Farmer awareness towards adding diverse trees to agriculture landscape

Agriculture generates large environmental externalities, many of which derive from markets' failure to value environmental and social harm and provide incentives for sustainability. There has been great potential to reverse this trend.

The practice of incorporating trees into agriculture is known as agroforestry, and it has been practised for thousands of years in a number of variations. Some involve planting trees on existing farmland, while other methods use an existing forest as a living laboratory for growing shade-loving species. These methods can avoid many of the pitfalls of our current food system, which has caused a precipitous decline in biodiversity and currently contributes around a third of global emissions. But forest farming also provides an incentive to protect existing forests themselves, by giving them an economic reason to remain standing, rather than being logged or cleared. Forest farms are usually associated with high-value species that thrive in a shaded environment, including foodstuffs like shiitake mushrooms, but also herbal and medicinal plants.

The quality and transparency of governance in the agricultural sector, including increased participation of stakeholders (specially forest dwellers, indigenous community and farmers) in decision-making, is fundamental. Strengthening developing country trade analysis and negotiation capacity and providing better tools for assessing tradeoffs in proposed trade agreements are important to improving governance.

Market and trade policies should facilitate reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture include removing resource use–distorting subsidies; taxing externalities; better definitions of property rights; and developing rewards and markets for agro-environmental services, including the extension of carbon financing, to provide incentives for sustainable agriculture.

Population as main concern to support resource sustainability

The human population is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, with the greatest increases in tropical developing nations. This growth, in concert with rising per-capita consumption, will require large increases in food and biofuel production. How will these megatrends affect tropical terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity especially in India? We foresee

1. major expansion and intensification of agriculture;

2. continuing rapid loss and alteration of tropical old-growth forests, woodlands, and semi-arid environments;

3. a pivotal role for new roadways in determining the spatial extent of agriculture; and

4. intensified conflicts between food production and nature conservation.

Key priorities are to improve technologies and policies that promote more ecologically efficient food production while optimizing the allocation of lands to conservation and agriculture. Everyone acknowledges population dynamics as a major factor in achieving sustainable land use and development in the tropics; the land-use systems it describes fit a broad range of population densities. We stress the importance of population issues, particularly in this region of the world. Still, an analysis of population densities, pressures, and trends was not part of our study, nor does the institutions' composition reflect the demographic expertise necessary to address population issues.

The land sparing – land sharing controversy: Tracing the politics of knowledge

Feeding 9 billion people by 2050 on one hand, and preserving biodiversity on the other hand, are two shared policy goals at the global level. Yet while these goals are clear, they are to some extent in conflict, because agriculture is a major cause of biodiversity loss, and the path to achieve both of them is at the heart of a public controversy around ‘productive’ land use and biodiversity conservation. Over the years, the scientific, policy, civil society and agri-business communities have been engaged in producing evidence that can support a land sparing policy (separating intensive agricultural production from biodiversity conservation) or a land sharing policy (integrating the two in larger and more extensive landscapes). This contributes to this debate by analyzing land sparing and land sharing (LSS) as a socio-technical controversy. Through the analysis of large and small corpora of scientific, policy, corporate social responsibility and sustainability standards documents we explore the ethical underpinnings and social networks that support the opposing sides of this controversy. We explore these linkages in order to explain how the concept of land sparing achieved dominance in the scientific literature and how the concept has been taken up in international policy, business and civil society circles. We examine the convergences and divergences in alliances between actors in this controversy in order to map how specific actors have promoted the concept of land sparing as the best way to used land for biodiversity and food production.

Conversely, in my opinion, guidelines for future research and policy, whether for conserving natural ecosystems or for encouraging sustainable agroecosystems, must be designed with a local perspective first and within the context of area environment, history, and culture before considering to global perspective. Each system can contribute toward the sustainability of the agricultural system in general by helping to meet the varied and changing needs facing countries in the tropics. To maintain a diversity of approaches while making real progress toward common goals is the challenge confronting all who are concerned with the future of the lands and people of the tropics.

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Therefore, it becomes necessary to maintain targets that:

• Natural resources are sustainably used:

• Forest restored and biodiversity maintained:

• Integrated multilevel biodiverse organic farming using natural soil regeneration techniques & harvesting various energies:

• Generated alternate sustainable livelihood options.

The importance of forest products

• In a village in the Philippines, rattan gathering for sale to furniture makers is a major source of income for half the people in an area where incomes and food supplies are insufficient to meet basic needs. Rattan collection in south-east Asia is estimated to have an annual value of $50 million and, with processing, involves possibly half a million people.

• Forest product processing enterprises were found to be major rural manufacturing employers in a six-country study of Jamaica, Honduras, Zambia, Egypt, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh. These businesses were among the most widely available non-farm sources of income.

• In Manipur, India, nearly 90 percent of the population depends on forest products as a major source of income. Some 250000 women are employed in collecting forest products.

• The collection of tendu (Diospyros melanoxylon) leaves for bidi cigarettes in India employs an estimated 7.5 million people part-time in the off-peak agricultural season.

Forests and agroforestry systems play important roles in stabilizing agriculture's resource base, for example, by slowing down soil erosion by wind and water and reducing sedimentation in rivers and reducing carbon footprint. In some cases, trees improve and enrich agricultural soil and help stabilize water supplies, thus improving soil productivity and making sustainable cultivation of marginal lands possible. Trees also exert important influences on micro-climates, thereby improving agricultural production and reducing climate turmoil's.

Finally, forests and farm trees augment food security by contributing to agriculture itself: they help prevent soil erosion, improve soil fertility, enhance the quality and reliability of water supplies, and help ameliorate microclimates. It is time that the forestry sector itself took the implications of these findings to heart. This will require considerable effort in terms of rewriting forest legislation and adapting forestry institutions to work for the benefit of local communities. These aims can be achieved by educating policy makers and forestry professionals for their new role, accelerating research and designing forestry projects that involve local people, particularly women. last but not the least, National forest policies and forestry institutions can be adapted to take into account the need of local people to use forest lands for farming and gathering forest products, and to help them increase production of food and cash crops on forest lands and farms through sustainable farming with forest restoration programmes.