Kathrin Schreckenberg

Agroforestry Tree Products (AFTPs): Targeting Poverty Reduction and Enhanced Livelihoods

Agroforestry tree domestication emerged as a farmer-driven, market-led process in the early 1990s and became an international initiative. A participatory approach now supplements the more traditional aspects of tree improvement, and is seen as an important strategy towards the Millennium Development Goals of eradicating poverty and hunger, promoting social equity and environmental sustainability. Considerable progress has been made towards the domestication of indigenous fruits and nuts in many villages in Cameroon and Nigeria. Vegetatively-propagated cultivars based on a sound knowledge of ‘ideotypes’ derived from an understanding of the tree-to-tree variation in many commercially important traits are being developed by farmers. These are being integrated into polycultural farming systems, especially the cocoa agroforests. Markets for Agroforestry Tree Products (AFTPs) are crucial for the adoption of agroforestry on a scale to have meaningful economic, social and environmental impacts. Important lessons have been learned in southern Africa from detailed studies of the commercialization of AFTPs. These provide support for the wider acceptance of the role of domesticating indigenous trees in the promotion of enhanced livelihoods for poor farmers in the tropics. Policy guidelines have been developed in support of this sustainable rural development as an alternative strategy to those proposed in many other major development and conservation fora.

Farmers' fruit tree-growing strategies in the humid forest zone of Cameroon and Nigeria

Many studies have stressed the importance of trees to rural households. Few, however, have focused on actual numbers and densities of trees in different land-use systems. Based on community-level participatory research in six communities, semi-structured household interviews and full-farm fruit tree inventories, this study aims to understand farmers’ tree-planting strategies. Relationships between the diversity, number and density of fruit trees and farm size, land-use system, land tenure, distance from the homestead, proximity to the forest, market access and household characteristics are investigated. The key factors determining the differences in tree-growing strategies between communities appear to be market access, land use and access to forest resources. Within communities, differences between individual households were less easy to explain but tenure was important as was farm size. Smaller farms had higher fruit tree densities, a relationship that was particularly strong in communities with good market access. Overall there was a great deal of variability both within and between communities and many of the factors affecting tree-planting decisions were found to be highly inter-related. Despite this complexity, trees on farm play an important role in rural households livelihoods. Therefore, expansion of tree cultivation should be recognized as a promising pathway to achieve increased income and food production by policy makers and extensionists alike. In addition to improved tree propagation and management techniques, farmers should be strengthened in the processing and marketing of agroforestry tree products and more emphasis should be placed on the development of tree enterprises. By doing so, farmers will be able to earn a more important and consistent income from fruit trees, contributing to the Millennium Development Goals.

Commercialisation of non-timber forest products: first steps in analysing the factors influencing success

SUMMARY Although trade in non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has been widely promoted as an approach to rural development, recent research has indicated that NTFP commercialisation is often not successful. Analysis of the factors influencing success of NTFP commercialisation has been hindered by the lack of an appropriate analytical approach for comparison of case studies. We tested and further developed a methodology recently developed by CIFOR, by examining 16 NTFP case studies in two workshops held in Mexico and Bolivia involving a variety of stakeholders involved in NTFP commercialisation. Workshop participants identified a wide range of measures by which the success of NTFP commercialisation can be defined, which included improvements in social justice, community organisation and local culture, as well as economic status. Participants then considered the factors influencing the processes involved in NTFP commercialisation: production, collection, processing, storage, transport, marketing and sale. In total 45 factors were identified that significantly limit one of the commercialisation processes. Generally product marketing and sale were found to be those processes most constraining overall success. These results illustrate how participatory methods can be of value in analysing the success of NTFP commercialisation, and how a process-based approach can provide an analytical framework for comparison of NTFP case studies.

