Agroforestry is increasingly recognised as a means of solving, in one integrated approach, three global challenges: poverty and hunger, climate change and biodiversity loss.

Agroforestry mixes trees and other woody plants together with crops and livestock. By doing so, it diversifies what is cultivated, multiplies economic options, increases land productivity, biodiversity and carbon storage, and builds local people’s resilience.

Diverse mixtures like this are not easily compatible with industrial-scale mechanisation. But agroforestry suits and can readily enrich the lives of 1.3 billion smallholder farmers and Indigenous Peoples. If spread, it will maintain the ecosystem functionality of agriculture, the world’s largest terrestrial land use. Yet, eight main barriers constrain agroforestry uptake: 

1. Limited awareness of agroforestry benefits
2. High upfront costs
3. Additional labour requirements
4. Off-putting system complexity
5. Limited access to seed
6. Lack of space and scale to aggregate volumes to penetrate markets
7. Disabling policies, and
8. Limited market know-how and logistics.

This report documents seven case studies that show how forest and farm producer organisations are helping overcome each one of these barriers. In diverse country contexts worldwide, they are spearheading agroforestry uptake of many different types.

To accelerate this, it is necessary to recognise the importance of such producer organisations in overcoming barriers to agroforestry uptake, promote the benefits of their efforts to increase agroforestry uptake and channel finance more directly to them as the main agents of change.