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.
Meine van Noordwijk is a Distinguished Research Fellow at World Agroforestry. He joined the organization in 1993. For many years Dr van Noordwijk guided the global integration of the Centre’s science and (co-)led ICRAF's global research program on environmental services. He has published on issues across a wide range of scales, from roots interacting with soil to global environmental policies and their national implementation. He also is professor of agroforestry at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. From 2002 to 2008 he was Regional Coordinator for Southeast Asia. Before joining the Centre, Meine was a senior research officer in the Root Ecology Section at the DLO Institute for Soil Fertility Research in Haren, the Netherlands, concentrating on models of the relationships between soil fertility, nutrient use efficiency and root development of crops and trees. He also worked for two years as a lecturer in botany and ecology at the University of Juba in Sudan. Meine has a PhD in Agricultural Science from the University of Wageningen, the Netherlands and an MSc in Biology from the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Over the past 40 years agroforestry as a term and concept has helped to gain recognition for age-old farmer practices using trees, explore options for their further development and to obtain appreciation for the agriculture-forestry interface.
As many of the bottlenecks to agroforestry are in the policy domain, quantification of positive and negative tree-soil-crop interactions has been a basis for forms of ‘negotiation support’ that increased recognition and opportunities for farmer-led development pathways, with agility sustained.