Factors Affecting Adoption of Agroforestry and Evergreen Agriculture in Southern Africa
2015
w.f mwase
This paper examines the factors that affect adoption of agroforestry and integrated soil fertility management(ISFM) practices in Southern Africa. Agroforestry practices, especially evergreen agriculture and conservationagriculture with trees have emerged as sustainable measures of addressing land degradation and loss of soilfertility. Although agroforestry is known to be beneficial to farmers and the environment, its adoption rate fallsfar behind the projected goals. The present study reviewed several publications on adoption of agroforestry inSouthern Africa and complemented the review with household and key informant interviews to obtain evidencefrom farmers and promoters of the technologies on the factors affecting adoption. The study revealed that themajor factors affecting adoption of agroforestry fall into two main categories of socioeconomic and biophysicalfactors. The factors are high initial costs of agroforestry practices (75%), low extension knowledge (69%);unavailability of agroforestry germplasm (69%) for economic, social and biophysical categories respectively. Upto 84% of the key informants indicated that awareness of the connection between agroforestry and land qualityimprovement could lead to wide scale adoption of the technology. We conclude that Government policies willstrongly influence adoption of agroforestry technologies. There is need to institutionalise sustainable agriculturalland management practices through policy formulation, budgetary allocation for extension officers and farmertraining and starter up inputs. Promotion of agroforestry should be coupled with investment in awarenesscreation, farmer-centered approaches in selection of technology and provision of inputs in the initial stages. Strongcollaboration among policy makers, researchers and extension providers will be required to harmonise messages tobe delivered to farming communities
Show more [+] Less [-]W.F Mwase, 'Factors Affecting Adoption of Agroforestry and Evergreen Agriculture in Southern Africa', Environment and Natural Resources Research, vol. 5(2), pp.148-157, 2015
Show more [+] Less [-]AGROVOC Keywords
Bibliographic information
This bibliographic record has been provided by GARDIAN