2.1. Introduction
2.2. Agroforestry: Definition, Relevance and Status
2.3. ICRAF: Mission and Strategic Objectives
2.4. The Evolution of the CGIAR System
2.5. The CGIAR in Transition - Lessons from ICRAF
2.6. Conclusions
The aim of this chapter is to set the ICRAF EPMR within a CGIAR context. It begins with a definition of agroforestry and an overview of ICRAF's mission. It then outlines issues of expansion and transition currently facing the CGIAR System and goes on to identify aspects of ICRAF's strategy, programmes and modus operandi relevant to these issues.
ICRAF has, until relatively recently, been an information agency and an advocacy organization, promoting the use of agroforestry in solving the problems of resource poor farmers. It extended its mandate to research in 1985 and, since then, has pursued the understanding of small farm systems as a prerequisite to identifying the strategic research issues in agroforestry relevant to such farmers. ICRAF is still at the beginning of its research "career" and the Panel has drawn attention to the evolving ideas of Centre management. ICRAF is positioned differently from many CGIAR Centres that started their lives heavily focused on strategic research. Its evolving orientation and rapid expansion raises the central question of whether ICRAF can successfully develop and sustain a strategic research effort, the hallmark of the CGIAR Centres, and maintain links with its farmer clients while also widening geographically into a global organization.
ICRAF uses the following definition of agroforestry:
"Agroforestry is a collective name for land-use systems and practices where woody perennials are deliberately integrated with crops and/or animals on the same land management unit. The integration can be either in spatial mixture or temporal sequence. There are normally both ecological and economic interactions between the woody and non-woody components in agroforestry."
Agroforestry is a relatively new name for a set of practices that have been developed by farmers over thousands of years. Although ICRAF has maintained essentially the same definition since 1982, it has been the subject of many interpretations and there remains a wide range of views on which practices do and which do not constitute agroforestry. The narrowest definition confines it to a type of intercropping where trees are grown to exploit a beneficial interaction with crops or pasture. A broader, more holistic, definition includes the full range of tree planting and woodland management practices such as living fences, hedges, woodlots, fruit trees near houses, woodland use and management. This broader definition covers practices included under the head of "social forestry"; areas under this head are likely to form an important area for a joint strategy between ICRAF and CIFOR.
The "art" of agroforestry has evolved over centuries; agroforestry as a formalized approach to land use is more recent. Agroforestry is promoted on the basis that it can provide biological, economic, and social advantages. ICRAF's Strategic Plan (April 1992, Final Draft) states:
"resource-poor rural households benefit from improved soil fertility coming from the introduction of nitrogen-fixing trees in enriched fallows or through interplanting; they gain additional income through sale of tree products such as fruit or timber; and gain improved food security associated with the way the perennial component of agroforestry systems extends the season when green fodder and food supplies are available. The latter benefit has significant implications for the nutritional vulnerability of the poorest groups, especially women and children. At the same time, the quality of the environment is maintained through the maintenance of biological diversity, preservation of water catchments and soil quality, and a halt to the net loss of forested land."
Many perceive agroforestry technologies as an attractive alternative to shifting cultivation, which is not now sustainable in many tropical areas. They may be appropriate for the reclamation of degraded secondary forest fallows and derived grasslands. In sub-humid and semi-arid savannas overgrazing, continuous cropping without fertilizer inputs and other practices by resource-poor farmers are causing massive soil fertility depletion. Agroforestry technologies have the potential to reverse this process and provide farmers with food, fodder, fuelwood and other sources of income.
However, agroforestry research in general has not yet validated many of the claims made for site improvement, increased yield, and sustainability to be had from its technologies. Similarly many of the disadvantages, such as competition for light, water and nutrients remain unquantified. Many of the perceived benefits of agroforestry, such as direct benefits on food production and incomes, and indirect environmental benefits on soil and water conservation, remain unsubstantiated and untested. Few new technology packages have emerged from agroforestry research and been widely adopted by farmers. There has also been a tendency to concentrate on technical aspects of agroforestry, with attempts to develop technology packages on-station with little complementary research on the social, economic and policy matters that will ultimately determine adoption.
The solid underpinning of promotion by well conceived and implemented research and proper economic evaluation of the results is essential to the continued credibility of agroforestry as an effective approach to solving land use problems.
ICRAF's mission and strategic objectives, elaborated by statements of the Centre's goal, purpose and guiding principles, are found in its Strategic Plan. ICRAF's declared mission reads:
"To increase the social, economic and nutritional well-being of peoples of developing countries through the use of research and related activities to integrate woody perennials in farming and related land use systems in order to increase productivity, profitability, sustainability, diversity of output and the conservation of natural resources."
In its Strategic Plan ICRAF identifies a set of implementing guidelines which help shape its strategic objectives and the modes of operation for its research and dissemination programmes. The five guidelines are:
- a systematic analysis of the needs of resource-poor land users and the relevance of agroforestry to address those needs to determine priorities;- a determination to use appropriate indigenous knowledge to develop improved technologies;
- a concern to ensure that agroforestry technologies simultaneously address the welfare of rural households and the conservation of natural resources for sustainable production;
- an approach that is oriented to systems and problems, one that draws on the expertise and knowledge of many disciplines, is driven by beneficiaries, and is responsive to users; and
- a desire that results should promote equity among various users.
