Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
total area under agroforestry shows any tendency to increase. The obvious question
is why? This is the subject of the next section.
11.6
A Broader Look: The Socioeconomics
of the Agroforestry System
In the study area, most of the agroforestry has been established with support of an
agroforestry project. The project did well, apparently, in sowing the agroforestry
seeds but the system did not blossom at all, neither in terms of new adoptions nor
in terms of area increase of households who adopted agroforestry initially.
The interviews with the 40 farmers that plant only rice and/or wheat reveal some
of the factors that underlie the failure of agroforestry to spread in spite of the finan-
cial benefits as analyzed in the previous section. Table 11.5 gives the overview.
The first thing to note from the table is that it contradicts the mainstream eco-
nomics idea that if something is profitable in the financial calculus and yet not
practiced, the reason must lie in 'constraints', i.e. lack of capacity (capital, land,
know-how, etc.). This type of reasons (
i
,
iii
and
v
) was mentioned indeed 60 times
by the farmers, but another 59 times farmers mentioned reasons in the motivational
realm (
ii
,
iv
and
vi
), i.e. referring to what they want to do rather than what they can
do (Elster 1989:13; Overmars et al. 2007). Underneath, we will take a deeper look,
starting out from the candidate constraint factors and then moving to the motiva-
tional factors.
Lack of suitable land or tenure issues were never mentioned by the non-agrofor-
estry farmers and indeed we may assume that virtually all farmers would have some
area, if only close to the homestead, where agroforestry would be feasible. Table
11.6 shows the overall land situation of the two types of farmers. The Table also
shows that the two types of farmers have the same land area on average. The distri-
bution of these areas among the farmers is quite even. The medians are very close
to the means, for instance, and the standard deviations are less than 40 percent of
the means. It can therefore be excluded that many farmers would have so little land
that they have no space for agroforestry. Moreover, land that could be unsuitable for
Table 11.5
Constraints of agroforestry, as mentioned by 40 non-agroforestry
farmers. Motivational factors are marked with M and factors of capacity (capital,
skills, etc.) are marked with C
Reasons
Number of farmers
Percent
(
i
) No knowledge (C)
7
17.5
(
ii
) No interest (M)
5
12.5
(
iii
) Lack of capital (C)
32
80.0
(
iv
) Delay in profit earning (M)
22
55.0
(
v
) Lack of technical assistance (C)
21
52.5
(
vi
) Unstable market price (M)
32
80.0
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