Sustainable development through trees on farms: Agroforestry in its fifth decade

As a concept agroforestry has now entered its fifth decade, as a practice it probably is as old as agriculture. This book takes stock of how concepts and practice of agroforestry have changed in the past forty years. Agroforestry started as efforts to reconcile forest restoration with farmers interest and agenda’s, seeking alternatives for the then dominant form of ‘green revolution’ focused on a few important crops only, and bridging between traditional agriculture and forestry education and curricula to help develop the capacity of new generations of professionals, better prepared for integrated rural development. Countless public policy issue attention cycles latera, the starting point for agroforestry may still be as relevant now as it was then, but it is much closer to mainstream thinking. This can be attributed to institutional change and active communication that started with the establishment of ICRAF in 1978, initially hosted at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and then moved to a new headquarter in Nairobi (Kenya)b. Thanks to this 40+ year history, we now have solid shoulders to stand on and can be more confident to express a vision of ‘transformed lives and landscapes’ with and through agroforestry – even though agroforestry itself had to be transformed and re-transformed in its own learning cycle of Diagnosis and Design. Allowing scientists to participate in farmer experiments rather than the other way around, was a radical idea, some time in the past. Conceptualization of socialecological systems and explicit scaling has advanced. A strong commitment to action, paired to a readiness to connect the farmer scale to the global discussion and negotiation tables have helped numerous young professionals and students to make connections that last throughout their careers and lifetimes. This book, a travelogue from the journeys of discovery, has three sections, that build up from the foundations in understanding trees, soils and component interactions in agroforestry, interpreted as field and farm level ‘agroforestry1’, and trace the development of ideas to the second, landscape-level concept (‘agroforestry2’) based on direct engagement in ‘learning landscapes’ across the tropical continents. Rather than focusing on specific tree-based agricultural technologies, the attention shifted to issues and constraints at the agricultureforest interface. Six chapters from Africa, Asia and Larin America provide examples of issues that needed to be resolved, for the agroforester-farmers on the ground to make progress. The final section follows this ‘moving up the scales’ one step further, with the agroforestry3 concept of integrating the agenda of agriculture and forestry into a single ‘land use’ contribution to Sustainable Development Goals; boundary-work at the science-policy interface in this stage was broadened to include negotiation support in a science-policy-praxis triangle. Many of the book chapters starting from recent review publications and ‘policy briefs’ on separate aspects; they were updated to match the overall storyline and provide references to both historical and current literature that trace the transformation of agroforestry as an idea. On behalf of the nearly 80 (co)authors, from inside and outside of permeable walls of ICRAF as a formal institution, I thank current and past ICRAF leadership for supporting and maintaining a bottom-up, participatory culture in which fierce debate on issues doesn’t interfere with friendships and mutual support. In that spirit the authors hope that the work reported here for discussions at the 4th World Agroforestry Congress in Montpellier in 2019, will soon be out of date, but be still recognizable as building block from the past.

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