Tea has been grown in the Ilam district since the 1860s, and today, as in the past, many women are involved in the process – usually in picking the leaves. The women who work for large plantations frequently get lower wages than their male counterparts. Yet, things are changing, and women are playing a key role in these changes.

In collaboration with the Rural Youth Forum, students at the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences (IAAS) visited the district to analyse the changes which are taking place and to come up with recommendations. They looked at the benefits of specific techniques (like contour farming to avoid erosion) and of other products like cardamom, mangoes, bamboo or amrisho, the “broom grass”. In terms of alternatives, however, their main observations were related to the enormous potential of the area for agro-tourism.

Their discussions with women and young farmers in the district showed that many are already benefiting from it in terms of employment and incomes. With more and better services, the IAAS students also discovered why more and more tourists are coming to Ilam.

Text: Roshan Mehta

The post The Future of Family Farming – New opportunities appeared first on Ileia.

Agroforestry can produce impressive results, as several experiences confirm. In a recent (must-read) report, Olivier de Schutter, Special Rapporteur to the UN on the Right to Food, refers to agroforestry successes in Africa. He convincingly argues that a farming system that integrates annual crops, trees and animals, is a highly effective way of dealing with the challenges facing farmers today.

So it is good to see that the number of trees on farms is increasing. Farmers are more motivated to grow trees. An impressive example can be seen in Niger, where the number of trees on farms has increased by 200 million in 30 years, covering a total area of 5 million hectares. Similarly impressive are the tree-growing initiatives of marginal farmers and landless women and men in Bangladesh, who, over the past twenty years have planted hundreds of millions of trees on their homesteads, on farm land and along roadsides.

Yet one thing is crucial in these two and in all other cases: smallscale farmers and landless people will only plant and tend trees if their rights to use these trees are secure. And a lack of rights is not the only possible threat to such “regreening”. The recent surge in large-scale commercial investments in land is leading to a further marginalisation of small-scale farmers and their loss of rights to land and trees. In pursuit of “efficiency”, large-scale mechanised farms can turn vast stretches of land into ecological deserts, with not a tree to be seen.

A recent (and also a must-read) report by OXFAM argues for greater complementarity between large-scale industrialised farming and small-scale, low external input farming. Can we envisage a future where large and industrialised farms embrace agro-ecological principles, and small farmers share the responsibility of regreening the environment – and share the benefits?

Text: Edith van Walsum, director ILEIA

The post Editorial – Trees for life appeared first on Ileia.

Over the next two decades, the world’s population is expected to grow by an average of more than 100 million people a year. More than 95 percent of that increase will occur in developing countries, where pressures on land and water are already intense.

A key challenge facing the international community, as well as local institutions and farming communities is, therefore, to ensure food security for present and future generations, while protecting the natural resource base on which they depend. Trees on farms will be an important element in meeting those challenges.

Farmers in many parts of the world are enthusiastically incorporating trees into their landscapes as the benefits of doing so become clear.

Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization show that the number of trees on farms is increasing, even as the amount of forests is decreasing. In some regions, such as Southeast Asia and in Central America, tree cover on agricultural lands now exceeds 30%.

Multiple benefits from working trees

Agroforestry focuses on the wide range of useful trees that can be grown on farms and in rural landscapes. These include “fertilizer trees” for land regeneration, soil health and food security; fruit trees for nutrition; fodder trees that improve the production of smallholders’ livestock; timber and fuel wood trees for shelter and energy; medicinal trees that combat disease; and trees that produce gums, resins or latex products. Many of these trees are multipurpose, providing a range of benefits.

Agroforestry provides many livelihood and environmental benefits, increasing the assets of poor households with farm-grown trees, enhancing soil fertility and livestock productivity on farms, and linking poor households to markets for high-value fruits, oils, cash crops and medicines. Domesticating wild fruit trees, such as the African plum (Dacryodes edulis) and the bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis), using simple, sustainable technologies like nurseries, soil fertility management and domestication programmes, has allowed smallholder farmers in Cameroon to increase their earnings fivefold. Similarly, a massive communal move to plant poplar trees in irrigated wheat and barley fields in northwest India now supplies 50 percent of the country’s pulp and paper industry. Both cases show the importance of a group effort, in the same way as Jeff Follett’s article from Brazil.

Policy, land rights and ownership of trees

Yet, the contribution that trees can make on farms is strongly influenced by governance institutions, policies and rights. Trees are a long-term crop and farmers need to have secure tenure to their land before they will invest valuable time and resources in growing or nursing trees. They also need rights over the trees themselves. Changes to policies in Kenya that gave farmers ownership of trees on their land have stimulated large new investments in tree planting and care.

For agroforestry to thrive, what is needed is an intensification of the trend to devolve land and forest tenures to local people and complete the transition from exclusion to ownership. Obstacles such as the gap between forest and agricultural policies, a lack of capacity and underinvestment have hindered the widespread adoption of agroforestry.

