Tree domestication by the World Agroforestry Centre and partners in the Peruvian Amazon: lessons learned and future prospects

1. The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) has been active in the Peruvian Amazon since 1991. In spite of changes in emphasis, organizational structure, and its collaborative arrangements, the broad focus of its work during this time has remained constant, i.e. the generation (through biophysical research) and facilitation (through biophysical and social science research and training) of means of preventing, mitigating, or reversing resource degradation. 2. The Amazon region makes up around 60% of Peru‘s terrestrial area. Much of the Amazonian population of around 3.85 million lives in poverty or extreme poverty. This situation is associated with a process of land degradation linked to increasingly short fallow periods, illegal coca cultivation, and conversion of forest to unproductive grasslands. The original forest cover has been lost from about 90,000 km 2 . Of this area, 55,000 km 2 are considered to be degraded or abandoned. Degradation processes are most advanced in terms of magnitude and intensity in the Selva Alta (rainforest in the altitudinal belt 400- 2600 m a.s.l.). 3. Although ICRAF‘s work has targeted resource -poor farmers, the underlying justification, implicit or explicit, of this work has been environmental: to slow or halt deforestation and associated environmental degradation. For this reason, ICRAF research in Peru has focused on the Amazon rather than the principal concentrations of extreme poverty and tree scarcity (i.e. parts of the Andes). 4. Until 2003, a broad programme of research was conducted, i.e. across ICRAF‘s research programmes. Subsequently, due to increasingly scarce funds, research concentrated almost exclusively on continuation of the Tree Domestication Project (TDP) begun in 1995. 5. From 2003, as a response to diminishing funding, ICRAF also led the development of the Amazon Initiative Consortium. This process led to the approval in 2007 by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Science Council of the Amazon Initiative Eco-regional Program (AI-EP). 6. With the approval of the AI-EP and its associated thematic agenda, and due to the advanced state of the TDP, and also taking account of the new CGIAR structure and the MegaProgams associated with it, ICRAF -Amazon decided to review its tree domestication activities in Peru. Accordingly, the present report, based partly on field visits and interviews in Peru in July 2009, was commissioned

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5716/WP16850.PDF

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