PRODUCTION AND MARKETING OF SAFOU (DACRYODES EDULIS) IN CAMEROON AND INTERNATIONALLY: MARKET DEVELOPMENT ISSUES

ABSTRACT This paper draws together information from three separate projects on the production of Dacryodes edulis (G.Don) H.J. Lam or ‘safou’ in Cameroon, and its domestic and international trade. The volume of safou fruit commercialised in Cameroon in 1997 was estimated at 11,000 tonnes, equivalent to US

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF DACRYODES EDULIS (G.DON) H.J. LAM IN SOUTHERN CAMEROON

7.5 million. Exports from Central Africa and Nigeria to France, the United Kingdom and Belgium were worth over US

Use of a Bayesian Belief Network to Predict the Impacts of Commercializing Non-timber Forest Products on Livelihoods

2 million in 1999. A study of nine markets in the humid forest zone of Cameroon in 1999 revealed that women dominate the retail trade while men concentrate on wholesale. For both, safou trade is an important long-term livelihood option. Depending on the market and volume traded, weekly marketing margins can be double the minimum wage. Far from being exploited by traders, producers were found to receive 75% of the consumer price on average. The main constraint to both the domestic and international trade is the high perishability of safou.

Domestication of Irvingia gabonensis: 3. Phenotypic variation of fruits and kernels in a Nigerian village

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the role played by the indigenous fruit tree species, Dacryodes edulis (safou), in four communities in Southern Cameroon. Safou is originally a forest species but has now almost completed the shift on to the farm, where it is particularly planted in association with cocoa and coffee plantations. Its oil-rich fruit are an important item in local diets and are widely marketed. The income is particularly important to women and its timing coincides with the need to pay school fees and associated costs. The reasons why different farmers plant safou are very complex and change over time. Extension services could help farmers obtain greater benefits from this resource by promoting participatory domestication and providing advice on tree management and fruit storage and processing.

Commercialisation of Non-Timber Forest Products: A Reality Check

Commercialization of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has been widely promoted as a means of sustainably developing tropical forest resources, in a way that promotes forest conservation while supporting rural livelihoods. However, in practice, NTFP commercialization has often failed to deliver the expected benefits. Progress in analyzing the causes of such failure has been hindered by the lack of a suitable framework for the analysis of NTFP case studies, and by the lack of predictive theory. We address these needs by developing a probabilistic model based on a livelihood framework, enabling the impact of NTFP commercialization on livelihoods to be predicted. The framework considers five types of capital asset needed to support livelihoods: natural, human, social, physical, and financial. Commercialization of NTFPs is represented in the model as the conversion of one form of capital asset into another, which is influenced by a variety of socio-economic, environmental, and political factors. Impacts on livelihoods are determined by the availability of the five types of assets following commercialization. The model, implemented as a Bayesian Belief Network, was tested using data from participatory research into 19 NTFP case studies undertaken in Mexico and Bolivia. The model provides a novel tool for diagnosing the causes of success and failure in NTFP commercialization, and can be used to explore the potential impacts of policy options and other interventions on livelihoods. The potential value of this approach for the development of NTFP theory is discussed.

The participatory domestication of West African indigenous fruits

Domestication of Irvingia gabonensis, a fruit tree grown in agroforestry systems in West and Central Africa, offers considerable scope for enhancing the nutritional and economic security of subsistence farmers in the region. Assessments of phenotypic variation in ten fruit, nut and kernel traits were made on twenty-four ripe fruits from 100 Irvingia gabonensis trees in Ugwuaji village in southeast Nigeria, a center of genetic diversity for this species. There were important differences between the young planted trees of this study and the older unplanted trees of a similar study in Cameroon. Significant and continuous tree-to-tree variation was found in fruit mass(69.0–419.8 g), flesh mass (59.5–388.8 g), nut mass (9.5–40.6 g), shell mass (4.9–30.9 g) and kernel mass (0.41–7.58 g); fruit length (49.2–89.3 mm) and width (46.2–100.5 mm) and flesh depth (12.9–31.4 mm), as well as considerable variation in flesh colour, skin colour, fruit taste and fibrosity. Some fruits were considerably bigger than those found in Cameroon. These quantitative results will help in the development of cultivars within participatory approaches to agroforestry tree domestication, and so promote poverty alleviation and sustainable agriculture.