Sequestering carbon

The United Nations declared 2011 as the International Year of Forests, emphasising the role of forests in the climate change agenda and building on several years of policy progress for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). Agriculture can reduce emissions, but so can trees in agricultural landscapes. Agroforestry blurs the agriculture-forest divide. However, climate change policies and emerging institutions perpetuate this divide, creating separate rules and incentives to govern each sector. This hinders the potential of agroforestry to play its full role as a major part of the solution to climate change.

Taking the results of a large number of studies (see http://tinyurl.com/6957366), we can confidently say that a tropical tree sequesters at least 22.6 kg of carbon from the atmosphere each year and in many cases much more. Most of the deforestation in Africa, and in parts of Asia, is caused by agricultural expansion, largely by smallholder farmers. Agroforestry can curb emissions of greenhouse gases by slowing the conversion of forest to farm land and holding carbon in the trees on the farms. Developing smallholder agroforestry on land that is not classified as forest could capture 30-40 percent of the emissions related to land-use change.

The long-term perspective

A long-term perspective is essential to meet the future challenges that increasing population will bring, especially that of increasing food supply from a diminishing area of available land. In the longer term, the emerging Evergreen Agriculture movement, which looks to reinvent agriculture trees in a radical, but entirely practical, way, is a vision of a future in which many food crops will be grown under a full canopy of trees. Evergreen Agriculture is doubling and tripling cereal crop yields in many parts of the African continent. The indigenous nitrogen-fixing tree Faidherbia or Acacia albida is increasing unfertilised maize yields in Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia and in numerous other countries. They are now being grown on over 5 million hectares of crop land throughout Niger.

The value of trees outside (as well as within) forests needs to be recognised by all involved in agricultural production, planning and policy development. Greater investment is needed in giving farmers land rights and ownership of the trees that they nurture and in supporting smallholder farmers to adopt agroforestry practices. Such support needs to include access to inputs, sector development of tree planting materials, information and training and access to credit – so that farmers can improve their incomes and ensure food security while also providing environmental benefits.

Innovative approaches are urgently needed which balance environment and development needs. In between forest and agriculture, and complementing them both, agroforestry is one of mankind’s best hopes to create a climate-smart agriculture, increase food security, alleviate rural poverty, and achieve truly sustainable development. This, in turn, will help ensure that our world’s forests can be conserved far into the future.

Text: Dennis Garrity and Paul Stapleton

Dennis Garrity is the Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, and Paul Stapleton is the Head of Communications.
E-mails: d.garrity@cgiar.org, p.stapleton@cgiar.org

The post More trees on farms appeared first on Ileia.

For over twenty years, Trees for the Future (TREES) has worked with communities around the world to integrate trees into agricultural production. Our staff has seen the impact that deforestation has had on people and the environment, including a decline in agricultural production as well as increases in diseases, the use of expensive inputs, erosion, landslides, polluted waterways and more. By bringing trees back into production systems, our projects help restore degraded lands and improve people’s lives. To reach these goals, we provide agroforestry training; seeds of multi-purpose, fast-growing tree species; technical assistance and project guidance. These are the main components of our work in Brazil.

Four communities

When we started our work in Brazil in 2008 we went to meet small-scale farmers’ associations and agricultural co-operatives to assess their interest in agroforestry. Because of the Federal Government’s ongoing initiatives to restore forest cover, many people were instantly interested. They liked the idea of planting trees that met the requirements for reforestation and that could be used for purposes such as feeding cows and reducing erosion. We started by working with several honey producing associations and agricultural co-operatives. But despite being part of an organised association or co-operative, most farmers were geographically isolated, and this made it difficult to conduct workshops, to provide regular assistance and get the participants to exchange information.

In 2009 we decided to work with associations that are more community-based, rather than the larger and more geographically dispersed groups we worked with in 2008. We chose to focus on four communities within the state of São Paulo. Three of the communities (Guaranta, Promissão Reunidas, and Promissão Dandara) are Landless Movement Settlements, while one community (Arco Iris) is an Indigenous Settlement. All of the communities can be reached by gravel road and each has a small town centre (of less than 35,000 people) within 20 kilometres. They are all approximately 400 km from the city of São Paulo. We work with between ten and one hundred individuals in each community; in each of the four communities there is a history of people working together to accomplish specific goals, such as gaining land titles. We have found that this community spirit improves their personal relations, as well as with our organisation, and has led to excellent project results.

Community-members identified the production issues that they wanted to address by starting agroforestry projects. In each case, our team worked with individuals to identify techniques and species that would improve their production systems. The main project objectives in these communities are increased and diversified production, reduced erosion and improved water availability. Each individual chose fast growing, multiple purpose tree species to plant in windbreaks, live fences, and fodder plots, as well as along waterways and in private forest reserves.

