Project Name:   Connecting, enhancing and sustaining environmental services and market values of
coffee agroforestry in Central America, East Africa and India

Implementing Agencies:
       ICRAF in East Africa, CATIE in Central America and University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore – India, University of Wales, Bangor, Coffee Board of India in India

Funder:                        CIRAD

Project Partners:          Kenya – CRF, Mugama Coop Union, Baricho Coop and Mutira Coop

Uganda – NUCAFE, CORI,

Rwanda – OCIR-Café, COOPAC

Project Duration:          48 Months         Start:    February 2007   End:  January 2011

Budget:                        €624,859 for the project duration €173,078 for the first year



Overview:               

CAFNET is a participatory rural research and development project that brings together pilot projects in Central America, East Africa and India, in collaboration with coffee producers and stakeholders in the sector, including NGOs (Rainforest Alliance, etc.) and the big buyers in the sector (Starbucks, Nespresso, Utz Kapeh, 4C, etc.). The four-year project will start in 2007, coordinated by CIRAD with regional partners CATIE in Central America, ICRAF in East Africa and Bangalore University/Coffee Board in India.

In the three East African countries (Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda), CAFNET focuses in watersheds that have a major national importance in terms of area and volume of coffee grown in the country, where coffee growing is mostly a smallholder enterprise, and which have a marked potential to respond to market demand for high quality, sustainable coffee.

Project Goal:  

The goal of CAFNET is clearly within the priorities of the EU delegations and that of the countries in the three target regions (Central America, East Africa and India) as it will contribute to their commitment to help the rural poor through actions such as improving productivity, processing and marketing, and promoting entrepreneurship and business opportunities in rural zones and small towns.

This will be achieved by coordinating assessment and development activities as well as building implementation capacities in these three regions.

The experience already acquired, particularly within Central America, on methodologies to evaluate coffee-shade tree interactions, environmental impacts, social and economic characteristics of coffee agroforestry systems, via surveys and participatory workshops with stakeholders, will be extended to, and adapted for, use in the other two regions. Pilot implementation plus monitoring of impact in target communities of the three regions will provide a basis for developing longer term market and policy frameworks to sustain wider dissemination.

This project will be a consortium of research and development institutions, as well as non-governmental organizations, from European and developing countries, interacting with coffee farmer communities, NGOs, governmental and municipal institutions and the private sector with the goals of:

1. exchanging methodologies, experience, information and results of pilot testing across continents in order to speed up the development of harmonized guidelines and the implementation of schemes that support sustainable coffee agroforestry practices, conveyed in terms understandable and socially-acceptable by farmers;
2. in each target zone, enhancing the management capacity, entrepreneurial skills and information available to farmers’ organizations and to their actual plus potential business contacts;
3. increasing awareness locally and internationally of the full environmental and economical value of coffee agroforests;
4. recommending policies and market based approaches that promote the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies and value chains for differentiated coffee products; and
5. reducing farmers’ vulnerability to coffee price volatility.

Regional and local specificities, in terms of economic opportunities, the natural environment and pressing ecological issues, will be addressed to go beyond the development of broad guidelines to arrive at locally applicable exemplary interventions.

To ensure the long term viability of this initiative, CAFNET has the institutional support from regional organizations (PROMECAFE in Central America, CORNET in East Africa, and the Coffee Board of India) and international organizations.

In the three regions, CAFNET partners have already engaged in dialogue with the private sector (4C and Starbucks) and NGO’s (Utz Kapeh, Rainforest Alliance).  It is expected that CAFNET will establish and/or strengthen these links resulting in better access of farmer communities to markets promoting sustainable coffee and tree products as well as payment for environmental services.

Detailed description of activities:

The project is organized into five Activity Packages (APs). The activities are listed under each AP including their justification, the partners and the local groups involved, and the deliverables to be produced.

AP 1: Identification of watersheds and target communities, and creation of steering committees 

AP 2: Participatory assessment of socio-economic and environmental impacts of coffee agroforestry practices and definition of guidelines for sustainable coffee practices.

AP 3: Valuation of environmental services as well as products of coffee agroforestry and improvement of the legal environment of coffee products by local cooperatives/associations.

AP 4: Biophysical and economic up-scaling for development of landscape level management plans and monitoring of impact.

AP 5: Capacity building of organizations to manage sustainable, market-oriented agroforests and dissemination of methods and impacts to national and regional actors.

