Agroforestry is a Form of Sustainable Forest Management: Lessons from South East Asia

Agroforestry as land use based on planted trees, provides productive and protective (biological diversity, healthy ecosystems, protection of soil and water resources, terrestrial carbon storage) forest functions that societies care about in the debate on sustainable forest management. Yet, the trees planted in agroforestry systems are excluded in formal definitions and statistics of ‘forestry plantations’ and overlooked in the legal and institutional framework for sustainable forest management. A paradigm shift is needed in the forestry sector and public debate to redress this oversight. We examine five issues that hinder a regreening revolution based on farmer tree planting to contribute to sustainable forest management. First, issues of terminology for forests, plantations and reforestation are linked to land tenure and land use restrictions. Second, access to high quality planting material of proven suitability remains a challenge, especially at the start of a farmer-tree-planting phase of a landscape. Third, management skill and information often constrain production for high market values. Fourth, overregulation often restricts access to markets for farmer grown timber and tree products, partly due to rules intended to curb illegal logging from natural forests or government plantations. Fifth, there is a lack of reward mechanisms for environmental services provided by agroforestry. Current relationships between agroforestry and plantation forestry are perceived to be complementary, neutral or competitive, depending on the ability of (inter)national policy frameworks to provide a level playing field for the provision to society at large of productive and protective forest functions. In conditions where large-scale plantations operate with substantial government subsidies (direct or indirect, partly justified by environmental service functions), in contrast to non-existent or minimal subsidies for agroforestry, the potential to produce wood and simultaneously provide for many forest benefits and ecological services with agroforestry is placed at a disadvantage, to the detriment of society at large. Introduction: including agroforestry can benefit sustainable forest management 1 World Agroforestry Centre, ICRAF-SE Asia PO Box 161, Bogor, Indonesia; Tel: +62 251 625415; Fax: +62 251 625416; Email: [email protected] ; www.icraf.org/sea 2 Winrock International, Bogor, Indonesia. [email protected] 3 Forest and Nature Conservation Research and Development Center (FNCRDC), Jl Gunung Batu, Bogor, Indonesia. [email protected] 4 Global Coordinator, Alternatives to Slash and Burn Programme (ASB), ICRAF, Nairobi, Kenya. [email protected] Thursday 27 March 2003 Ensuring SFM Session Paper 17 2 Over the past 50 years the earth’s population doubled to reach its current level of 6 billion. Today the world’s population is increasing by 80 million annually, with the total projected to reach 10 billion within 40 more years. If the Millennium Development Goals are to be realized, a considerable per capita increase in the provision of productive and environmental service functions is needed on the same total land base. Global population growth and increasing wealth (Millennium Development Goals) exert pressure to convert forests to agricultural, industrial, or residential uses. It also results in an increase in the demand for wood fiber, exerting pressure to increase tree production per unit ‘forest’ land. Forests are also expected to meet an expanding array of social objectives, like clean water, recreation, and biodiversity. Forestry as a sector is striving to meet these needs with a decreasing land base for forestry in its current form. Luckily, a major opportunity to meet the challenges exist, if only we are able to break the traditional sectoral divide between ‘agriculture’ and ‘forestry’, and recognize ‘agroforestry’ as farmer-led efforts to meet livelihood needs on a limited land base without categorical distinctions between ‘perennial’ and ‘annual’ components of their enterprise. In this paper we will draw on some of the successes of farmerled tree planting in Southeast Asia and their relation to ‘sustainable forest management’. Ultimately the sustainability challenge is to find ways to sustain the provision of goods and services that society derives from forests in ways ...that” meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (Bruntland Commission, 1987). Sustainability in this sense does not imply ‘keeping everything as it has always been’. In fact sustainability requires a constant search for new ways to meet the overall goals, while addressing current challenges. There have been several large efforts throughout the world to identify criteria and indicators by which to gauge the progress of sustainable forest management. The Montreal Process on Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) identified seven criteria, of which the first six are essentially a statement of the goods and services that society derives from its forests: 1) Biological diversity 2) Wood and non-timber products 3) Healthy ecosystems 4) Soil and water resources 5) Maintaining carbon cycles 6) Multiple socioeconomic benefits 7) Legal and institutional framework Agroforestry