More than proximity

A sense of community has shone throughout the development of our projects. Over the past three years we have found that the percentage of people who successfully transplanted their seedlings was related to their proximity to one another. We believe this relationship is due to the number of times that our technician can visit each individual (important in light of our limited resources and small staff). The smaller the participants’ properties and the closer they are to one another, the more often they receive visits. During these visits, our technician provides important information on issues such as how to ensure the survival of seedlings. The regular visits also provide an incentive for people to follow through with their tree-based projects and convince them that we are a reliable partner.

The importance of working with a group is evident since individuals hold each other accountable for completing our training courses. This was seen during a recent site visit to Guaranta, when our staff arrived at the house of Cida and Zezão. Members of three families sat around their table reviewing the training materials and discussing specific questions. When asked why they were reviewing the materials they stated that they knew the community could only go forward with the project if most of them completed the course. They wanted to be sure that they had all fully understood what we were all talking about.

Sometimes we find it difficult to reach individuals within the communities during site visits. In these situations, we can rely on other community members to help us distribute seeds and information. They also provide updates on who is having trouble with their nurseries and can direct us to people who have specific questions. We have found communication and the co-ordination of the projects to be much more efficient and effective as a result of the tight bond found among the project participants.

No easy start

Initially we faced a lot of scepticism about our approach and our projects. Many people found it hard to believe that trees could benefit agricultural production. We addressed concerns about the loss of land for trees in our meetings and workshops in two ways. First, we tried to honestly outline how long it would take to receive benefits from the trees that people chose. Second, we relied on the results of previous TREES projects in other countries to show what can be done and what benefits result from planting efforts. The first few years were difficult because many people chose not to participate. We found that examples from other countries were not accepted as proof. People did not believe that techniques that worked in other countries would work on their land.

However, we did find some individuals who wanted to try, and they have started to see the benefits of their efforts. We are confident that our programme will continue to grow as more participants benefit from trees. The opportunity for people to see the projects in action, and for people to share information about their work, have been essential in the growth of our programme.

Other benefits
 
There are many advantages of working with organised groups. There are several government programmes (like Bolsa Família and the Direct Local Purchase programme) that purchase products from communities. As agroforestry improves production, working together helps these communities sell a higher quantity of quality products. Larger issues such as the reforestation of waterways and legal reserves also benefit from a community approach. Although each agroforestry project is an individual effort on private land, it would be harder to address these larger issues if everyone was only working individually.
 
Through working with a group we can help co-ordinate efforts to ensure that we take a landscape approach and that individuals do not have a negative effect on each others efforts. For example, if we work with a group of people with land within the same water catchment, this will have more effect in improving the quality of the water. If we only worked with one individual, the benefits of the effort could be offset by another person’s unsustainable land management practices.

When we met with people in these four communities one of their greatest complaints about agricultural projects was that an extensionist might show up once in the community, hands out materials but then never return to see how things develop. Our field staff have been absolutely crucial in alleviating fears about the commitment of TREES to these communities. People see our technician visiting every week or two and understand that we consider ourselves to be part of the community effort to address economic, social, and environmental issues. We often hear people joking with one another about not completing the next step in the project. Part of that joking usually includes a reference to our staff visiting the community and how bad it would look if they were lagging. It is apparent that there is a certain level of social and peer pressure which helps ensure the projects are completed.

Not long ago, an official from the government agency responsible for landless settlements in São Paulo attended a TREES presentation. He did not believe all of the results that had been presented so he went to visit individuals in Guaranta. To the official’s surprise, the community confirmed that we had assisted them by helping to plant trees. In the 2010 nursery season almost one hundred project participants transplanted approximately 120,000 seedlings to diversify their incomes and improve yields, improve nutrition or conserve soil and water. In early 2011 participants direct seeded another 340,000 plants for agricultural production and 70,000 plants for conservation. Our relationship with participating communities is essential in enabling us both to achieve such positive results.

Putting principles into practice

We have found a direct relationship between the proximity of people, the strength of a community and the success of agroforestry projects. Our organisation’s relationship with communities and the resulting trust has increased our ability to reach people and to work toward improved agricultural production, increased conservation and enhanced nutrition.

There is a tendency for projects to get more impersonal as they increase in size and become more geographically dispersed. In response to this, we are currently working on ways to apply our communitybased approach as we expand to new areas. Constant contact with communities through field visits creates an environment for open communication and will produce a feedback system that allows communities to guide the projects. Being part of the community allows us to identify risks and make appropriate adaptations to ensure that people’s needs are met and that we build upon the motivation of the people with whom we work.

Text: Jeff Follett

Jeff Follett works as the South America Programme Officer in Trees for the Future. E-mail: jeff@treesftf.org. More information about their work can be found on their website: www.plant-trees.org

The post The TREES experience in São Paulo appeared first on Ileia.

International year of the forest 2011Because of its growing demand for inputs and energy, it is increasingly evident that the Green Revolution approach is environmentally unsustainable. But also, and most of all, it is unsustainable because it has an inherent tendency to reduce biodiversity. It is not just a coincidence that the degradation of different Brazilian ecosystems is directly related to the advance of monocultures and the use of chemical inputs, along an ever-expanding “agricultural frontier”. While the destruction of our ecosystems began 500 years ago, there is no doubt that the greatest damage has occurred seen since the “modernisation process” started in the 1960s.

