The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) joined forces in 2019, leveraging a combined 65 years’ experience in research on the role of forests and trees in solving critical global challenges.
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The country-reporting guidelines define agroforestry as “a collective name for land-use systems where woody perennials … are integrated in the farming system.” In practice, however, use of the term varies from country to country, reflecting local, national and regional contexts. Moreover, since the word rose to prominence in the late 1970s (Bene, Beall and Côte, 1977), its usage has evolved considerably. Van Noordwijk, Coe and Sinclair (2016) describe three successive paradigms: the first focused on plot-level interactions of trees with crops or livestock; the second based on a landscape-level understanding of agroforestry as a land use with explicit (positive) impacts (Leakey, 1996); and the third encompassing the combination and interface of all agriculture and forestry issues without reference to the institutional barriers that have traditionally separated them. Van Noordwijk, Coe and Sinclair (2016) propose a new definition of agroforestry that recognizes all three paradigms and can be paraphrased as “land use that combines aspects of agriculture and forestry, including the agricultural use of trees.” Moreover, usage of the term by farmers and development practitioners is often more specific than usage in scientific circles. Generalizations about the state of agroforestry are thus difficult to make, even at country level. The following paragraphs provide illustrative examples of the types of agroforestry practised in various regions of the world.








