Board of Trustees on 3 May 2013.

Annexes


STATEMENTOFFINANCIALPOSITION ASAT31DECEMBER2012(In US Dollars ‘000’)

ASSETS 2012 2011

Currentassets

Cash and cash equivalents 19,800 20,873

Short term investments 5,197 13,450

Accounts receivables

Donor 11,077 7,241

Employees 155 94


Other 3,165 3,462

Inventories - net 96 84

Prepaid expenses 1,178 742

Total current assets 40,891 46,243

Non-currentassets

Property and equipment 5,653 5,350

Long term investments 14,624 3,020

Totalnon-currentassets 20,277 8,370

TOTALASSETS 61,168 54,613

LIABILITIESANDNETASSETS

Currentliabilities

Accounts payable

Donor 17,306 12,389

Employees 688 871


Other 1,919 2,609

Accruals 8,307 6,292

Totalcurrentliabilities 28,600 22,597

Non-currentliabilities

Accounts payable

Employees 5,579 5,263

Totalnon-currentliabilities 5,579 5,263

TOTALLIABILITIES 34,179 27,860

NETASSETS

Unrestricted

Designated 16,658 16,847

Undesignated 10,331 9,906

Totalnetassets 26,989 26,753

TOTALLIABILITIESANDNETASSETS 61,168 54,613

The financial statements were approved by the Board of Trustees on 3 May 2013.

STATEMENTOFACTIVITIESFORTHEYEARENDED31DECEMBER2012(InUSDollars‘000’)

2012 2011

Unrestricted Restricted-CRPsRestricted-

Others

CGIARFundWindows

1&2

Bilateral Total Bilateral Total Total2012

Total

Revenue,gainsandothersupport

Grant revenue 1,486 19,836 25,972 45,808 4,091 4,091 51,385 41,896

Other revenue and gains 1,713 - - - - - 1,713 1,196

Total revenue and gains 3,199 19,836 25,972 45,808 4,091 4,091 53,098 43,092

Expensesandlosses

Programme-related expenses 3,630 19,635 25,035 44,670 - - 48,300 37,182

General and administration expenses 5,554 201 937 1,138 - - 6,692 4,119

CGIAR Gender and Diversity/AWARD Programme

- - - - 4,091 4,091 4,091 4,822

Sub-total expenses and losses 9,184 19,836 25,972 45,808 4,091 4,091 59,083 46,123

Overhead cost recovery (6,221) - - - - - (6,221) (4,232)

Total expenses and losses 2,963 19,836 25,972 45,808 4,091 4,091 52,862 41,891

NetSurplus 236 - - - - - 236 1,201

Expensesbynaturalclassification

Personnel cost 7,132 5,893 5,737 11,630 1,234 1,234 19,996 17,243

Supplies and services 7 9,342 11,207 20,549 1,737 1,737 22,293 16,039

Collaborators/partnerships 63 2,365 4,303 6,668 75 75 6,806 5,252

Operational travel 1,338 1,610 3,256 4,866 1,022 1,022 7,226 5,766

Depreciation 636 626 1,307 1,933 16 16 2,585 1,717

System Cost (CSP) 8 - 162 162 7 7 177 106

Sub-total 9,184 19,836 25,972 45,808 4,091 4,091 59,083 46,123

Overhead cost recovery (6,221) - - - - - (6,221) (4,232)

Total 2,963 19,836 25,972 45,808 4,091 4,091 52,862 41,891


Board Statement on Risk ManagementThe Board of Trustees and Management of the World Agroforestry Centre have reviewed the implementation of the risk management framework during 2012 and the Board is satisfied with the progress made.

The Board of Trustees has the responsibility of ensuring that an appropriate risk management process is in place to identify and manage current and emerging significant risks to the achievement of the Centre’s business objectives, and to ensure alignment with CGIAR principles and guidelines as adopted by all CGIAR Centres. These risks include operational, financial and reputation risks that are inherent in the nature, modus operandi and locations of the Centre’s activities. They are dynamic owing to the environment in which the Centre operates. There is potential for loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes or systems, human factors or external events. Risks include:

1. Misallocation of scientific efforts away from agreed priorities

2. Loss of reputation due to lack of scientific excellence and integrity

3. Business disruption and information system failure

4. Liquidity problems

5. Transaction processing failures

6. Loss of assets, including information assets

7. Failure to recruit, retain and effectively utilize qualified and experienced staff

8. Failure in staff health and safety systems

9. Failure by the Consortium to execute legal and fiduciary responsibilities

10. Withdrawal or reduction of funding by donors due to the financial crisis

11. Subsidization of the cost of projects funded from restricted grants and/or partial non-delivery of promised outputs due to inadequate costing of restricted projects

12. The lead Centre not complying with the terms of the agreement with the Consortium and/or not delivering on the agreed outputs can have a negative impact on ICRAF as a participating Centre

13. Non-prioritization of agroforestry in the CRPs due to lack of funding, etc.

The Board has adopted a risk management policy that includes a framework by which the Centre’s management identifies, evaluates and prioritizes risks and opportunities across the organization; develops risk mitigation strategies which balance benefits with costs; monitors the implementation of these strategies; and periodically reports to the Board on results. This process draws upon risk assessments and analysis prepared by staff of the Centre’s business unit, internal auditors, Centre-commissioned external reviewers and the external auditors. The risk assessments also incorporate the results of collaborative risk assessments with other CGIAR Centres, office system components, and other entities in relation to shared risks arising from jointly managed activities. The risk management framework seeks to draw upon best practices, as promoted in codes and standards promulgated in a number of CGIAR member countries. It is subject to ongoing review as part of the Centre’s continuous improvement efforts.

