Building on a solid foundation: achievements, opportunities and impact

Since its last EPMR, ICRAF has experienced a profound process of change, transforming itself from an information and advocacy council into a strategic research centre with a global mandate. These changes are reflected in a major increase in resources (from US$14 million in 1993 to US$22 million in 1998), in new staff (65% of the 1998 professional staff were not working at ICRAF in 1993), in its geographical span (from an Africa-based centre to a global centre that operates in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia), and in its up-to-date research facilities at headquarters.Behind these highly visible changes lies a deeper and significant evolution in the management of the centre (involving improvements in research management, regionalization, more delegation to 'middle management', a leaner senior management team, new information technology, more transparent activity-based budget management system), in the disciplines represented in its body of scientists now totalling 25 (for example, anthropology, landscape ecology, forest ecology and ethnobotany were not represented in 1993) and in its research (and now development) agenda (with emphasis on the multiscalar analysis of the trade-offs between environmental resilience and income production in agroforestry systems). To bring its structure in line with these various changes, ICRAF created a development division in January 1998.In this context of functional and structural changes, ICRAF has been able to produce a long list of achievements. These range from disseminating to our partners' guidelines on innovative research and development methods, to identifying the conditions in which specific agroforestry technologies will not work. These achievements are too diverse to be briefly summarised. They vary greatly across regions and programmes, reflecting differences in the history of these regions and programmes, differences in funding levels and differences in prevailing biophysical, social and economic environments.Actual impacts are, quite naturally, fewer than achievements: ICRAF is a relatively new research centre (most of its research programmes were created between 1991 and 1993). Impacts cannot therefore be expected to be comparable with those of research centres with a long history, all the more since we deal with trees, which take years to reach their 'productive' phase. Notwithstanding this, ICRAF has had different kinds of impacts, on different groups of stakeholders.First, during the last five years ICRAF has helped transform agroforestry from a largely descriptive field of study into a multidisciplinary applied science, based on process-oriented research. ICRAF has produced a new definition of agroforestry and developed a substantial list of new scientific methods and paradigms, which have benefited the global scientific community. These include the development of a tree domestication paradigm, which is replacing the more traditional tree-breeding approach to agroforestry; methods for assessing the trade-offs between global environmental benefits and economic profitability of different land-use systems; methods for analysing below-ground interactions between trees and crops; and new models (such as a decision-support system for predicting risk of deforestation and an ecological-economic farm model). In short, ICRAF has brought about major advances in the predictive understanding of agroforestry systems and in the development of a natural resource management research approach to agroforestry.Second, some of ICRAF's results and approaches have been taken on board by international institutions with policy-making powers such as the World Bank (our soil fertility replenishment paradigm has been recognised as a priority for the work in sub-Saharan Africa of the Bank, FAO, and other donors) or the Global Environment Facility (which has adopted our natural resource management approach, instead of a 'green' approach, to the management of slash-and-burn agriculture at forest margins in the humid tropics).Third, ICRAF has had impacts on regional and national institutions. Agroforestry research is now fully integrated in the agenda of many national agricultural research systems, non-government organizations and universities in the regions where ICRAF functions. The number of undergraduate and postgraduate students, trainees, tropical country scientists and development officers who have benefited from ICRAF training and information dissemination activities in these regions averages 360 per year since 1993. Many national institutions are shifting from commodity or discipline-oriented, on-station research to the multidisciplinary, more on-farm NRM approach, including the hiring of more social scientists.Fourth, ICRAF has had an impact in regional and national policy making, in particular in Southeast Asia. ICRAF developed, in collaboration with ministry officials and with direct inputs from farmers, a new 'historical decree' (to use the words of the Indonesian minister of forestry) that recognizes indigenous land rights of complex agroforests. This has a major positive impact on the welfare of thousands of households at the forest margins. At the request of the Indonesian government, ICRAF (in collaboration with the ASB consortium) has proposed a reform of export taxes for timber from agroforestry trees, and means of reducing the impact of forest fires.And fifth, ICRAF has started to have a direct impact on farmers. In southern Africa, for example, about 5000 farmers have begun to adopt improved fallows, which increase maize yields by 200 to 400%. In western Kenya, more than 1500 farmers are experimenting with a range of options for increasing soil fertility through synergies between organic (tree-based) and inorganic nutrient sources. These options increase the crop yields by 300-400% and increase profitability drastically when farmers shift to high-value crops in the replenished, fertile soils. Increasing small-scale milk production is now practised by about 2000 farmers in peri-urban areas of eastern and southern Africa, through the adoption of forage legumes fed daily to dairy cows, farmers report either doubling milk production or eliminating the need for buying feed concentrates. In the Philippines, ICRAF has helped farmers create a land care association with more than 1000 farmer members, which disseminates conservation farming methods to other farmers with 600 practising vegetative filter strips. In Indonesia 17 000 households have been positively affected by the new tenure regulation

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