In December 2014, 23 young scientists from 11 countries and 21 different institutions graduated from the African Plant Breeding Academy at the World Agroforestry Centre’s headquarters in Nairobi. This was the first batch of some 250 scientists who will benefit from training in modern genomics over a 5-year period.

The Academy was launched in 2013 as an initiative of the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC), which aims to improve the quality, productivity and climatic resilience of 101 orphan crops. These are indigenous crops – just under half are trees – that have been used by African farmers, in some cases for centuries, but have been largely ignored by science.

“When it comes to funding crop research, most of the money spent internationally focuses on the big five – wheat, cotton, maize, soybean and rice,” explains Prasad Hendre, a plant breeder who manages the AOCC laboratory in Nairobi. “What we’re doing here is investing in research that will identify the genetic sequences associated with particular traits, such as high yields and resistance to drought, of a wide range of species which could help to transform the lives of African smallholder farmers.”

Between 2000 and 2014, scientists sequenced the genomes of just 57 plants. During the next 5 years, the AOCC will sequence the genomes of double that number in a collaborative research involving Mars, Inc., the World Agroforestry Centre, Beijing Genomics Institute, Life Technologies Corporation, the World Wildlife Fund, the University of California, the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), various CGIAR (Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research) institutes, LGC Genomics, iPlant Collaborative and Google. It will be up to plant breeders, such as those trained in Nairobi in a programme designed by UC Davis, to work out how best to use this new-found knowledge.

One of the first students to graduate from the Academy was Busiso Mavankeni, a Zimbabwean scientist whose focus of interest is the Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea). A popular “backyard crop” grown by two-thirds of small-scale farmers in Zimbabwe, Bambara groundnut is highly nutritious.

“It is a long season crop, taking about 140 days to mature,” explained Busiso after the graduation ceremony. “I would like to reduce that to between 90 to 120 days.” The lengthy growing season is not the only challenge she hopes to tackle. She would also like to develop disease-resistant and drought-tolerant strains. The training she has received at the African Plant Breeding Academy will stand her – and the other 22 students who graduated in 2014 – in good stead. “We talk of food security, yet not many people have access to enough food,” she said. “We talk of nutrition, and yet not many men, women

and children in Africa have access to nutritious food. This programme targets the crops that are important for African people, and they will benefit from it.”

The training offers young scientists like Busiso a unique opportunity to use the latest plantbreeding technologies, which include four gene-sequencing machines provided by Life Technologies Corporation and installed in the AOCC laboratory in Nairobi. These are a million times faster and cheaper to use than the old generation equipment of a decade ago. Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of recent advances in gene-sequencing technologies.

“In the early 2000s, you needed an area the size of a basketball gymnasium, 100 machines, 70 technicians, five years of effort and US$20 million to sequence the genomes of just one plant,” says Tony Simons, World Agroforestry Centre’s Director General. Now, a machine which can sit on a table top, three months, two researchers and approximately US$200,000 will do the same thing.

But that’s just the start. “Sequencing the genomes provides the treasure map,” says Tony. “Once you have that, you must start bioprospecting – identifying the sequences which are associated with the traits you want in the orphan crops, and building them into a breeding programme.”

An estimated 450,000 smallholder producers living in the Peruvian Amazon could significantly increase their incomes through timber production on their fallow plots of land. An analysis of over 376 Amazonian districts during the most recent agricultural census showed that more than 4.5 million hectares of land was under smallholder production mosaics. The amount of land left fallow corresponds to 19% of the surface area, with almost half the producers having some fallow land at any one time.

In the past, it was technically illegal under the country’s forest laws for smallholders to market timber and wood products grown on fallow land. This has now changed, thanks to a series of modifications to articles of the Regulations of the Forests and Wildlife Law (No. 29763), which is currently going through the process of approval in Peru.

Using evidence from years of research on family farm production systems at the tropical forest margins, scientists from the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the World Agroforestry Centre lobbied for legal recognition of timber production practices based on the management of natural regeneration in temporary fallows.

“We have made the case for a change in the definition of agroforestry, and this will help to reduce the regulatory burden on family farmers producing timber,” says Valentina Robiglio, a scientist with the World Agroforestry Centre.