Figures recently released by the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment are alarming, and contradict reports published by many other organisations. The Pampa Gaucho, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul (which borders Argentina and Uruguay) has already lost 54% of its original forests, mostly as a result of the new soybean farms, livestock, and, more recently, the large-scale plantation of trees for pulp. The Brazilian Cerrado, with a total area of more than 2 million km2, has already lost 48% of its original cover. The changes seen in the states of Maranhão, Tocantins and Bahia show the enormous impact of the soy industry, with 85,000 km2 lost between 2002 and 2007. The same has been seen in the Mata Atlántica, where the production of ethanol has led to a loss of 75 percent of the forested area. The government has frequently mentioned positive trends in the Amazon region, yet the figures released show that the loss rate of forested areas in the state of Amazonas actually grew by 91 percent. Upward trends are also reported for the states of Rondônia and Maranhão.

Notwithstanding this bleak picture, the Brazilian Minister of Agriculture had the affront to say, in an interview last March, that the intensification of agriculture in areas like the Cerrado “does not have any environmental impact”. The Brazilian authorities feel able to continue supporting the current policies of producing and exporting commodities without any worries. Yet, considering how much we are losing in terms of forests and biodiversity, there is a lot to worry about and, during this International Year of Forests, very little to celebrate. Only those behind these policies are celebrating. We should ask them if they’ll continue celebrating in a few years when even more has been lost. I am starting to worry for my grandchildren.

Text: Francisco Roberto Caporal

Francisco Roberto Caporal, lectures at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Brazil. He is also President of the Brazilian Association of Agroecology.
Email: caporalfr@gmail.com

The post An incompatible approach appeared first on Ileia.

Amidst a dense canopy of teak trees, a beaming Dina Nath Singh lists the many benefits coming from the 265 hectares of forested area that he has helped establish. Protected and replanted since 1997, the manmade forest in the village of Jaitpur Kachhya, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, is an oasis in an otherwise denuded area. While lopping and collecting litter from the forested area have been tangible benefits for the villagers, Mr Singh is more interested in talking about the intangible benefits that the community draws from the greenery. “The fact that many like me lead a healthy life may have to do with the fresh air we receive as a bargain”, he says. Being the founding chairman of the local Primary Farm Forestry Co-operative Society, he has a deep personal commitment towards forests and the environment.

Located about 50 km from the district town of Sagar, this forest co-operative has been effective in regenerating and conserving trees on public (government-owned) land. And as one travels some 10 km further from Jaitpur and approaches Dungariya, the forested hilltop can hardly be missed. An area of 212 hectares stands tall, covered with a wide variety of trees. According to the co-operative secretary, Rajneesh Mishra, “the area only needed protection for the root stock to regenerate and that is what we have done”. As a consequence, all along the periphery of the slopes the water levels in the village wells have shown marked improvement.

More than 4,800 hectares have been brought under tree cover through 29 co-operative societies in this district alone, showing that the rolling landscape is well suited for farm forests. And this total represents only one-fifth of the total number of Primary Farm Forestry Co-operative Societies (PFFCS) set up during the past 13 years by the Indian Farm Forestry Development Co-operative, or IFFDC. In total, IFFDC has helped 143 co-operative societies regenerate some 27,000 hectares of wastelands with trees in 13 districts in the states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

A forestry initiative

The Indian Farm Forestry Co-operative (IFFDC) was established by the Indian Farmers Fertilizer Co-operative (IFFCO), one of the largest fertilizer co-operatives in the country. Since its inception, IFFDC has promoted farm forestry as a way of regenerating wastelands.

Their main interest was a model which would emphasise and help increase the role of the local community in managing and regenerating wastelands. The adoption of a co-operative model for forest farming was therefore the obvious choice, considering that:

• co-operatives have a legal status, and are not subordinate to the government;
• co-operative institutions are both economic and social entities, not mere charitable trusts or social clubs where members participate in social or recreational activities;
• the members are the owners: they have rights and responsibilities associated with electing directors and with giving general direction to their organisation;
• there is clear involvement of the members and this influences decision-making;
• the membership is diverse;
• their success depends on the efforts of their members, their mutual solidarity, their trust in their leaders and on their willingness to make sacrifices.

Another concern was how to achieve similar advantages to those provided by other models. Sacred groves are wooded areas that have existed for a very long time (in most cases dating from before the laws of the country were drafted). They are currently “socially protected” and are left undisturbed. In contrast, “joint forest management” programmes are agreements between a state’s Forest Department and local village forest committees, which give communities the right to extract non-timber forest products.