practices and agroforests are an important category of planted forests that have the potential to provide a wide array of forest-related benefits to society, generally meeting criteria 1 – 5 of this list. There may be quantitative differences in the degree these criteria are met in ‘agroforestry’ compared to ‘plantations’, depending on tree density, species diversity of planted trees and spatial arrangement in the landscape. While agroforests are typically less diverse than native forest, they do contain a much greater number of plant and animal species than forest plantations (Michon and de Foresta, 1990, 1995; Murdiyarso et al., 2002). This diversity can, at time, provide ecological resilience and contribute to the maintenance of beneficial ecological functions. Similar to plantation forests, agroforests are “working forests” and they can help relieve some of the pressure to harvest native forests (although their presence as such is not a sufficient condition for protection of old growth forests (Angelsen and Kaimowitz, 2001; Michon and Bompard, 1987; Tomich et al. 2001a, b). Linked systems of upland and riparian tree-based buffer systems, designed in regards to other landscape practices and features, can optimize soil and water conservation in the watershed (Van Noordwijk et al., 1998b), along with other economic and social services. Much of the opportunity to store carbon through afforestation will occur on agricultural lands due to the vast land area devoted to agriculture throughout the world (Watson et al., 2000; Smith and Scherr, 2002). Thursday 27 March 2003 Ensuring SFM Session Paper 17 3 Socioeconomic Benefits Criterion 6 of the Montreal process may differentiate agroforestry from plantations. Perspectives on socio-economic benefits depend on the general context of ‘development’ and the constraints to ‘livelihoods’ that entails. In societies where a major part of the population still makes their living of the land, the first concern may be income – and it is here that agroforestry efforts differ from conventional ‘tree plantation’ efforts (Dixon, 1995; Leakey and Sanchez, 1997). Agroforestry can, in fact, help overcome one of the major challenges to plantation forestry in the tropics: conflicts of interest between local communities and large estates supported by governments. These conflicts can reach a stage of violent manifestation (Box 1). Foresters have experimented for more than a century with ways to get local farmers to participate in their efforts to plant and manage trees, in various forms of ‘taungya’, ‘agroforestry’ or ‘social forestry’. Most of these efforts have been a hard way to learn a simple lesson: unless farmers share substantially in the long-term benefits of forest plantation efforts, the interaction between the ‘agro’ and the ‘forestry’ component remains a competitive one (Van Noordwijk and Tomich, 1995). Because of land scarcity, large-scale plantations and smallholder development programmes tend to be mutually exclusive, at least in most developing countries of Asia and parts of Africa. What is needed is that foresters start to participate in farmers’ tree planting efforts, rather than expecting farmers to participate in foresters’ efforts (Garrity and Mercado, 1994). In societies where the majority of people live in urban/suburban areas, concerns over the accelerating loss of open and green space tend to become prominent. This is a quality-oflife issue to many and raises the potential for agroforestry applications at the agricultural/community interface to restore ecological functions that provide for storm water management, wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, and aesthetic enhancements. Legal and institutional framework Criterion 7 of the Montreal process, the legal and institutional framework appears to be the main obstacle for including agroforestry in debates on sustainable forest management. By definition (literally) agroforestry has often been excluded. A paradigm shift may be needed. The need for a paradigm shift in forestry Logging old-growth forest remains, from a private perspective, the cheapest way to get high quality timber. Until the forest extraction frontier is effectively closed (either by effective protection of remaining forests, strict enforcement of rules on certified timber origin down the market chain, or through sheer exhaustion and deple tion), planting trees needs specific subsidies and protection to compete successfully with other land uses. Once the supply from natural forests dries up, however, and the prices go up, the time lag between planting and harvesting of (even fast-growing) trees creates a gap in the supply (Fig. 1). Regulations aimed at curbing illegal logging (closing the forest extraction frontier) tend to obstruct the trade and transport of farm grown timber as well, and the transaction costs involved become a deterrent Box 1. Key threat to sustainability of large-scale plantation forestry in Indonesia The allocation of land for plantation development in Indonesia (both timber and oil palm plantations) has often been undertaken without recognizing the rights of local people who already oc upy and cultivate the land. Fires initiated by the plantation compan es have often been used to force local co munities fr their land. T feeling of