AGROFORESTRY SYSTEMS AND PRACTICES TEACHING DOCUMENT FOR AGRICULTURAL AND NATUR

INTRODUCTION
Cultivating trees and agricultural crops in intimate combination with one another is an ancient practice that farmers have used throughout the world. Tracing the history of agroforestry, King (1987) states that in Europe, until the Middle Ages, it was the general custom to clear-fell degraded forest, burn the slash, cultivate food crops for varying periods on the cleared area, and plant or sow trees before, along with, or after sowing agricultural crops. This "farming system" is no longer popular in Europe, but was widely practiced in Finland up to the end of the last century, and was being practiced in a few areas in Germany as late as the 1920s.
Many factors and developments in the 1970s contributed to the general acceptance of agroforestry as a system of land management that is applicable to both farm and forest. These factors included:
The re-assessment of development policies by the World Bank;
A reexamination of forestry policies by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations;
A reawakening of scientific interest in both intercropping and farming systems;
The deteriorating food situation in many areas of the developing world;
The increasing spread of tropical deforestation and ecological degradation;
The energy crisis of the 1970s and consequent price escalation and shortage of fertilizers; and
The establishment by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada of a project for the identification of tropical forestry research priorities.
Of the two billion persons living in our developing member countries, nearly two-thirds, or some 1.3 billion, are members of farm families, and of these are some 900 million whose annual incomes average less than $100...for hundreds of millions of these subsistence farmers life is neither satisfying nor decent. Hunger and malnutrition menace their families. Illiteracy forecloses their future. Disease and death visit their villages too often, stay too long, and return too soon.
The miracle of the Green Revolution may have arrived, but, for the most part, the poor farmer has not been able to participate in it. He cannot afford to pay for the irrigation, the pesticide, the fertilizer, or perhaps for the land itself, on which his title may be vulnerable and his tenancy uncertain. Against this backdrop of concern for the rural poor, the World Bank actively considered the possibility of supporting nationally oriented forestry programs.
As a result, it formulated a Forestry Sector Policy paper in 1978, which has been used as the basis for much of its lending in the forestry sub-sector in the 1980s'. Indeed, its social forestry program, which has been expanded considerably since the 1980s, not only contains many elements of agroforestry but is reportedly designed to assist the peasant and the ordinary farmer by increasing food production and conserving the environment as much as it helps the traditional forest services to produce and process wood (Spears, 1987).