Smallholder Tree Growing in South and Southeast Asia - Smallholder Tree Growing for Rural Development and Environmental Services - page 5

The integration of trees into farming systems in the form of agroforestry has
been promoted since the late 1970s as a strategy for sustainable land use particu-
larly in support of the rural poor (King 1987, Young 1997, FAO 2005) and, at its
earlier stage, as a means to narrow the so-called fuelwood gap (FAO 1997). With
the introduction of rural integrated development programs in the 1980s, small-
holder tree growing regained recognition because of its potential role in mobilizing
rural resources for the generation of a wide range of tree products, for both subsist-
ence and commercial purposes, including timber, wood fuel, fruit, leafy vegetable,
fodder, resin, oil, and medicine. In this context smallholder tree growing is also
considered in recent times as a policy option addressing the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs; see http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/). Smallholder
tree growing is further linked to environmental services and the agenda on global
change. Under the nomenclature agroforestry, it has been identified as one of the
thematic areas by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1996. The CBD refers to agroforestry as a form of
adaptive management, being “a method of sustainable agriculture that employ man-
agement practices and technologies that promote positive and mitigate negative
impacts of agriculture on biodiversity” (Decision V/5 2.3). Likewise, there is a clear
link to agrobiodiversity being described as having “all components of biological
diversity of relevance to food and agriculture and all components that constitute the
agro-ecosystem, i.e., the variety and variability of animals, plants and micro-organism,
at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels, which are necessary to sustain key
functions of the agro-ecosystem, its structure and processes” (Decision COP III/11
in 1996). More recently, the role of tree farming including agroforestry in mitigat-
ing climate change primarily through carbon sequestration has also been high-
lighted (IPCC, 2000, 2007).

1.3 From Deforestation to Reforestation: An Urgent Need

for Sustainable Land Use

The state of forest resources in countries world-wide has reached a critical point;
never before have forest ecosystems been so greatly and rapidly affected by human
activities as during last decades. Large stretches of the world's forests, that have
served in the subsistence and development of humankind, have been converted to
other uses particularly agriculture or are severely degraded. The global net change
in forest area approximated −8.9 million hectares per year in the period 1990-2000
(FAO 2001, with corrected data in FAO 2006b; Table 1.1). Deforestation still con-
tinues at a high rate today.
Most forest losses occur in tropical countries, particularly Africa, South America
and Asia. The highest rate of forest reduction in South and Southeast Asia has been
recorded for Indonesia with a loss of 1.9 million hectares (or 1.7 percent reduction)
per year for the period 1990-2000 followed by Myanmar and the Philippines with
losses of, respectively, 0.5 million hectares (−1.3 percent) and 0.3 million hectares