Dr. Dennis Garrity - Director General, World Agroforestry Centre Photo by: Anthony Njenga

Agroforestry has come of age.

During its first 25 years, the World Agroforestry Centre has pioneered solutions to transform some of the bleakest rural areas of the developing world into productive, ecologically sound landscapes that integrate a variety of trees, food and cash crops, and livestock in sustainable farming systems.

With our many partners worldwide, we have developed the scientific basis for improved tree crop systems that provide nine basic ‘family securities’ required by rural households everywhere: security in food, nutrition, health, fodder, shelter, energy, water, income, and a restored environment.

Recently, I had the good fortune to glimpse the future – a place where communities applied and adapted the principles of agroforestry and are now reaping rich rewards, and teaching others to do so. The future I saw was in an unlikely place – Shinyanga region in northwestern Tanzania. Shinyanga was originally a semi-arid open acacia woodland. But by the time ICRAF began working
there in 1988, it had become an overworked, overgrazed landscape with hardly a tree in sight. It was fast becoming completely desertified.

Common wisdom has it that you can’t practice agroforestry in drylands. But when scores of communities worked together with researchers and extensionists through the Hifadhi Ardhi Shinyanga (HASHI)–ICRAF Project, a vast transformation occurred in just 15 years. Using natural
regeneration and rotational grazing, the woodlands were restored. Lush indigenous grasses and graceful acacia trees returned on over 350,000 ha. At that point, researchers and community members introduced a wealth of new types of useful trees, turning the common ‘wisdom’ on its head.

Farmers Anthony Paulo Katakwa and his wife Agnes Said now found their imaginations fi red up by the possibilities of agroforestry. They first contacted the Project in 1997 to diversify their tree enterprises. Today, fruit, fodder, timber, fuelwood and medicinal trees surround their homestead, contributing to the family’s nutrition, income, and health year-round. Interspersed among the maize crops on their 3 ha are fertilizer trees that can double or triple their previous yields. (As illustrated in our report Defying the odds).

Woodlots for timber, fodder, fencing and fuelwood green other parts of their farm. Their fodders trees feed dairy cows contributing both to family nutrition and income. Sales of extra timber and fuelwood, plus cash-generating trees, provide other sources of income. Their rainwater-harvesting pond provides water to raise seedlings during the dry season. This small, diversified farm exemplifi es what we at ICRAF call the ‘family tree enterprise portfolio’. Even when a household is too far from the market to sell much produce, such enterprises provide the
services and products the family needs to meet its nine family securities.

Anthony Katakwa (second right) and his wife Agnes Said in discussion with Dennis Garrity Photo by Peter Oduol

But Anthony and Agnes didn’t stop there. They shared their knowledge with community members throughout the region, and grew and dispensed an amazing 90,000 seedlings in the last year alone! More than 1,700 other farmers have trained with them. An estimated two-thirds of these households have now begun practising agroforestry to create leafy, productive havens of their own.

Recently Anthony and Agnes started volunteer teaching two days a week in local primary schools. Today, the 17 schools they ‘adopted’ have become agroforestry learning centres, producing fruit, fodder, timber, honey and other bounty. School children take the seeds and seedlings home to enrich their own family farms.
Anthony and Agnes have never requested a shilling for their training or seedlings. In Anthony’s words, “We want to pay back for what we’ve learned, because agroforestry has made our lives so much better. We want others to enjoy success too, and to give back to the land that blesses us all.”
Thanks to the work of Anthony, Agnes and their neighbours, over 350,000 ha in the Shinyanga region have been rejuvenated in just a few years. From a semi-desert has grown a green mosaic of grassland and open woodlands suitable for grazing, tree culture and crops. The HASHI–ICRAF Project` was recently honoured for its successes by receiving the UNDP Equator Award. This, in a place where people said “it couldn’t be done.”

Working trees, enriching families, communities, and the larger environment…these are the themes of this year’s Annual Report, the themes that Shinyanga illustrates so well. . During the next 25 years, we must expand the science that will enhance the scaling-up of such achievements to include tens of millions more poor, rural smallholders in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

We are also using agroforestry to educate future, as well as current farmers about agriculture and environment at every stage from primary to post-graduate studies (See our report A Stitch in Time).
Few people realise that research on tree crops has yielded an impressive mean internal annual rate of return of 88%. We are working hard to encourage governments to build agroforestry into their development plans. And we are reaching out to the international community through the global environmental conventions. Agroforestry is a powerful means to help achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, and improving family health, while ensuring environmental sustainability.

Beyond research, education, and policy work, scaling-up will take concerted collective action by organised community groups. (As illustrated in our report, Local stewardship). And, of course, it will take inspiring role models like Anthony and Agnes. From my travels I know they are there, in every region, indeed in every village.

I do feel that I’ve seen the future in Shinyanga. And it works, for us all.

Dennis Garrity,
Director General.