Introduction

Abstract

Agroforestry, based on ecological principles, is of paramount importance in the areas where crop production is very insecure due to variable and harsh climatic conditions. Besides providing food, fodder, fuel, timber and several other products of day-to-day use, agroforestry offers security to inhabitants and their animals during famines and droughts. Forestry with agriculture provides support to the farming system by way of conferring stability and generating assured income. Agroforestry can mitigate the impact and consequences of these environmental limiting factors. Time-honoured suitable agroforestry models are required, especially for the arid regions. Agroforestry, as subject of scientific investigation, assumes wider recognition in view of the need to maximise production based on sustainable land management. During the past four decades, agroforestry has come of age and begun to attract the attention of the international scientific community, primarily as a means for sustaining agricultural productivity in marginal lands and solving the second-generation problems such as secondary salinization due to waterlogging and contamination of water resources due to use of excess nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides. Research efforts have shown that most of the degraded areas including saline, waterlogged and perturbation ecologies like mine spoils and coastal degraded mangrove areas can be made productive by adopting suitable agroforestry techniques involving highly remunerative components such as plantation-based farming systems, high-value medicinal and aromatic plants, livestock, poultry, forest and fruit trees and vegetables. New concepts such as integrated farming systems, domestication of high-value native plants and urban and peri-urban agroforestry have emerged.