The co-operative farm forestry model is somewhere between the two: communities revere the forests, like sacred groves, yet also pursue economic activities based on the extraction of non-timber products and mature trees. Besides such products, the farm forests provide clean water and air, while the teak, eucalyptus, neem and bamboo farms also support animal biodiversity. But as an institutional innovation to generate and protect woodlots, farm forests still face a few unresolved issues.

Supplementing farm income

The first of these issues concerns the expected benefits. Although intangible benefits are acknowledged by some co-operative members, farm forestry on degraded lands has been promoted as a strategy for supplementing the limited income which farmers get from agriculture, integrating forestry into their regular farming practices. The way in which individual farming households are profiting varies as the schemes have been established on land under different forms of ownership.

Farmers in Rajasthan used panchayat land (common land at a village level); in Uttar Pradesh they used individually owned plots and in Madhya Pradesh state-government-owned lands. The commercialisation of different products (such as firewood) has meant that co-operative members are being paid for their efforts, and in some cases it is heard that the forestry co-operatives “have come to the rescue of the poor”.

In the districts of Sagar, Tikamgarh and Chhattarpur, in Madhya Pradesh, the total amounts which are reaching farmers are considerable: a total of 900,000 rupees, or US$ 20,000 for one year. The income from 6,251 hectares of afforested land has been shared equally between the 3,237 members. Yet, the net gain received by each member is not much, nor has it risen with time. This has led to brewing unrest amongst a large number of members, all of whom supposed that, once the woodlots were mature, they could share the benefits of the timber and that this would considerably increase their annual incomes.

Lack of clarity over ownership

Linked to these problems there is a second issue to deal with. The Forest Department and the forest co-operatives don’t always agree on who is the legal owner of mature trees. The Forest Department has been proclaiming ownership in some locations, and the current Forest Act prevents the co-operatives from selectively felling trees from non-forest lands. Similar uncertainties are also found within each co-operative, as seen in Jaswant Nagar, a village in the district of Tikamgarh. It has a 92-member Primary Farm Forestry Co-operative Society that has been allotted, on lease, 314 hectares of government land.

Over the past seven years, over 204,000 trees of different species converted the abandoned land into a dense patch of forest. But only a few weeks ago, the stillness of the night was shattered as many an axe fell on the woodlot. A group of a hundred people was felling the trees indiscriminately. By dawn, the felled wood was hidden in people’s cowsheds and the eaves of their houses.

The power-struggle between two factions in the village triggered one of them to cut down all the trees, and although everyone knew who was behind it, no one would utter a word for fear of retribution. Eighty women members of the co-operative society had the courage to complain and bring matters to the police, but the damage had already been done, and the forest co-operative is on the verge of collapse.

Risks and rights

This case is far from unique. Forest farms on previously bare land create a considerable economic value. It is therefore important that legal tenure rights are clearly defined beforehand to prevent conflict. Before initiating forest co-operatives it is thus important to assess if the group has (or can have) the legal right over the capital value of the trees on the land. Who is a legal member of the group, and how can this member claim his or her forest shares?

The contribution of tenure rights is best shown by a practical example from another state. In the early 1990s, the Forest Department in Haryana decided to lift the ban on felling and selling a few fastgrowing tree species. Farmers started planting poplar trees along their fields. Within ten years, Haryana has become a centre of plywood manufacturing with an estimated 50,000 trees being brought to the market every day. Farmers and the environment benefit accordingly.

Projects and programmes around the world are finding ways to compensate farmers for the services that trees can bring and the co-operative model is showing clear results. It is also showing, however, that farm forests are still constrained by existing laws and regulations. Disappointingly, programmes like the Green India Mission do not yet acknowledge the role of forest co-operatives in increasing the presence of trees on non-forest lands. In the coming year, the forest co-operatives will demand recognition of farm forestry and the provision of a legal and institutional framework that can help them scale up and replicate their initiatives across the country.

Text: Sudhirendar Sharma

Sudhirendar Sharma (sudhirendarsharma@gmail.com) works at The Ecological Foundation in New Delhi, India and researches and writes on environment and development issues. The author wishes to thank and acknowledge the inputs from Dr H.C. Gena, Project Manager, IFFDC, New Delhi, for his help in writing this paper.

The post Rights and ownership: “It’s our forest” appeared first on Ileia.

The current and impending food crises are increasing pressures on the ownership of land and its use for agriculture. What are the implications of this for family farmers? Land grabs cause large scale migration, poverty and conflict – not to mention environmental impacts. Biodiversity decreases when small family farms are replaced by mono-crops treated with pesticides and fertilizers. Small-scale farmers have little power to farm sustainably if they don’t have control over land: secure access to land is a prerequisite for farmers to invest in sustainable agriculture. Land grabs give rise (directly or indirectly) to other issues, the rights of pastoralists, ethnic or political conflicts, and can also threaten protected areas.