The management of the regeneration of fast-growing species like bolaina (Guazuma crinata), which sprouts naturally on fallow land, represents a simple and economical way of producing timber, while at the same time integrating timber production with agricultural activities. The new law recognizes that a range of different practices can be used by smallholders to manage and produce trees, and that the association of species on any one plot of land can change over time. This represents a major change of thinking by the Peruvian forestry authority.

“As a result, we hope smallholders will be able to obtain permission to harvest, transform and transport timber from their land, regardless of their production system,” says Valentina. “This will create a conducive environment for agroforestry on smallholder farms and could significantly improve the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families.”

Reference
R P M VL, Cornelius CGIAR Research Programme,Danny and you on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry:Timber Production in Smallholder Agroforestry Systems –
Justifications for Pro-Poor Forest Policy in Peru.

The European Union’s first package of climate and energy measures was adopted in 2008, and member countries are now well on the way to meeting the 2020 targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction and renewable energy targets. None of this has had any bearing on farmers, for the simple reason that the package ignored the role of agriculture as both an emitter and remover of greenhouse gases. However, this is set to change, thanks to assiduous lobbying by Patrick Worms, a senior science policy adviser at the World Agroforestry Centre.

For the past four years, Patrick – one of some 30,000 lobbyists based in Brussels – has been quietly championing agroforestry in discussions related to climate change, development and the Common Agricultural Policy. As far as the former is concerned, Patrick cites research by the Flemish Institute of Technological Research. “This suggests that the total potential for mitigation from agricultural practices corresponds to around a third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the EU,” he says. “Agroforestry could deliver 90% of agriculture’s mitigation potential. That’s one reason why it is so important.”

The mitigation potential of agriculture, landuse and forestry has now been recognized in the ‘Communication from the Commission’ document outlining a policy framework for climate and energy for the period 2020 to 2030. Agroforestry is the only agricultural practice which is specifically mentioned. In practice, this should give agroforestry a considerable boost in member countries over the coming decades.

Just as importantly, reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which accounts for 40% of the EU budget, now recognize agroforestry’s potential to deliver a range of benefits beyond climate change mitigation. Patrick is an observer member of the executive committee of the European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF), which began pushing for measures in the CAP to reward agroforestry shortly after it was founded in December 2011.

“Agricultural policy lobbying is a complex business in Brussels and highly formalised, with lobbyists having seats on Civil Dialogue Groups, which are regularly invited to discuss issues of concern with the relevant directorates,” explains Patrick. Since it was established, EURAF has been invited to sit on several Civil Dialogue Groups and it has played a significant role in getting agroforestry onto the CAP agenda.

EURAF prepared a series of amendments for the March 2013 Plenary Session to the European Parliament. As a result, there is now a clear definition of agroforestry systems in the regulations, and agroforestry is recognized as an eligible form of land use under so-called Pillar I payments, the area-based payments which all farmers receive. In the past, land devoted to agroforestry was not eligible for area-based payments.

Just as importantly, EURAF lobbying led to agroforestry being recognized as an important greening measure under Pillar II of the CAP, which covers subsidies provided for the development of rural areas. Member states can now pay farmers up to 80% of the costs of establishing agroforestry systems, together with five-year maintenance costs. This is not ideal – another part of EU agricultural legislation dealing with afforestation offers support for 12 years – but is clear progress on previous measures. “Another important victory was to delegate the definition of the

minimum/maximum number of trees that make up agroforestry systems to member states, ensuring that local context is taken into account,” says Patrick. Does this have any relevance for developing countries? Patrick believes it does. “You often hear people talking about agroforestry as a tool to save the rural poor from destitution,” he says. “But it’s also a high-performance technology which can be used by all farmers, however rich or poor, however large or small. Getting it onto the policy agenda in Europe helps to establish its modernity, and makes it a more credible option for farmers and policymakers alike in the least developed countries.”

Reference
Joris Aertens et al. 2013. Valuing the carbon sequestration potential for European agriculture. Land Use Policy 31, 584-594

According to Peter Minang, the global coordinator of the ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins at the World Agroforestry Centre, scientists tend to think about landscapes from just one perspective, such as water management, or forestry, or ecosystem services, or climate-smart agriculture. “We need to look at landscapes in terms of their multifunctionality, so that they provide as many benefits for as many people as possible,” he says.

