Agroforestry for Sustainable Livelihoods: The Way Forward

Agroforestry has been a practice since time immemorial but as a scientific discipline, it is relatively new compared to many other agricultural science disciplines. As a scientific discipline of enquiry, agroforestry evolved since the 1970s. It is a sustainable land management system which increases the overall production of the land by combining the production of trees, crops and or animals simultaneously or sequentially on the same unit of land. Agroforestry trees benefit the livelihoods of farmers in multifarious ways, including improved well-being, increased income and savings, decreased susceptibility to various whims, and sustainable resource usage. Furthermore, because of their capacity to store carbon and balance out the losses brought on by deforestation and forest degradation, agroforestry trees have recently gained more attention in the fight against climate change and adaptation. There has been an overall increase in the area under agroforestry at the global level in 2000-2010. The overall population in the world living in an agroforestry landscape has increased from 746.7 million to 837.6 million during 2000-2010, which implies that more farmers have realized the importance of agroforestry and consequently adopted it. Keeping in view the importance of agroforestry, there is a need to further accelerate its adoption and its intensification to increase the area under agroforestry for the overall benefit of the world farming community. In India, agroforestry has received the attention of policy makers as a sustainable land use as evident from the fact that India is the first country in the world to have a dedicated Agroforestry Policy. Despite its numerous benefits, several challenges must be addressed to accelerate the widespread adoption of agroforestry.