Agroforestry in the context of land clearing and development in the tropics

The background docuaent for this Workshop has highlighted the importance and urgency of developing scientific approaches to address the critical issues of land clearing. While reviewing and evaluating the current status of methods of land clearing and formulating technological packages for improvements, which are among the specific objectives of the Workshop, it is relevant as well as essential to consider the benefits and potentials of agroforestry and other integrated land, use systems. Land clearing in the tropics whether legitimate (with governmental knowledge and approval).or otherwise, is done either for bringing the land under some pre-determined use other than the existing one or for exploiting the timber and other natural resources, In government-approved land clearings for alternate land uses, it may be possible to adopt appropriate land management strategies to ensure adequate short-term productivity and longer-term sustainability, provided that the decision-makers and policy-planners are aware of the advantages of such modern approaches and are careful about implementing them. But in common practice, such a satisfactory situation does not exist mainly because of the lack of such modern knowledge

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