The key question is: who has the rights to land, or to determine what happens to it? In some countries, the central government is the main decision making authority over land issues, while in others this control is delegated to local authorities, or traditional leaders. Land policies can undermine collective land management, as land is divided up and allocated to individuals. Farmers are often excluded from land planning processes: they are overruled by local leaders or removed from their land without warning. Also among farmers, some have more access to, control over and rights to land than others. Minority groups, for example, including the indigenous population, often have less power over land. The same is true in many societies for women, who have less influence when it comes to decision making and ownership. How can (all) farmers be included in all decision-making processes?

We welcome your suggestions and contributions in the form of articles, photographs, contacts of people with expertise in this area or ideas for other topics you think should be addressed. Please write to Jorge Chavez-Tafur, editor, before September 1st, 2011. E-mail: j.chavez-tafur@ileia.org

The post Call for contributions: Land and land rights appeared first on Ileia.

The idea behind focusing on export markets is that building direct links between smallholders and big business can cut out the middle man and deliver better prices to farmers.

The trouble with exports

But too often, this approach ignores the important role that many products play in local economies. Speaking at the provocation, Harm van Oudenhoven, coordinator of the Tropical Commodity Coalition, said that in Nicaragua, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) have put huge efforts into stimulating the production of quality cacao by connecting farmer cooperatives to large foreign companies.

“It seemed that if cacao could be produced by farmers and exported at a reasonable price, development goals would be achieved,” he said. But what about local markets? Cacao has played an essential role in the local economy for more than a thousand years, said Van Oudenhoven. “Millions of people drink cacaobased drinks and yet I know of no NGO putting time and effort into improving the cacao production for use in local drinks.”

Van Oudenhoven argued that it would make more sense to focus on improving local production, local knowledge and local markets before looking to regional or international opportunities. His point was echoed by several participants, including fellow speaker Roger Blein from Bureau Issala, who said “Before conquering world markets, we need to focus on regional and local ones.” One online participant suggested that a progressive approach — starting with local markets then moving up to regional, national and finally export ones — would also help farmers reduce risk.

Julienne Brabet from Université Paris Est Créteil raised an important question, asking “if we don’t start with local development and go straight for an exportdriven economy, will we miss the target of alleviating poverty?”
Van Oudenhoven’s answer: yes — linking to export markets may be positive for some farmers but not for all. “The coffee sector in Nicaragua has been helped quite a lot by NGOs, which is fine, but other sectors are still struggling with the same problems they were facing 20 years ago.”

Other local actors lose out too. “With an international business dominating the local market the development of local traders is by-passed, the higher quality produce is exported leaving local producers with the inferior product and often with a shortage,” said van Oudenhoven.

Jérôme Coste, director of the Institut de Recherches et d’Applications des Méthodes de développement (IRAM) agreed, adding that in his experience, a focus on exports can, in some cases, also increase socio-economic inequalities at the local level.

Partly this is because, as noted by one online participant, when you start getting involved with big business — even for Fairtrade products — attention is focused only on price and other key aspects of making markets work for the poor, such as capacity building, fall by the wayside.

The hard path

A focus on exports has big implications for food security too, according to Blein. This is because it acts as a disinvestment in the food sector. The result is that agricultural areas of Western and Central Africa — where 70 per cent of the population is involved in agriculture — now find they have a negative balance of food despite being large exporters, still reliant on imports to meet demand for staple foods such as rice, milk and meat.

Blein argued that the development of value chains would have more impact if we respected staple food crops. Earnan O’Cleirigh, from the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee agreed, arguing that the problem is that development agencies and NGOs tend to focus on markets based on commercial opportunities rather than picking markets that are important for the poor and on which they base their livelihoods. For many people in sub-Saharan Africa, these are basic food crop markets — rice, cassava, sorghum, millet and banana, for example.

So why don’t we focus on these local markets? It’s largely because they are difficult. “They don’t link easily into export markets except regionally, they don’t have big commercial opportunities and they work very inefficiently,” O’Cleirigh said.

It seems that development actors too often seek out interventions that will be seen to be successful. But if we are to really make markets work for the poor, perhaps we must start choosing the hard path.

More information

To find out more about the provocations visit www.iied.org/provocations, where you can also find links to watch past seminars on producer agency, on “rights versus markets” and on making markets work for smallholders.

Text: Sian Lewis

The post Provocation seminars: Going local appeared first on Ileia.

For several decades, forests and grazing lands in Africa have continued to deteriorate, and rural communities have taken the blame for cutting down trees and overusing common land. But since the 1950s governments and the global conservation movement have deliberately excluded farmers from this resource, taking over control of forests and establishing parks or government-managed forest reserves.

Farmers thus lost their feeling of ownership, while their numbers grew and the forests and communal lands were not fully protected. The result is that, today, large areas of previously forested land have been lost.