The mission statement and the guidelines have determined three strategic objectives for ICRAF. Two of these objectives feature collaboration as an operating principle. Given the emphasis placed by ICRAF management on the use of national facilities for ensuring partnership it is surprising that collaboration is not included in the list of implementing guidelines in the Draft Strategic Plan, although the omission is corrected in the MTP. The three strategic objectives identified are:
- conduct collaborative research aimed at improving the socioeconomic welfare of resource-poor farmers and other land users, whilst enhancing agricultural sustainability and the conservation of natural resources in areas of ecoregional and global significance;- undertake and foster research leading to an understanding of processes and to the development of appropriate agroforestry technologies; and
- strengthen national capacities to conduct agroforestry research by fostering collaboration between institutes and promoting the dissemination of information through training, education, documentation and communication.
Agroforestry, ICRAF's raison d'être, has a major potential role in the prevention of environmental pollution at the global level. Success in the quest for sustainable agricultural production will reduce the pressures on forested land, and the threats from both atmospheric pollution and reducing biodiversity. The potential of agroforestry technologies to conserve soil, prevent erosion, and reduce downstream and ocean pollution, is equally important.
In its Strategic Plan (page 11) ICRAF recognizes as its ultimate purpose the mitigation of tropical deforestation, land depletion and rural poverty. The Panel suggests ICRAF articulate more explicitly in its MTP the relevance and importance of its work to these global environmental issues.
When originally set up in 1971, the rationale for the countries supporting the new CGIAR System was the cost efficiency of international, publicly funded, scientific research for the Third World rural poor. Properly conducted science is expensive and time consuming, and therefore requires a degree of protection from the political pressures of development. By giving leadership in providing scientists with good facilities there was the expectation of globally relevant results to be used in specific country contexts through the mediation of national institutions skilled in applied and adaptive research. The original centres were focused on important Third World food commodities and difficult agroecologies. Early expectations were realized through the successes with the high yielding varieties of wheat and rice which led to rapid growth of the CGIAR System through the 1970's and 1980's. Latterly, as the CGIAR starts into the 1990's, a number of issues have emerged among its stakeholders. The CGIAR is clearly in transition, and there is strong emphasis on the sustainable management of natural resources and the reduction of environmental degradation.
The CGIAR's paper on sustainable agricultural production (TAC 1989) 1 states:
"The sustainability of agricultural production is determined by the complex interactions of the biological, physical and socioeconomic factors that constitute the basis of all production systems. Although diverse in character, agricultural production systems are, inherently, neither sustainable nor unsustainable. They respond to changes in ways that either enhance or endanger sustainability, depending on the nature of the change in relation to the prevailing environmental and socioeconomic circumstances. Understanding the dynamics of environmental and socioeconomic change therefore lies at the heart of understanding agricultural sustainability"... "the pressures threatening sustainability are new, and perhaps some of the plants or animals not yet adopted by man might find a place in novel production systems, especially those designed to balance more easily the budget of affordable inputs and usable outputs. In this context, research into the incorporation of woody perennials into crop and livestock production systems, now generally referred to as agroforestry, has much to commend it."1 Sustainable Agricultural Production: Implications for International Agricultural Research. FAO Research and Technology Paper 4, FAO, Rome. 131 pp.
The entry of ICRAF into the CGIAR has to be seen within this evolutionary context. Although the state of transition in the CGIAR will make successful entry harder to achieve, ICRAF's experience can help resolve some of the issues of the transition.
This external review report is an opportunity to highlight the fact that ICRAF is already making contributions to resolving the transitional issues currently facing the CGIAR. The experience and expertise at the Centre offers lessons for the Group as a whole.
There are demands from the donors for new initiatives and a wider role for the CGIAR. These demands have already extended CGIAR and IARC responsibilities and seek to extend them further. Wider responsibilities, unless judiciously undertaken, threaten focus, management capacity and critical mass, and therefore effectiveness, credibility and confidence.
The recent donor led expansion of the CGIAR took it beyond agriculture into the sectors of Agroforestry, Forestry, Fisheries and Irrigation. Each of these four new sectors has a new IARC, all of which need substantial funding to make an effective contribution. Perversely, the broadening of the mandate of the CGIAR System by its donors has been paralleled by declining funding due to the G7 recession, to alternative uses for donor funds in eastern Europe, and to alternative uses for funds to save the environment.
New funds may eventually come to the CGIAR System as the links between the environment, poverty alleviation, agricultural progress, and research contributions to such progress, are better understood and articulated. Money from new donor sources on the environment, biodiversity and global climate change is only slowly starting to become available to the IARCs. ICRAF has pioneered a consortium of IARCs and other institutions to make an application to the Global Environment Fund. The success of the application is an important acknowledgement of the role of agricultural research in combating environmental degradation and achieving sustainable production. The process behind successful application has lessons for other fund raising initiatives by CGIAR Centres.
The way ICRAF is mobilizing to address the sustainability issue has lessons for other IARCs also reorganizing towards natural resource management research (see sections 3.1. and 7.2.). Similarly ICRAF's collaborative research efforts within the Southern and Eastern African AFRENAs offer insights for improving the interface between IARCs and national research systems (see sections 6.1. and 7.4.). Both natural resource management research and the IARC/NARS interface are currently preoccupying a Joint TAC/Centre Directors Working Group on the CGIAR Ecoregional Initiative.
These lessons are taken up in the report. Suffice it to say here that the external review of ICRAF, a new IARC in agroforestry and a new sector for the CGIAR, sheds useful light on several of the contemporary issues facing the CGIAR.