This thinking permeates the 27 chapters in a major new book, Climate-Smart Landscapes: Multifunctionality in Practice. When discussing the book, Peter quotes a Malawian farmer who attended a UN climate change meeting in Warsaw in 2013: “He said: ‘I don’t get up one day to do climate change mitigation, and the next day to do adaptation. I see my farm as a single package, and I manage the land to get as many benefits as possible.'”

Climate-Smart Landscapes reflects the farmer’s philosophy. The book challenges the ‘oneplace- one-function’ concept of specialization that places agriculture, forestry, urban development, water use and biodiversity in separate silos. Instead, it builds on climatesmart landscape experiences as a pathway to achieving successful multifunctional landscapes. The book is the work of 88 authors from 44 institutions. Over half of the authors work for the World Agroforestry Centre.

Written for practitioners, researchers and policymakers, the publication includes over 100 different case studies and is structured around four key propositions. First, we still have a long way to go before we will achieve multifunctional and sustainable landscapes. Second, there are plenty of opportunities to ‘nudge’ landscapes towards multifunctionality. Third, it is important to recognize that climate is just one driver of landscape change. Finally, the landscape approach needs to be grounded in local realities, and take into account what people really want.

Climate-Smart landscapes was launched at the Lima climate change conference (COP 20) in December 2014 to considerable praise. “The book is a great tool for policymakers, and it has come at the right time, when UNEP has been tasked to develop a landscape approach in Uganda,” said Tim Christophersen of the United Nations Environment Programme during the book launch. “One of the things I like about this book is that you do not get bogged down trying to define landscapes – it moves straight into the issues,” said Robert Nasi, head of the Consortium Research Programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry. The book had been downloaded over 5600 times by the end of March 2015, and viewed over 20,000 times.

The last word on shifting cultivation

Agroforestry’s evolution Running to over 1000 pages, Shifting Cultivation and Environmental Change provides an authoritative and up-to-date analysis of the transformation of shifting cultivation in recent decades. The editor, Malcolm Cairns, was able to call upon the services of a large team of experts, including Meine van Noordwijk, Dennis Garrity, Peter Minang and Jianchu Xu of the World Agroforestry Centre.

This is how the book was described by James C Scott, Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University: “The appearance of these collectively definitive volumes on swidden cultivation represents an intellectual event of great importance. Finally, a comprehensive account of the form of agriculture most widely practised in world history; most responsible for changing landscapes, and most grievously misunderstood by highmodernist agriculture. So much to learn here, so much to digest, so much to ponder as we imagine a less catastrophic agricultural future.”

Agroforestry’s evolution

“We are underselling what we do if people think we are simply concerned with promoting agroforestry technologies like fertilizer trees,” says Meine van Noordwijk. “We take a much wider, more holistic view of agroforestry contributing to sustainable development at the landscape level and beyond.”

This was one of the key messages of an inaugural lecture delivered by Meine in October 2014, on his appointment as Special Professor of Agroforestry at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. It draws on over two decades of global experience working for the World Agroforestry Centre. He is currently the Centre’s chief science adviser.Meine’s lecture, Agroforestry as a plant production system in a multifunctional landscape, explores the history of agroforestry, how our perceptions of agroforestry have changed over time, and the importance of agroforestry at every level from the local to the global. You can read it here: http://asb.cgiar.org/Publications 2014/Lecture-Notes/Oratie_ Meine_van_Noordwijk_16-10-2014.pdf

References
Minang PA, et al. (Eds) 2015. Climate-Smart Landscapes: Multifunctionality in Practice. Nairobi, Kenya: World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Cairns MF (Ed) 2015. Shifting Cultivation and Environmental Change. Routledge, Abingdon, UK

Over half of the world’s energy is derived from oil and natural gas, another 30% comes from coal and peat, and 5% comes from nuclear generation. Just 13% comes from renewable sources. “If we carry on like this, energy use will double and that’s going to lead to long-term increases in atmospheric temperatures that most climate scientists believe will exceed safe limits by some distance,” says Phil Dobie, who has helped to develop the World Agroforestry Centre’s new strategy on tree-based energy.

