| Abstract: |
| Agroforestry systems envolved over centuries through farmer experimentation and changing conditions. Today, agroforestry is an integral component of community forestry, watershed management and natural resource management efforts in mountainous areas troughout Asia. People's participation is the key to sustainability of mountainous agroforestry systems. An emerging trend in agroforestry research and development is the evaluation toward community- based landscapes approaches. Such approaches underpin the potential contributions of agroforestry to watershed management as well as to sustainable development for households and communities. In mountainous areas, agroforestry is increasingly adopted by farmers because of the crucial role of biomass derived from perennials as well as the changing patterns of availability and access to tree products.
Asian watersheds are in rapid decline, and heading for an impending crisis. The rates of sediment deposition in the oceans are much higher in Asia thn anywhere else in the world. Most of the nearly 130 million people who live in upper watershed areas throughout Asia face poverty and other daunting constraints. In the past 50 years, most watershed management programs and projects have been failures, owing to top-down, technology -first approaches used in government and donor interventions. Lesson leraned have pointed the way to new approaches thet emphasize better land husbandry practices and active people's participation.
Successful watershed management must be built on two pillars : 1) sound, practical, suitable technical innovation, and 2) participatory institutional innovation. Agroforestry has a role in both. Conservation-oriented farming in the uplands is gaining recognitions. Two key strategies are emerging. First is the adoption of a problem-solving approach; second is the promotion of a suite of agroforrstry practices can provide the service functions of wartersheds, which are of greatest concern to outside stakeholders, as well as the productivity functions that are of most urgent concern to local people lving in the watersheds.
The SANREM project in the Manupali watershed in Midanao, Philippines and the Sam Mun Highland Development Project in northern Thailand are excellent case studies of community based approaches where agroforestry is integrated into succesful watershed management at the landscape level. |
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