Designing Hope and The Ivory Foundation are working with the NGO APAF International to develop agroforestry training.
The definition given by the World Agroforestry Center is as follows: “A dynamic natural resource management system based on ecological foundations, integrating trees on farms and the rural landscape, thus diversifying and maintaining production in order to improve the social, economic and environmental conditions of all users of the land.”
Agroforestry is a rational land use system that increases the total productivity of cropland through the combination of trees and crops. This old agronomic technique can meet many expectations of human societies.
Rapidly and not exhaustively, agroforestry has the following qualities:
- it fertilizes the soil, enriches it with organic matter and structures them
- it enriches the biodiversity of cultivated areas and thus stabilizes the environments
- it moderates the soil’s microclimate and helps adapt to climate change;
crop evapotranspiration is decreased - it improves soil porosity and water and nutrient storage capacities
- it diversifies sources of income through the production of firewood, labor and forage
- it increases incomes per saving of fertilizer and treatment
At the same time, agroforestry contributes to the fight against erosion, deforestation, desertification and the storage of carbon in the trees’ wood and in soils enriched with organic matter; and thus reduce the volume of “carbon dioxide”, a greenhouse gas responsible for climate change.
Finally, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), more than 1 billion hectares are available for conversion into high productivity agroforestry systems that have the potential to reduce poverty and deforestation significantly, and sequester carbon on a large scale. According to the IPCC, the potential for carbon sequestration could reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 50 billion tons within 50 years.
Permaculture (= permanent cropping) goes beyond a simple ecological agricultural production system. Its approach encompasses all aspects of daily life and connects all elements, including human beings, with each other.
An important place is given to the design of the garden, carried out after a long period of observation and in which the different parts are placed so as to optimize the available resources, the space and the displacements.
In Africa, where the climate is favorable, associations like APAF use certain families of trees, called fertilizing trees, to enrich the soil.
In the same category :