Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
(Ramadhani, 2002; Chapter 12, this volume). Enacting policies that would
facilitate cross-border trade, and harmonizing policies related to
exploitation, transportation and germplasm exchange, import and export
are long overdue.
Conservation. There is a need to formulate regulations that will ensure that
the exploitation, processing, commercialization and on-farm cultivation of
IFTs does not pose a threat to their conservation. This implies that they
should be treated as cultivated crops instead of 'invisible' forest products
from the wild.
Private or common property rights . The domestication of these IFTs should
aim at enhancing the social and economic benefits of agroforestry through
improved profitability, reduced risks and diversified income sources to
buffer against crop failure (Sanchez, 1995). This will act as an incentive to
farmers (Leakey and Izac, 1996). An important question for the
domestication of IFTs is to ascertain who will be the major beneficiaries,
and at what level, if IFTs such as camu camu, peach palm, durian, marula
and shea butter tree are improved and become as widely cultivated as
mangoes or citrus. If a large company invests in IFTs, such as has been
done for guarana in Brazil, what share of the market goes back to the
custodian of the wild resources? What would be the fate of the local
farmers: would they remain competitive in production and supply to the
market? A.J. Simons (unpublished, 2004) frequently asked, 'What is the
feasibility of producing one million trees of a high-value IFT? Will it be
more profitable for 100,000 small-scale farmers planting and managing ten
trees each, or 100 medium-scale farmers growing 10,000 trees each, or ten
large-scale farmers growing 100,000 trees in plantations?' Leakey et al.
(2005) and CEH (2003) have noted that winners and losers in IFTs
domestication must be clearly established, with necessary policy support
(Leakey et al. , 2005). This requires a balance between consistent market
supply, sustainable management, risk management and distribution, cost
outlay requirements and economic incentives. Enacting policies to ensure
that intellectual property rights of farmers (farmer-breeders), and
community custodians' and breeders' rights of research are well protected.
This will ensure that the benefits from IFT domestication are not unfairly
exploited by large-scale commercial growers. Adoption of UPOV
(International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties) by
governments in the tropics has been suggested (Leakey et al. , 2005;
Schreckenberg et al. , 2006).
New tree crop development . Despite current trends toward globalization,
the movement of IFT germplasm from one country to another has been
constrained. We recognize that early domestication and improvement of
the tree crops traded in global markets, and cultivated across the tropics,
was a product of free movements of important plant germplasm during the
colonization period. The downside is that intellectual property rights,
breeders' rights and farmers' rights were being violated without
compensation. Worse is the fact that some of the crops performed better in
the countries of secondary or tertiary destinations than in those of their
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