Agriculture Reference
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and wheat. The net present values are more than five times higher, the internal
rates of return benefit/cost ratios are almost twice as high, and the return-to-labour,
at almost US$24 day
−1
for agroforestry, is almost six times higher than for the sea-
sonal crop system. The sensitivity analysis showed that this finding stands up well
against what could normally be expected in terms of discount rate and price fluc-
tuations. Other sensitivity might have been overlooked in our analysis. It could be,
for instance, that some parts of the farmers' land lies so far from the homestead
that the cost of guarding the agroforestry crops would become prohibitive. If this
would be the case indeed, farmers would still have a 'home plot' for agroforestry,
however.
Mainstream economic reasoning assumes, however tacitly, that people are basi-
cally and solely financially motivated. Logically then, if something is financially
attractive but not practiced in reality (as in our case with a very low and static adop-
tion rate of agroforestry), this can only be caused by capacity constraints; people
want it but they cannot do it due to lack of capital, knowledge, land, seedlings, and
so on. Farmers did mention some of such factors in our interviews but these state-
ments do not live up to more analytical scrutiny. One major reason is that no con-
straint prevents farmers in this region - those who have agroforestry already but
even those who have not yet - to expand agroforestry little by little over the years.
If people would really be motivated for agroforestry, they would get it. We conclude
that in spite of the impression given by the financial analysis, farmers are not really
motivated
for agroforestry.
Unstable market prices were mentioned by the great majority of farmers as a
disincentive against agroforestry. The financial analysis has indicated that farmers
must refer here to something deeper than bounded price fluctuations. Rather, they
appear to express a fundamental aversion of locking oneself into a land use system
that produces foodstuffs that are much less basic than rice or wheat. Rice and wheat
are fundamental to the farmers and to the country. Agroforestry farmers express this
by maintaining an area for family subsistence besides the agroforestry plot. The
country expresses this by government back-up of rice and wheat through support
prices, soft loans, tax concessions, crop insurance, research, extension and so on -
institutions (laws, regulations, policies, organizations) that fail in the case of agro-
forestry. This government support works at two levels. The first is the level of the
measures themselves, if farmers make use of these loans, insurance etc. The second,
deeper level is that through the institutional support, the government emanates that
rice and wheat are basic indeed and with that, safe for farmers to do. Likewise, the
lack of institutions for agroforestry is not only a concrete disincentive, but also
reinforces the feeling that agroforestry is a fundamentally unsafe bet.
The agroforestry in this region has been greatly stimulated by a field project.
Generally, the tragedy of field projects is that they cannot change laws, factor mar-
kets, banking regulations, tenure rules or other, foundational institutional structures
and therefore tend to supply their target groups with only superficial capacity and
motivation. Like the seeds sown on rocks in the biblical parable, the trees resulting
from superficial incentives are easy to plant but do not multiply, lacking the deep
soil of supportive institutional structures.
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