Multifunctional Agriculture

Section 2. Agroforestry Practices and Systems

In the 1990s agroforestry turned from being a practice aimed primarily at soil fertility improvement while supplying poles, wood, and fuel, to one also focused on producing livestock fodder and marketable products, especially foods and medicines, for income generation—an approach which can be intensified by tree domestication. The first paper reviews the considerable progress made with smallholder farmers across sub-Saharan Africa in the development of simple and appropriate agroforestry technologies using fast-growing leguminous trees and shrubs to address the production constraints of declining soil fertility in the absence of accessible external inputs. This practice is important both to improve ...