Recently released guidelines to promote
agroforestry shows the industry is proffering solution to the world hunger,
according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), saying that this often neglected sector of
agriculture combines forestry with agriculture is important to the food
security and lives of millions of people in the world.
The FAO says agroforestry is an
important source of local commodities, such as timber and fruit, and fodder for
livestock, adding that with proper development, agroforestry could help solve
hunger, land degradation and poverty.
Gerard Buttoud, professor of Forest
policy at Tuscia
University in Viterbo, Italy and also a key consultant to the FAO on
developing the guidelines explained how agroforestry is a good system for
improving production at the local level because it helps to arrange the
agricultural production and the environmental benefits.
“It maximizes the production on the
long run because it produces food under the trees. The trees are then used as
means to sustain the land and the production. Also agroforestry is a very good
system to adaptation to climate change because as a complex system it minimizes
the risk,” he said.
Buttound said it is important to
have a framework in which to promote agroforestry properly. He also provided
insight into another use of agroforestry and he gave an example of a success
story in Africa.
The Arabic
gum in Sudan, for instance, he said, is known as the first category of
parklands developed through strong demand from the market to have this kind of
product.
"This resulted into a
development of agroforestry which was really productive even in terms of money
in this part of Africa,” he said.
For the farmer, he said that the
benefit comes from maintaining the soil so it could continuously produce crops
for a long period of time.
NNEKA ALAMAEZE/LS
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