perc ived injustice by smallholders decreases their inc ntive to control the spread of fire to large-scale tree plantations. As a consequence of land tenure conflicts, local communities frequently burn plantation grown trees that have been established by large companies. Since the start of the political reformation period in Indonesia in mid-1998, the open manifestation of the land tenure conflicts (that date back to the ‘New Order’ period) between local communities and large companies has increased. There are increasing visual signs of violence and burning of property, as companies can no longer rely on armed security to quell the unrest. In many cases, tenure conflicts often become a trigger for forest and land fires. The nature of partnerships between communities and companies in the development of oil palm and timber plantations is also a very important factor in reducing the incidence of fire as communities with partnerships have a vested interest in protecting their assets. Many people believe that a good partnership between farmers and companies in developing oil palm or timber plantations will reduce land tenure conflict. The result of the study by Suyanto et al. (2001) as part of the CIFOR/ICRAF project on underlying causes of forest fire supported this view and quotes examples where actual progress is being made. Thursday 27 March 2003 Ensuring SFM Session Paper 17 4 for what should be the logical outcome of a timber shortage: positive incentives for smallholder production systems to respond to market demand by planting trees. Figure 1. The overall pattern of loss of natural forest followed by the increase of farmer-grown or forestermanaged tree plantations, variously described as a ‘U curve’, ‘inverse J’ or inverted Kuznets curve (‘it has to become bad before it can become better’). Seen at the timescale of the evolution of a landscape (in the order of decades, usually), we can recognize four important questions: 1) can deforestation be avoided or halted, 2) can the process of forest degradation be deflected to a tree-based land use pattern that avoids the more serious stages of environmental degradation, 3) can degraded lands (from a forest function perspective) be rehabilitated, and 4) to what new level of tree cover and forest functions can land use recover in a new ‘steady state’, while meeting economic expectations of the land managers as well as society at large. While we here focus on questions 3 and 4, a few remarks on question 2 may be relevant. Good markets for tree products such as fruits, resins and latex have allowed a transition of substantial areas of southeast Asian forest into ‘agroforest’, a land use that combines ‘planted trees’ with forest flora and fauna, either retained or naturally regenerated vegetation (de Jong et al., 2001). Tree planting in these agroforests can occur in an open field’ stage, often in between food crops, or in small gaps or clearings in existing forest. The ‘miang tea’ agroforests of northern Thailand and some of the fruit tree, cacao and coffee agroforests originated from such ‘enrichment planting’, gradually modifying the species composition without a clear felling stage. The rubber, damar (resin) and other fruit tree and coffee based agroforestry has been through such a clear-felled (usually ‘slash and burn’) stage, but recovered their tree cover and most of the forest functions, allowing a greater population density to make a living (about 50 persons km for rubber agroforests, versus about 10 persons km in sustainable forms of shifting cultivation or plantation forestry). When the first generation of planted trees gets old, the choice may again be either ‘interplanting’ or a new clear-felling + planting rotation. In Indonesia farmers use different words for these two ways of planting trees (sisipan versus tanam) (Joshi et al., 2002). The term ‘plantations’ in Southeast Asia generally refers to a form of ‘land clearing’ (conventionally ‘slash and burn’, with various forms of ‘slash and mulch’ or ‘controlled burning as more recent alternatives) to form a break with the preceding vegetation. Both from an economic and an environmental perspective, however, the ‘enrichment planting’ approach to question 3 merits further interest. While nearly all experiments with a large-scale ‘plantation’ style approach to agriculture have failed, the tradition in forestry is still to expect that there are economies of scale in the planting, managing and harvesting of trees. In fact, the ‘economies of scale’ may (in contrast to what is commonly perceived) not derive from the planting, care or management of trees as such, but from the harvesting, marketing and processing stage and from regulatory frameworks or subsidized credit directed to large operators (Barr, 2001, 2002), accentuated by a century of pro-plantation emphasis in research. Experience in countries such as New Zealand shows that the two sectors can exist side by side with generally healthy relations. Smallholders with diverse, risk-averse farms that include a significant tree component (‘agroforestry’) are seen, at least in a number of countries, to be the most efficient tree producers of the future. However, a number of constraints at policy level, in the way markets C s t o c k , M g h a 1 E nv ir on m en ta l s er vi ce fu nc ti on s,