Annual Report 2007-2008: Agroforestry for food security and healthy ecosystems.

During recent months, rising food prices have led to riots, protests and ever lengthening food queues in countries as far afield as the Ivory Coast and Indonesia, Haiti and Thailand. Less visible, and seldom reported, has been the misery caused to tens of millions of families who can no longer afford to adequately feed themselves. In September 2008, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the global food crisis —prices had risen by over 80 per cent in 3 years—had added at least 75 million people to the 850 million already suffering from hunger and poverty. To avert disaster, FAO indicated that the world needed to mobilize US$30 billion a year. The aim: to double food production by 2050, when the population will be around 9 billion. A variety of factors have led to rising food prices, including dramatic increases in the price of oil and other fuels, a lack of investment in the agricultural sector, an increase in demand for meat and grain in growing economies like China, the expansion of the biofuel sector, and land degradation and declining soil fertility. Tackling the global food crisis will therefore require a range of vigorous activities and initiatives. Our experience suggests that agroforestry science, and its application in development by smallholders throughout the tropics, must play an important role in achieving greater food security. The incorporation of a diverse variety of trees into agricultural systems can increase crop productivity, increase the incomes of smallholder farmers, and improve nutrition, especially among the rural poor. Here, briefly, is some of the evidence.

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