Risk mitigation strategies include the implementation of systems of internal controls, which, by their nature, are designed to manage rather than eliminate risk. The Centre endeavours to manage risk by ensuring that the appropriate infrastructure, controls, systems and people are in place throughout the organization. Key practices employed in managing risks and opportunities include business environmental scans, clear policies and accountabilities, transaction approval frameworks, financial and management reporting, and the monitoring of metrics designed to highlight positive or negative performance of individuals and business processes across a broad range of key performance areas. The design and effectiveness of the risk management system and internal controls is subject to ongoing review by the Centre’s internal audit service, which is independent of the business units, and which reports the results of its audits directly to the Director General and to the Board through its Finance and Audit Committee.

The Board also remains very alive to the impact of external events over which the Centre has no control other than to monitor and, as the occasion arises, to provide mitigation.

Eric Tollens

Chair

Board of Trustees

World Agroforestry Centre

3 May 2013

Annexes


The Performance Measurement (PM) system of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) measures the performance of the Centres it supports in terms of their results and potential to perform.

The PM system provides the Centres with a method to better understand their own performance and demonstrate accountability. The results are presented below.

ResultsfortheWorldAgroforestryCentre

Publications1. Composite measure of Centre research publications: Number of peer-reviewed publications per scientist in 2012 that are published in journals listed in Thomson Scientific/ISI: 1.16 Number of externally peer-reviewed publications in 2012: 1.61

2. Percentage of scientific papers published with developing country partners in refereed journals, conference and workshop proceedings in 2012: 12.9%

Institutionalhealth

Percentage of women in management: 25%

Financialhealth

Long-term financial stability (adequacy of reserves): 155 days where the minimum benchmark is 90 days

Cash management on restricted operations: 0.65 where the benchmark is less than 1.00

Performance Indicators


Selected PublicationsBooks&manuals

Dawson I, Harwood C, Jamnadass R, Beniest J, eds. 2012. Agroforestry tree domestication: a primer. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre

McDermott B, Coe R. 2012. An easy introduction to biplots for multi-environment trials. Reading: University of Reading

Mulyoutami J, Moeis E, Juita L, Abraham R, Pribadi RA, Roshetko JM. 2012. Membangun kembali Aceh: Belajar dari hasil penelitian dan program rehabilitasi Aceh pasca Tsunami. Kumpulan Hasil Penelitian, Pembelajaran dan Rekomendasi untuk Kemajuan dan Rehabilitasi di Aceh Barat dan Sekitarnya. Bogor: World Agroforestry Centre

Nair PKR, Garrity D, eds. 2012. Agroforestry – the future of global land use. Dordrecht: Springer

Susila AD, Purwoko BS, Roshetko JM, Palada MC, Kartika JG, Dahlia L, Wijaya K, Rahmanulloh A, Raimadoya M, Koesoemaningtyas T, Puspitawati H, Prasetyo T, Budidarsono S, Manue IK, eds. 2012. Vegetable-agroforestry systems in Indonesia. Bangkok: World Association of Soil and Water Conservation

OccasionalPapers

Boureima M, Abasse AT, Sotelo Montes C, Weber JC, Katkoré B, Mounkoro B, Dakouo J-M, Samaké O, Sigué H, Bationo BA, Diallo BO. 2012. Analyse participative de la vulnérabilité et de l’adaptation aux changements climatiques: un guide méthodologique. ICRAF Occasional paper no. 19. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre

Dkamela GP. 2012. Essai de reconstitution du cadre d’action et des opportunités en matière d’agroforesterie en République Démocratique du Congo: perspectives pour une politique publique. ICRAF Occasional Paper no. 20. Yaounde: World Agroforestry Centre

TreesforChange

Pye-Smith C. 2012. Falling by the wayside: improving the availability of high-quality tree seeds and seedlings would benefit hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers. ICRAF Trees for Change no. 11. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre

Pye-Smith C. 2012. Taking the heat out of farming: an innovative agroforestry project is helping Indian smallholders to join the global carbon market. ICRAF Trees for Change no. 10. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre

Journal articles

Aynekulu E, Aerts R, Moonen P, Denich M, Gebrehiwot K, Vågen T-G, Mekuria W, Boehmer HJ. 2012. Altitudinal variation and conservation priorities of vegetation along the Great Rift Valley escarpment, northern Ethiopia. Biodiversity and Conservation 21

Bayala J, Sileshi GW, Coe R, Kalinganire A, Tchoundjeu Z, Sinclair F, Garrity D. 2012. Cereal yield response to conservation agriculture practices in drylands of West Africa: a quantitative synthesis? Journal of Arid Environments 78

