The World Agroforestry Centre is one of several partners in a new project, Humidtropics, that aims to increase staple food crop yields by 60 percent and average farm income by 50 percent, lifting 25 percent of poor households above the poverty line.

Modern Ghana reports that the project could become the largest multi-stakeholder initiative to tackle development challenges in the humid tropics. It also has the goal of restoring 40 percent of degraded farms to sustainable resource management.

The humid and subhumid tropics of the Americas, Asia, and Africa are home to the bulk of the rural poor and suffer from depleted soil fertility.

These areas span agroforestry systems such as cocoa in West Africa, banana-based systems in East and Central Africa to intensive-mixed systems in Asia and vulnerable integrated crop-livestock systems in Central America and the Caribbean.

Led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Humidtropics provides a single research-for-development plan and unique partnership.

Read the full story: Poor farm families in the humid tropics to boost their income from improved agricultural production systems