How can small-scale farmers benefit from trees on farms? Premium

Enhancing farmer livelihoods and the environment through agroforestry in India, focusing on smallholders and sustainable practices.

Agriculture in India has historically been a diversified land-use practice, integrating crops, trees, and livestock. This technique, broadly called agroforestry, can enhance farmer livelihoods and the environment and is slowly gaining in popularity after decades of the modus operandus of monocropping inspired by the Green Revolution.

“The Gaja cyclone nearly razed down all coconut trees and made the soils saline; we did not know what to plant after,” said Chitra, a medium-scale farmer in Pudukkottai district of Tamil Nadu, during one of our recent field visits. “We pooled our money and started planting jackfruit and mangoes. It has been six years and we are seeing some good profits.”

This change resulted from India’s pioneering efforts to promote agroforestry. These efforts received an impetus nearly 10 years ago with the establishment of the National Agroforestry Policy (2014) but which also built on significant investments in research over a longer 40-year span. Yet the uptake of agroforestry remains restricted to farmers with medium or large landholdings.

This pattern is unsurprising since smallholder farmers seldom grow trees because of their long gestation, a lack of incentive or investment-based capital, and weak market linkages. Then again, Chitra’s experience demonstrates agroforestry’s potential and presents a case for creating an enabling environment to enhance trees on farms.

The five-year ‘Trees Outside of Forests India’ (TOFI) initiative is one such attempt to assess comprehensive ways to stimulate a change in the status quo. It’s a joint initiative of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. TOFI seeks to enhance tree cover in seven Indian states by identifying promising expansion opportunities and engaging the right levers.

Through our research and stakeholder consultations, we have identified key impediments to enhancing trees-outside-forests (TOF) cover through agroforestry in seven states: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh.

In particular, we discovered that water availability and transition finance have been recurrent concerns for smallholders across these states. Still, solutions to these barriers are within reasonable reach.