Bennett M, Franzel S. 2012. Can organic and resource-conserving agriculture improve livelihoods? A synthesis. International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 1-23

Degrande A, Tadjo P, Takoutsing B, Asaah E, Tsobeng A, Tchoundjeu Z. 2012. Getting trees into farmers’ fields: success of rural nurseries in distributing high quality planting material in Cameroon. Agronomy Journal 104 (6)

Grumbine RE, Dore J, Xu J. 2012. Mekong hydropower: drivers of change and governance challenges. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 10 (2)

Gyau A, Chiatoh M, Franzel S, Asaah E, Donovan J. 2012. Determinants of farmers’ tree planting behaviour in the North West region of Cameroon: the case of Prunus Africana. International Forestry Review 14 (3)

Iiyama M, Newman D, Munster C, Nyabenge M, Sileshi GW, Moraa V, Onchieku J, Mowo JG, Jamnadass R. 2012. Productivity of Jatropha curcas under smallholder farm conditions in Kenya. Agroforestry Systems

Kalinganire A, Weber JC, Coulibaly S. 2012. Improved Ziziphus mauritiana germplasm for the Sahelian smallholder farmer: First steps toward a domestication programme. Forests, Trees and Livelihoods 21:128-137

Lasco RD, Veridiano RKA, Habito M, Pulhin FB. 2012. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation plus (REDD+) in the Philippines: will it make a difference in financing forest development? Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change

Martini E, Roshetko J, van Noordwijk M, Rahmanulloh A, Mulyoutami E, Joshi L, Budidarsono S. 2012. Sugarpalm (Arenga pinnata) for livelihoods and biodiversity conservation in the orangutan habitat of Batang Toru, North Sumatra, Indonesia: mixed prospects for domestication. Agroforestry Systems 86 (3)

For a complete list of publications, visit our publications page on http://worldagroforestry.org/our_products/publications

Annexes


Our Offices

HEADQUARTERSWorld Agroforestry Centre

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Annexes


List of AbbreviationsACATPA Asociación de Cacaoteros Tecnificados de Padre Abad AfSIS Africa Soil Information ServiceCAFNET Coffee Agroforestry Network CATIE Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education CCAFS Climate Change, Agriculture and Food SecurityCDC Centre de Développement du CacaoCGIAR Consultative Group on International Agricultural ResearchCIAT International Center for Tropical AgricultureCIDA Canadian International Development AgencyCIFOR Center for International Forestry ResearchCIRAD Le Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développementCNRA Centre National de Recherche AgronomiqueCOP Conference of the PartiesCRI Coconut Research InstituteCRP CGIAR Research Programme CTA Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural CorporationDFID Department for International DevelopmentDRC Democratic Republic of CongoEmbrapa Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation EU European UnionFAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FARA Forum for Agricultural Research in AfricaFLD Forest & Landscape DenmarkFLEGT Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade FMNR Farmer-Managed Natural RegenerationFSC Forest Stewardship Council GDP Gross Domestic ProductGEF Global Environment FacilityICRAF World Agroforestry Centre IFAD International Fund for Agricultural DevelopmentIIAM National Institute of Agronomic ResearchIIAP Peruvian Amazon Research InstituteINIA National Institute of Agricultural InnovationIPG International Public Goods IUCN International Union for Conservation of NatureLAMA Locally Appropriate Mitigation Action LUWES Land Use Planning for Low Emission Development StrategyNASA National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationNGO Non-Governmental OrganizationPEFC Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification PROTA Plant Resources of Tropical AfricaREALU Reducing Emissions from All Land UsesREDD Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest DegradationRMG Research Methods GroupSACC Sustainable Agriculture in a Changing ClimateUK United KingdomUN United NationsUS United StatesV4C Vision for ChangeVECEA Vegetation and Climate Change in East Africa WOCAT World Overview of Conservation Approaches and TechnologiesWWF World Wide Fund for Nature

Writer: Charlie Pye-Smith

Other contributors: Daisy Ouya, Kristi Foster, Rob Finlayson, Kate Langford, Adjehi Claude

Coordination, compilation, editing/proofreading: Betty Rabar, Paul Stapleton

Design & layout: Martha Mwenda

Cover photo: Lehri Lal, a farmer in Rajasthan, India, has established an orchard which will sequester carbon and provide him with fruit and an income. Photo credit: Charlie Pye-Smith

Financial information: Francis Kinyanjui

Publications: Jacinta Kimwaki

Staff list: Aziz Arthur

Distribution: Naomi Kanyugo, Hellen Kiarago

World Agroforestry Centre, United Nations Avenue, Gigiri,P. O. Box 30677-00100, Nairobi, Kenya.Phone + (254) 20 722 4000, Fax + (254) 20 722 4001,Via USA phone (1-650) 833-6645,Via USA fax (1-650) 833-6646,Email: [email protected]: www.worldagroforestry.org

World Agroforestry Centre is a member of the CGIAR Consortium

2012-2013 - user account | world agroforestry centre intranet

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