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Message from the Director General
Wicked Challenges Today.
Wicked Solutions Tomorrow.
Hit me again. It's so hard to believe. Could it really
have been 10 years?
It was a whirlwind of a decade, being at the helm
of the world's premier scientific institution that
investigates the role of working trees for farmlands
across the globe. But it's been a sheer joy serving with
such a fantastic community of people, and a priceless
personal fulfillment. But, curiously, I find myself
having little interest in dwelling on the past while the
imperatives of the present and future seem so stark.
The World Agroforestry Centre has an enormous
responsibility in today's tumultuous world. It was
created to "open a new front…on the war against
hunger, inadequate shelter, and environmental
degradation" and to "administer a comprehensive
programme leading to better land use in the tropics".
The Centre has now developed into a major force to
achieve these goals. Agroforestry is currently practiced
throughout the world, but more importantly, I believe it
will be the basis for the farming systems of the future
in the majority of agricultural ecosystems. Why is that?
It's because the agriculture of the late 21st century will
have to look very different from what we see today. So different, in fact, that few people are inclined to even
imagine how radically reinvented it will have to be.
But if we look seriously at the truly wicked challenges
that agriculture and natural resource management are
facing, in both the short and long term, and we pause
to appreciate the inadequacy of our conventional
models to cope with them, we can begin to understand
why.
Take the nexus of climate change, food security,
and the deteriorating agricultural resource base. The
imperative is to increase smallholder farm income
and to double food production in the face of climate
change, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions
and reversing land degradation. Realistically, there are
very few conventional agricultural options that meet all
these imperatives. Agroforestry systems, however, are
elegantly suited to do so.
And this report illustrates the great body of innovative
research that characterizes how we are achieving
tangible outcomes for smallholders in all of these
areas.
In the wetter tropical environments, diversified treecrop
systems are the appropriate agricultural option
for the biophysical and economic environment. And
tree crop systems continue to expand throughout the
humid tropics. This annual report reviews a range of the World Agroforestry Centre's critical work that
is impacting on some of the world's most important
smallholder tree crop systems, including cocoa, coffee,
rubber, fruits and medicinals. These diversified tree
crop systems are evolving as profitable development
pathways that increase productivity while providing
sustained environmental services. See articles on
pages 12, 16, 25, 34, 38 and 41.
But what about the conundrum of the world's extensive
monoculture food crop systems? Most private and
public sector agricultural research remains focused
like a laser on increasing food production through
conventional options, such as increasing the use of
fossil fuel-based inputs, particularly fertilizers. But we
know that this pathway will only further exacerbate
greenhouse gas emissions. And many developing
country farmers cannot afford the inputs anyway.
Double-storey tree-crop systems are a sound vision
of what crop farming will be in the future. Granted,
such systems are a radical departure from the
conventional models. But they have already proven to
have exceptional potential where they are practiced
on millions of hectares in diverse environments. I'm
concerned that so little attention is still given to the
transformative opportunities for integrating perennials
into annual crop systems. Integrating trees into
agricultural systems improves the delivery of biological
nitrogen, enhances internal nutrient cycling and soil
water conservation, and ensures a more conducive
microclimate under drought and heat stress.
I see a great scientific and developmental adventure
ahead: that such systems shall become the
conventional practice on hundreds of millions of hectares of cereal crop fields. That vision is much
closer at hand than one might think, when you
examine the wicked problem in Africa of stagnant food
crop yields, declining per capita food availability, and
the marginalization of smallholder agriculture. Current
climate variability and skyrocketing costs are major
reasons why four-fifths of African farmers don't use
fertilizers. However, the foundation for a transformation
exists that could increase yields and crop resilience to
drought, with minimal up-front investment and very low
recurrent cash costs.
The evidence indicates that a double-storey evergreen
agriculture of trees with crops can be based on a
range of compatible tree options that increase farm
productivity, enhance system resilience to climate
change, and provide the global co-benefit of reversing
the contributions of agriculture to carbon emissions.
See article on page 40.
I believe that this evergreen agriculture allows us
to glimpse a future of more environmentally sound
farming where much (or most) of our annual food crop
production occurs under a full canopy of trees. Doublestory
evergreen agriculture could be a basis for the
reinvention of agriculture during the 21st century.
The question is: will the CGIAR invest seriously in
such radically unconventional (but farmer-proven)
solutions?
As I clean out my desk these days, I find that I'm not
really in much of a reflective mood. Those wicked
challenges weigh heavy on my mind. But I am
energized more than ever by the wicked possibilities
- for the World Agroforestry Centre to contribute to recreating
the future of tropical agriculture, and indeed of
the world.
Dennis Garrity
Director General |
