The Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI), under its programme Asia- Pacific Consortium on Agricultural Biotechnology and Bioresources (APCoAB), organized a Virtual Regional Expert Consultation on Agroforestry for Environmental Resilience and Sustainable Livelihoods of Farmers in Asia-Pacific with active partnership of Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) and Council of Agriculture (COA), Taiwan, on October 13–14, 2021.

The Expert Consultation came out with some very important recommendations including highlighting the need for a new paradigm of inter-sectoral planning and policy for each country to scale up practice of agroforestry and also for giving due importance to specific local farm innovations with farmers as core innovator and focused around different public and private stakeholders. The need for having National Agroforestry Policies was stressed upon for scaling up the innovations, bringing in investments and converging stakeholders to one platform and so also for carbon financing of agroforestry plantations. It was also recommended that Agroforestry Business Incubators should be linked with industries and markets in sourcing raw materials direct from farmlands, ensuring that farmers get the best prices for their tree products and for establishing the market-linked value chains to facilitate income generating activities for smallholders including women farmers in agroforestry. There were some useful recommendations for acting at regional level on researchable agendas, capacity development, regulatory policy development and public awareness, and potential partnerships. The need of continuous scientific communication activities including documenting and sharing of lessons learnt was also emphasized.

Download the proceedings here