Policy Support for Large-Scale Adoption of Agroforestry Practices: Experience from Africa and Asia

Abstract

Government policies play an important role in facilitating agroforestry promotion. Based on a set of five agroforestry practices that are adopted at a significant scale in different countries of Africa and Asia, we analyze the development path of the different practices and examine how they evolved into widely practiced systems, with the focus on the specific role that government policies had in facilitating such developments. The selected practices were regenerated parklands in Niger, cashew in Ghana, timber planting in India, smallholder fruit production in Kenya, and agroforests in Indonesia. Additionally, major roles of other key actors, such as the private sector, are examined in the light of the current state of knowledge on the policy implications on private sector investments in this field. The study reveals that both government and non-state actors played different roles to encourage the spread of agroforestry. In many cases, the spread of agroforestry was triggered when existing or new policies created market opportunities and increased the economic rationale for adopting given agroforestry systems. Widespread adoption of agroforestry is strongly influenced by the policy and institutional context within which agroforestry is disseminated. Agroforestry was found to be increasingly embedded into national development programs as evidence of its benefits became better known, although a significant number of policy measures disadvantage agroforestry. The study concludes that the dissemination of agroforestry at the farm level should be complemented with conducive policy, institutional and economic incentives. In addition, to ensure a sustained adoption of agroforestry over the long term, policy and dissemination questions will have to be researched with the same vigor that biophysical and farmer levels questions are being investigated.