There are some articles on potentials of agroforesty for regeneration or increase of productivity for abandoned lands/degraded and or lands with poor soil health. But huge area of such lands in tropics are not converted to agroforesry ecosystems. Please discuss this matter and problems or limitations for such development.
@ Ratnayake, the major limitations for such developments are: lack of knowledge of the technology, availability of suitable seeds and appropriate skills for development of agroforestry.
R M C S Ratnayake Yes, by implementing systems that mimic nature’s functions, agroforestry has the potential to remain productive while supporting a range of ecosystem services. Agroforestry can provide the next step in sustainable agriculture by promoting and implementing integrated, bio-diverse processes to increase yields, decrease harmful effects, and advance our understanding of the complex interactions involved in increasing food production while minimizing damage.
Agroforestry is used in rural communities in Latin America, Sub Sahara and Southeast Asia. It presents several advantages such as: increase in crop production, increase biodiversity, reduced erosion and sequestration of atmospheric carbon. We have basically two forms of Agroforestry. Agrisilvicultural: a combination of trees and crops. Silvipastoral : combine forestry with grazing of cattle.
Agroforestry is a multidisciplinary field and barriers to its implementation have to do also with knowledge and education. Land reclamation through agroforestry demands a more holistic understanding of land and natural resources because in a restoration effort the objective should aim at the ecological recovery of the system, rather than the yield/s of agricultural products that are needed to sustain economically, people living on the land. When agroforestry has been able to restore ecological services on the land, then the productivity of farming on the same will be secured. The education challenge (in my opinion) to prepare agroforesters consists in producing broad spectrum generalists who have been exposed to the ecology of ecosystems, their functioning and processes, rather than specialists who are able to dig deep in the role of a specific tree species and its potential benefits, but remain oblivious of its role within the whole system, which includes all biotic and abiotic factors.
Here in Brazil, I believe that one of the main obstacles is the lack of public policies aimed at encouraging agroforestry practices. Some important advances are seen in the popularization and technological development of integration systems known as crop-livestock-forestry, with the use of trees such as eucalyptus and pinus, agricultural crops such as soybeans, in a space-time consortium with livestock, as part of a large project called "Low Carbon Agriculture". However, agroecology-based systems for food production and income for poor family farmers and farmers still lack better public policies to enable more research as well as technology transfer to farmers. Meanwhile, more and more land is leased to the large producers of agricultural commodities and more areas of the Cerrado and the Amazon are occupied by livestock.
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