Across Africa millions of farmers are embracing a system of agriculture that is turning around their crop production and bringing their households and communities myriad additional benefits to boot. The farmers are finding that ‘Evergreen’ agriculture, agroforestry that integrates beneficial trees with annual crops, intensifies production while building environmental resilience.
Using evergreen agriculture farmers have turned near-deserts in the West African Sahel into productive oases. Smallholders in Zambia, Malawi, Niger, Burkina Faso and other countries on the continent have found that the shift to evergreen means that together with higher crop yields, they can now enjoy a range of tree products like fruit, fodder, firewood and timber to use and sell. These small-scale farmers are living proof that agroforestry can help deal with the related phenomena of land scarcity, food insecurity, environmental degradation, high population and an exponential growth in the global demand for food and natural resources.
Dennis Garrity, UN Drylands Ambassador and Senior Fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre, describes evergreen agriculture as “the environmentally sound farming system of the future, where annual food crops are grown under a full canopy of trees.”
The socio-economic circumstances of Africa’s hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers are as different as the continent’s vastly diverse landscapes. Research to establish the tree species that will produce the greatest benefits to farmers in these varied conditions, in the most sustainable way, continues at the World Agroforestry Centre and similar institutions. Furthermore, scientists continue to work with farmers to domesticate and improve additional tree species for use on farms. For greater adoption, efficient seed and seedling production avenues need to be worked out, education and extension services strengthened, and government policies put in place to support farmers in their shift to evergreen agriculture.
Follow the genesis and spread of evergreen agriculture in a new video that shows how African farmers are going about practicing this climate-smart farming system and reaping multiple benefits.
Related articles:
A recently launched ICRAF-coodinated project: Tree for Food Security http://worldagroforestry.org/project/aciar
Bringing the benefits of trees from the wild into the farm