The strategy provides an approach to developing various kinds of bioenergy, derived principally from trees, to satisfy energy needs, reduce poverty and improve livelihoods and income generation. Plants are highly efficient users of the sun’s energy, which they transform into biomass, and they could help us to develop truly renewable energy systems. “We see the strategy as a step towards making the Centre a recognized first port-of-call for people who are interested in the woody aspects of bioenergy,” says Phil.

While the strategy was being developed, good progress was made under the four-year Programme for the Development of Alternative Biofuel Crops. Funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the European Commission, the programme has established integrated agroforestry/energy projects in India, Kenya and Brazil. The main aim is to develop agroforestry models that will enable rural communities to produce biofuels from tree seeds. Besides generating energy, for example to power tractors and other machinery, the projects are helping rural families to diversify their sources of income and improve their standard of living.

In India, the programme is being implemented in Karnataka and Maharashtra, where it is supporting efforts to improve and scale up promising biofuel initiatives. Working with local partners, the World Agroforestry Centre is providing smallholder farmers in energydeprived villages with high-quality planting material and technical assistance. Farmers are being encouraged to grow species such as neem (Azadirachta indica), Mahua (Madhuca longifolia), Simarouba (Simarouba glauca) and pongamia (Millettia pinnata) on the borders of their plots and along bunds.

“As the saplings will take time to mature, we are encouraging farmers in 20 pilot villages to collect seeds from mature trees on communal land,” explains the biofuels programme director, Navin Sharma. Using machines provided by the project, the communities are using the seeds to manufacture vegetable oil, biodiesel and biogas, which they are using to run tractors and irrigation pumps, and for cooking. The oil cake which is left at the end of the process is being used as fertilizer, as a catalyst in biogas plants, and as animal feed.

Preliminary data suggest that the project is having a significant impact in terms of reducing poverty and that the model could be scaled up elsewhere. Indeed, Navin and his colleagues are already looking at establishing similar projects in Nepal and Bhutan. They have calculated that farmers adopting these energygenerating agroforestry systems could increase their incomes by up to 36% in the long-term, or even more if further investments are made.

Maximizing the potential of these systems will depend on improving the availability of high-quality germplasm and introducing improved nursery techniques, technologies for processing, and adding value to the products. The Centre is working with the Government of Karnataka and other partners to achieve these objectives.

In Kenya, the World Agroforestry Centre has entered into a partnership with the EFK group, a social enterprise which produces liquid biofuels, organic fertilizers, briquettes and poultry feed through a manufacturing process using the nut of the croton tree (Croton megalocarpus). The tree grows throughout central and west Kenya, but its commercial value has only been recently recognized. Some 2000 people are now supplying nuts to EFK’s factory in Nanyuki.

“Under the Programme for the Development of Alternative Biofuels we are helping EFK improve its business model and looking at ways in which the croton-based energy business could be scaled up,” says Rodrigo Ciannella, the biofuels programme officer based in Nairobi. “There is no doubt that croton has significant potential for rural communities across East Africa.” He estimates that around 5000 collectors will be benefiting from the harvesting of croton by the end of 2016.

During the course of the next year, Rodrigo and his colleagues will use GIS research to identify the areas where croton grows best, and collaborate with EFK to promote croton as an agroforestry crop and provide technical advice to farmers.

In Brazil, the programme is exploring the research gaps that are limiting the development and scaling up of energy production using the fruits of macaúba, a species of palm found over much of tropical South America. So far, most exploitation of macaúba has focused on natural stands of the palm in the southeastern and centre–west regions. Within the context of the biofuels programme, the World Agroforestry Centre is working with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) to develop a technological package for domesticating macaúba in the northeast region. The palm fits well into silvopastoral and agroforestry systems that integrate food crops and livestock.

At present, around 100,000 farmers in Brazil benefit from the National Biodiesel Production and Use Programme. “One of the aims of our project is to integrate family farmers in the northeast, one of the poorest parts of the country, into the national biodiesel programme,” says Rodrigo. “This would help to improve local incomes and bring some real benefits to the area.” It would also help to increase the availability of renewable sources of energy.

“Ultimately, the success of any large-scale biofuel project comes down to rigorous science that can determine what species to grow, and where and how to grow them,” reflects Navin Sharma. Trees like neem, croton and macaúba could help many tropical countries satisfy the demands for renewable sources of energy while promoting rural development.