Rural livelihoods: conservation, management and use of plant biodiversity - experiences and perspectives of the World Agroforestry Center in West and Central Africa

Forest loss and fragmentation over the past decades in the West and central Africa region is having a direct effect on the habitats of valuable plants, driving species isolation, reductions in species populations and in some cases, increasing extinction rates of potentially useful plants. Furthermore, some tropical rainforest plants exhibit hampered seed germination or seedling establishment through hampered natural regeneration in disturbed ecosystems. Nevertheless, these forests in West and central Africa remain important sites, habitats and sources of potentially useful plant diversity. Many tropical tree species and their products have been documented regarding the roles they play as food, medicine and other services they provide to local peoples. The exploitation, use and commercialisation of these tree products constitute an important activity to people living around forests and beyond within the region. For some of these species, existing markets have expanded within and outside their wide ecological range. As well, great potential exists for further development at the industrial level. Since 1998, the World Agroforestry Centre, Africa Humid Tropics, in partnership with several local and regional stakeholders in West and central Africa, have been implementing a Tree Domestication Programme aimed at diversifying smallholder livelihood options through the selection, multiplication, integration, management and marketing of indigenous trees/plants and their products, ensuring that they provide both livelihood and environmental services. As tree domestication itself depends on existing plant diversity, biodiversity at genetic, species and ecosystem levels have been important considerations in cultivar selection, farming systems diversification and contributing towards ecosystems resilience, respectively. This tree domestication programme is being implemented in Cameroon, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and more recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The programme started with the prioritisation of a range of indigenous fruit and medicinal tree species at local community levels. Emphasis then moved to capacity-building: training, followup and information dissemination focussing on a range of low-tech and adaptable propagation, marketing, selection, cultivation and management techniques for local level stakeholders, and training, backstopping and dissemination, for a range of regional government and non-governmental partners, in order to enhance ownership and adoption of the process. The programme has contributed to the building of both natural assets of resource-poor farmers to increase their access to a diverse range of agroforestry trees and products, and human assets for perpetuating the knowledge and experience in the region. As well, mechanisms have been developed for increasing and diversifying household revenue through better marketing of indigenous agroforestry tree products, protecting biodiversity on-farm and recognizing the value in maintaining both intra and inter-specific diversity on farms. The programme has also developed multispecies, on-farm needs-based live gene banks as well as classical ones of regionally important high-value indigenous tree species in both Cameroon and Nigeria. As the programme develops in the region, increasing emphasis is being placed on building strategic partnerships in order to achieve greater and more far-reaching impact by increasing the potential contribution that diverse agroforestry trees make to household revenue, and environmental management at farm and landscape scales.

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