Expected Results:

1. Target farmers’ groups, empowered with technical information, enhanced business skills and access to markets, adopting ecologically sound agroforestry management options.
2. Easy to use methodologies, for the valuation of environmental impacts and services, developed, tested and used in contrasting coffee agro-ecosystems.
3. Effectiveness of coffee agroforests for biodiversity conservation demonstrated in contrasting socio-ecological contexts and landscape configurations.
4. Sustainable coffee management guidelines developed, pilot-tested and disseminated, using manuals in local languages, to farmers and NGOs.
5. Local, national and international awareness of the environmental and economic value of coffee  agroforests increased.
6. Existing certification and sustainable production schemes analyzed; guidelines for improving their  applicability promoted among NGOs and the private sector.
7. Model value chains, promoted through producer-trader alliances and market related mechanisms, reward farmers for coffee certification, environmental services and quality.
8. Governmental agencies informed and sensitized about appropriate concepts, policies and
9. institutional support to promote coffee agroforestry systems.
10. Capacity of local authorities to target appropriate policies and monitor their impacts, using  decision support tools for land use planning, enhanced.
11. Training tools and materials for production and marketing of coffee agroforestry products
12. developed and disseminated (e.g. website, manuals, radio programs and local newspaper articles).
13. Participants of the sustainable coffee and timber sectors trained on the job, including university students from the South trained through field assessments.

 Main activities:

1. Identify watersheds and target communities; establish steering committees.
2. Document traditional agroforestry knowledge and the value of native trees.
3. Biodiversity inventories in coffee agroforests of target watersheds.
4. Develop indicators, assess environmental impact of different coffee management models and value environmental services of coffee agroforests.
5. Participatory development & pilot testing of sustainable agroforest management guidelines.
6. Document present marketing arrangements, assess farmers’ constraints and build producer-trader alliances to enhance value chains.
7. Assess farmers’ legal constraints to adoption of agroforestry practices.
8. Develop methodologies, particularly GIS, to scale up and integrate biophysical and economic results from plot and farm level to watershed, for impact monitoring.
9. Train staff and build capacity of local organizations to manage sustainable, market-oriented agroforests.
10. Disseminate methods and impact assessments to national, regional and global partners.

 Procedures for monitoring and internal/external evaluation:

Annual internal evaluations of the project will take place, during the general meetings of all CAFNET partners, by comparing actions effectively completed or in progress with respect to the Action Plan. These general meetings will take place once at the headquarters (HQ) of CIRAD, the coordinator, in Europe, and at the HQ of the three regional leaders. During these meetings, high-ranking personal of the organizing institution will be invited to participate.

Quarterly meetings will also take place at the HQ of each regional leader to assess progress of activities undertaken by local partners with respect to the Action Plan, to identify difficulties impeding progress and to come up with practical solutions.

Representatives of the EU, the Ministries of Agriculture, Environment and Commerce, Coffee and Forestry Institutes, farmers’ networks, local authorities and the private sector will be invited to perform an external evaluation on project progress in each region: at the end of Year 1, on environmental assessment and capacity building of steering committees; at the end of Year 2, on implementation of pilot testing; at the end of Year 3, on capacity building of farmers’ organizations and the first draft of recommendations; and at the end of Year 4, on the overall project achievements.

1.8.6  level of involvement and activity of other organizations (partners or others) in the action CIRAD will be the administrative and technical coordinating partner and will collaborate, via staff members posted at headquarters of the three regional leading partners, on all activities in the three regions, particularly in the development of tools (indicators, GIS, methodologies, etc), economic evaluations and the formulation of recommendations and policies.

Due its physical presence on the three continents, it will promote exchanges across continents respect methodologies and information regarding the elaboration of technical, institutional and market-oriented recommendations.

UWB will be involved in: providing training and support of regional and local partners in the acquisition of local knowledge; rapid environmental and biodiversity assessments; and in the use of the resulting information in the formulation of spatially explicit, integrated technical and policy guidelines.

CATIE will assume the role of Central American leader.

ICRAF will assume the role of East African leader while

UASB, with the help of the Coffee Board of India, the role of leader in India.

In their respective region, regional leaders will play a major role assisting their local partners in technical assessments, elaboration and pilot testing of recommendations and policies, and in training, capacity building and dissemination of information to all stakeholders.

Reasons for the role of each partner:

CIRAD mission is to contribute to the social and economic development of tropical regions through agricultural and environmental research, along with training, capacity building and the dissemination of scientific and technical results. It is operating though partnership and networking activities with all concerned stakeholders from Education and Training Centers to International and Regional Centers, organizations of producers, extension services, NGOs and the private sector. CIRAD has a long experience in Eastern Africa and Central America, especially in highland zones, through cooperation projects. Its expertise ranges from social forestry and agroforestry to soil and water conservation, food and cash crop management, socio-economics and commodity chains, in order to contribute to the reduction of pressure on the natural resources, insure the sustainability and the quality of agricultural production, promote local governance and empowerment of farmers organizations with an access to markets and better prices, as key entries for food security, poverty alleviation, and, as a whole, improvement of rural livelihoods.

The University of Wales, Bangor, together with ICRAF, CATIE and other partners, has developed robust methods for formal documentation of local agro-ecological knowledge, and rapid assessment of farmer perceptions, that have been proven appropriate for the sort of application envisaged in this action. UWB already has developed training materials in English and Spanish and has worldwide experience in mounting training and support in knowledge acquisition and rapid biodiversity assessment.