Forested watersheds where biodiversity thrived and which provided clean water, fuel and timber in abundance have now dwindled. Can farmers provide environmental services (such as habitats for wildlife, carbon sequestration, climate regulation or the regulation of water flows and quality) in addition to producing food? Around big cities in Africa the situation is particularly precarious. But the rural communities who have been blamed for most of the degradation are best placed to become wardens of the environment. So far, farmers in Africa have rarely been rewarded for their environmental services. Some live next to hydroelectric power plants that utilise water from their land and yet they are not provided with electricity. These farmers continue to use wood for their fuel, and hence continue to degrade forest ecosystems.

Agroforestry is uniquely suited to improving food and fuel security, while sustainably managing agricultural landscapes so they continue to provide essential ecosystem services. But how do we get more farmers to adopt agroforestry and other suitable land use practices that secure the continued provision of these environmental services?

Experimenting with rewards

The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is conducting research on the ways to promote more productive, diversified, integrated and intensified agroforestry systems that provide livelihood and environmental benefits. ICRAF is working with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in a research programme aimed at building knowledge about the necessary rewards for environmental services. This programme is called “Pro-poor Rewards for Environmental Services in Africa” (PRESA), and is linked with local research and farmers’ groups to identify and establish those arrangements that bring multiple benefits. The programme is working in seven sites (three core and four associate sites) in the highlands of East and West Africa, where there is immense pressure from growing human populations and demand for increased food production. PRESA does not consider rewards for environmental services solely in terms of monetary compensation, but has adopted a broader perspective (see box).

A first condition is that those who need the environmental service recognise the importance of rewarding the one who provides it. As a marketbased mechanism, with buyers and sellers, rewards for environmental services must involve establishing a correct price. Price setting is difficult because the market for environmental services is neither open, nor transparent. With little data from related markets it is often difficult to determine a market price. Moreover, buyers cannot choose their suppliers. For example, a water scheme has to make a deal with a particular group of farmers – it cannot look for another (cheaper) group outside the catchment area of their water source. So buyers and suppliers need to strike a deal – which can easily result in dissatisfaction or conflict.

Auctioning services

A pilot programme in Malawi where farmers get cash payments for growing trees could provide useful lessons in price setting. A study by ICRAF researchers in 2008 examined two different approaches to setting prices and allocating environmental service contracts: an auction and a fixed price offer.

An initial survey identified 27 villages with 538 households. A total of 467 people were registered as eligible for the contracts and divided into two equally-sized groups. The first group was exposed to the “auction” method. Individuals made bids on how much money they would require to allocate half an acre of their farms to trees. The bid cards were collected and the data analysed. Naturally, there were both high and low bids, varying from 100 Malawi kwacha (€ 0.46) to almost 1 million kwacha!

The second group was exposed to a “fixed price” method. The data from the “auction” was used to set a realistic price, considering everyone’s opinion and the available budget. This was offered to the second group as a fixed price: 12,000 kwacha (circa € 55) per half an acre. Over 90 percent of those in the second group agreed to this price. This exercise is expected to avoid any potential conflicts, as it has transparently set a clearing price mechanism that was offered to anyone interested in a contract.

Pricing water quality

What kind of rewards?
 
Rewarding communities for environmental services can provide powerful incentives and efficient mechanisms for conservation, while also offering new sources of income to support rural livelihoods. Rewards can come in different forms. The best known system is that of “Payments for Environmental Services” or PES, which make direct payments to farmers.
 
Examples are direct deals between water and hydropower utilities and communities living in catchment areas, and payments for carbon sequestration. The latter involves global systems of trade in terms of carbon credits. Other rewards create opportunities for economic benefits for farmers. They include the use of certificates and labels in order to access a better market, community-based eco-tourism, conditional tenure rights in areas where land and resource ownership is communal, or specific rights to harvest and sell tree products from public land.
 
Other types of rewards are the support to livelihood conditions for farmers. The service “buyer” provides infrastructure – schools, roads or water holes – in exchange for more environment-friendly farming. Building the capacity of farmers is another possible reward: better management of degraded ecosystems can restore the productivity of land and provide local communities with food and fuel.
 
In all cases a major issue is the monitoring of the services as well as the level of the reward provided. Who measures the services, how is the reward level set, how are rewards delivered, and how can you make sure that farmers actually get the reward they earned?

In Kenya, the Sasumua watershed supplies Nairobi with almost 20 percent of its water needs. Most of the rivers feeding the Sasumua Dam flow through intensively cultivated areas, where land use decisions have a great impact on downstream water flows and quality. Over the last few years, the area has seen a clash of interests between water authorities and local communities. A fair reward system might help to create a win-win situation.

In such a situation, what level of rewards would be fair to both parties? The project first sought to understand how agricultural best practices, such as contour grass strips, contour farming and agroforestry, affect the quality and regime of water flowing into the reservoir and treatment plant. The project also determined sediment levels and the cost of purifying water under different land management scenarios. A cost-benefit analysis of conservation practices and savings allowed land owners and the Nairobi Water Company to make a decision on how to set a reward scheme, and on whether to participate in it or not.

The Sasumua Water Resources User Association, a local group for the equitable allocation of water rights, says that its members are more interested in obtaining assistance to implement land conservation measures than in cash payments. They want the Nairobi Water Company to help them to establish rain water harvesting technologies.

