Quality Planting Material: Need for Guidelines and Accreditation

Trees are an integral part of agricultural landscapes and are playing increasingly important roles in income provision for rural households. Our farmers still prefer to purchase planting material rather than producing their own. Often the nurseries operate with minimal inputs and outdated techniques, and produce poor seedlings. Disappointment about slow development or even seedling death is common, and many farmers loose interest in tree planting out of frustration over bad planting material. If the tree nurseries fail to produce high quality seedlings, deforestation and loss of valuable genetic resources will continue and will devastate our landscapes. Easy access to, and unhindered availability of, Quality Planting Material (QPM) of agroforestry species is the need of the hour, especially in focus of the government’s various missions on greening through plantations, agroforestry, horticulture, and road side plantations. To ensure production and supply of quality planting material of tree species, a nationally accepted guidelines for both production and accreditation of nursery is urgently needed.

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