Tree commodities are among the fastest-growing land uses in Africa, covering about 100 million hectares of arable land, engaging over 150 million farmers directly, impacting over 600 million livelihoods indirectly, and contributing to over 15% of the sub-Saharan countries' GDP. 

Further, they have a huge potential to restore degraded arable and forested landscapes across Africa in line with national, continental, and global aspirations such as NDCs, AFR100 and the Bonn Challenge. Yet, the investment in building transformative tree commodities across the continent remains low, with Africa capturing less than 10% of the global market value for the leading crop commodities. 

Consequently, farmers have remained poor, and tree commodities expansion has come at huge deforestation and biodiversity loss costs. Tree commodities in Africa not only impact the lives within the continent but also the consumer nations in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Therefore, discussion within the event will be of great interest to governments, international non-governmental organizations, investors, private companies such as processing centres and retailers, producer organizations and consumers. 

During this event, CIFOR-ICRAF will showcase the Tree Commodities and Green Resilient Economies Book and the Green Tree Commodities Initiative. It will also bring different actors to give their diverse perspectives on promoting tree commodities, including private sector perspectives, policy perspectives and marketing perspectives. Additionally, the organization will invite all its partners and donors to join the discussions, along with the African countries within which the organization has various projects.  

The event will showcase the interlinkages of tree commodities across Africa within different value webs. This will bring into perspective the agronomic, value-addition and governance pathways that currently enable the achievement of sustainable development in Africa. Additionally, the event will highlight discussions on the nexus of restoration and conservation, and economic impact among the African countries. 

Discussions on the role of tree commodities in the agriculture, trade, industrialization, and energy sectors will bring to perspective solutions across the continent and those that require further advancement. It will discuss the opportunities, barriers, and green growth pathways through tree commodities. The session aligns with the key statement from the IUCN’s position paper leading to COP 28, through positioning green tree commodities as nature-based solutions towards livelihood improvement, combating climate crisis, and addressing biodiversity loss.