Mixed rewards

The role of agriculture and forestry in carbon sequestration to mitigate global climate change is well documented, but it is difficult to price carbon or find ways so that communities benefit from this exercise. Ecotrust Uganda, an organisation that is developing environment conservation financing, is working in a carbon sequestration scheme with small-scale farmers. The scheme prepares a contract with individual farmers with targets for establishing trees.

Farmers who achieve the targets are issued carbon payments of 632 euros for establishing and maintaining one hectare of woodlot. The payments come from local and multinational corporations interested in carbon credits, such as Tetra Pak, Camco, Nedbank and African Safaris. The majority of farmers participating have between one-half and two hectares, resulting in payments ranging from € 316 to € 1,264. This total is paid in five instalments over a ten-year period, provided that producers continue meeting certain “milestones”. Apart from providing additional income, the trees protect soils from erosion while providing shade, medicine, fruit, wood fuel and construction materials.

When carbon payments are distributed to each individual farmer, the amount often doesn’t justify the effort. So most carbon projects (and other PES projects) in the region tend to focus on collective benefits to a community, for example, roads, schools, access to markets, access to farm inputs, etc. One way to optimise the benefits for individual farmers is to initiate nature-based enterprises through “ecolabelling” schemes. Such a label provides products such as honey, baskets and fruits with better access to global markets and relatively higher prices. Ecolabelling can become an important extra source of income for farmers and contributes to sustainable carbon binding.

Policy solutions

Policy makers have grappled with the dilemmas of livelihoods and conservation for decades, and they welcome the arrival of schemes that offer practical solutions. Farmers can be convinced of the merits of sustainable land use management if such schemes consider the costs in terms of lost income opportunities, or the costs of implementing land management technologies. Rewards for environmental services offer an obvious compromise between livelihoods and conservation. There is no denying that there is much to learn on how to establish efficient and sustainable mechanisms to reward communities for sustainable land use and to ensure that buyers of environmental services can be sure that they get value for their money. But in the long-term it is the only solution to overcome further degradation of the rural environment in Africa.

Text and photo: Godfrey Mwaloma

Godfrey Mwaloma is Communications Officer at the PRESA project at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya. E-mail: g.mwaloma@cgiar.org.

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Each one of us, whether as a producer or as a consumer of agricultural products, can have a strong influence on how these are produced. Hence there is a need to inform and educate everyone about how farming can be efficient and sustainable. A particularly relevant aspect of this is the biodiversity of a farm or a region – an issue that is recognised as important by the international community through the Convention on Biological Diversity. Since 2008,

The Green Wave campaign has contributed significantly to the annual celebration held on the 22nd of May, the day proclaimed by the UN as the International Day for Biological Diversity. Taking part in it is easy and fun. As the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Ahmed Djoghlaf, explains, “we have kept the project simple and adaptable to enable the participation of as many schools and young people as possible around the world.

Teachers have access to a series of resources and guiding instructions on the Green Wave website. They are welcome to create their own projects and/or integrate biodiversity components in their existing curricula”.

This year’s theme, reflecting the International Year of Forests, was forest biodiversity. As always, participants were requested to count down to 10:00 a.m. local time, when they planted a locally important tree species. Wherever this was not possible, for example because of climatic reasons, students could still participate in the event by watering the trees in their schoolyard, or by taking another action to support trees and forests. Each single action contributed to the creation of a figurative “green wave” travelling west around the world.

The Convention on Biological Diversity aims to conserve biodiversity, ensuring the sustainable use of biodiversity and enabling the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from this. To know more about the Convention you can visit its website: http://www.cbd.int. In 2012 the theme of The Green Wave will reflect the importance of marine and coastal biodiversity.
 
All the information and instructions for teachers and students interested in taking part are available (in English French, Japanese and Spanish) at The Green Wave website: http://greenwave.cbd.int.

Why planting trees? “In terms of learning”, according to Dr Djoghlaf, “what better than a tree to demonstrate the interconnectedness of species and ecosystems? A growing tree represents a microcosm of biodiversity, a micro-ecosystem in itself – sustaining life in the soil and the roots, in the bark, leaves, flowers and branches – microscopic organisms, fungi, plants and animals of all kinds… There is so much there to observe and study!” “Moreover,” he continued, “there is something fascinating and intrinsically attractive about planting trees. There is strength in the idea of giving and sustaining life – and in particular to something that could live and grow for centuries.” The idea of co-operation, working together to make a big difference, is another key aspect of the campaign.

The promoters’ hope that participants will associate caring for nature with the real pleasures of discovery, sharing and giving something back. “We also hope that they enjoy working together as a group, and as part of a worldwide movement. They get a chance to be part of a global community of young people who care for the planet and co-operate, beyond borders, to safeguard the well-being of humanity”.

Text: Nicola Piras

Illustration: Fred Geven

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