CATIE is a regional center for tropical research and higher education based in Costa Rica. It has a pivotal role in Central America in terms of agricultural, forestry and environmental research, training, capacity building and dissemination of scientific and technical results. During the last 30 years, it has gained a unique expertise in biophysical and socio-economic research of agroforestry systems, particularly with coffee. It has a strong expertise in collecting and analyzing information regarding the socio-economic roles of trees and the effects of incentives on tree planting by rural communities. During this last decade, it has taken a leading role in Central and Latin America in economic and environmental issues associated with agriculture.

The World Agroforestry Centre, ICRAF is an international agricultural research centre, one of 15 members of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Its mission is to advance the science and practice of agroforestry to improve human welfare by reducing poverty, improving food and nutritional security, and enhancing environmental resilience in the tropics. ICRAF focuses globally on four primary themes:

i) agroforestry systems to restore soil fertility and regenerate degraded lands; ii) market driven tree cultivation systems to help lift rural poor out of poverty and improve their health and nutrition;

iii) agroforestry systems to enhance environmental services, such as watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration; and iv) capacity building for agroforestry research and development.

Building on 25 years of collaboration with national agricultural organizations in East Africa and beyond, ICRAF, as an international leader in agroforestry research and development with global headquarters in Kenya is in a unique position to lead and coordinate regional East African activities in CAFNET related to the assessment, improvement and scaling up of best coffee agroforestry practices in the region. The University of Agricultural Sciences of Bangalore (UASB), India, has undertaken in collaboration with CIRAD, the French Institute of Pondicherry, the Coffee Board of India and local communities, inventories of trees, bird and fungal diversity in coffee plantations, and on impacts of land tenure systems on tree diversity.

The Coffee Board of India has a long experience in training and extension programmes, particularly for the participatory development of a sustainable and eco-friendly management of coffee pests and diseases, and the enhancement of coffee quality through the prevention of mould formation via an evaluation program involving all stakeholders along the production-processing-storage-transport chain. More information is provided on the applicant and its partners in the section 9 “description of partners”.

Team proposed for implementation of the action:

The CIRAD team, the coordinating partner, will be composed of a project coordinator, foresters and agroforesters, a SIG specialist, a biophysical modeler, a socio-economist, a specialist in rural organizations, a commodity chain specialist, all with significant tropical experience. At least, one CIRAD specialist will be posted permanently at the headquarters of each of the three regional leaders for the duration of CAFNET.

The UWB team will be composed of two senior agro-foresters (one focusing on indigenous knowledge and the other on watershed functions), a senior forest ecologist and a field ecologist specializing in rapid biodiversity assessment. All the UWB team members have extensive experience in developing countries, including collaborative projects with CATIE and ICRAF.

In Central America, the CATIE team will be composed of agro-foresters, a SIG specialist, a socio-economist, a rural development specialist, a certification specialist, all with a significant experience in agroforestry and the coffee sector of this region. This team will be assisted by extension agents and GIS specialists from national coffee institutes of the three target countries (ICAFE in Costa Rica; UNICAFE in Nicaragua; ANACAFE in Guatemala) and that of coffee producers’ associations and cooperatives.

In East Africa, the ICRAF team will be composed of several agro-foresters, one coffee scientist (coffee pathology & local coffee value chain), one biodiversity expert, GIS specialists, socio-economists specialized in rural dynamics and commodity chains, all with a significant tropical experience. ICRAF will implement CAFNET jointly with the Coffee Research Network (CORNET) and its members in the concerned countries (CRI in Uganda, OCI in Rwanda, and the CRF in Kenya) as well as specialists from national universities  (Makerere, Kenyan universities) and coffee producers’ groups.

In India, the joint team of the UASB and the Coffee Board of India will be composed of agro-foresters and foresters, training and dissemination specialists. This team will be assisted by extension staff from the Coffee

Board of India, as well as GIS specialists from the French Institute of Pondicherry.

A list of experts is provided in the annexes. If listed experts(s) become unavailable, all the partners have sufficient staff with relevant experience to satisfy all the areas of expertise needed to implement this project. Furthermore, local staff and graduate students will be hired by the project to complement this pool of experts, especially in terms of data collection and contacts with and dissemination to farmers’ organizations.

Principal means proposed for the implementation of the action (equipment, etc.) Financial support is provisioned to help target organizations (especially, steering committees and farmer experimenters), to hire local technicians and graduate students for assessments and training activities and to pay for local and international salaries of experts. Vehicles, portable equipment (laptops and projectors) and field equipment are needed to facilitate economic and environmental assessments as well as training of target farmers’ organizations.

Funds are also provisioned for: local transportation; organization of meetings between partners, steering committees and farmers’ organizations; and for international workshops to exchange experiences/results; and for internal/external evaluation monitoring and auditing. Satellite images and software will be acquired to develop/refine GIS. Office supply and computer equipment will be bought by the project to strengthen administrative capacity of target farmer’s organizations and technical monitoring capacities of local authorities. Finally and very importantly, funds are budgeted for the production of training and dissemination materials (manuals, publications, website…).