Chapter 32 - Trees: Ensuring That Farmers Benefit From Domestication: An Update: R.R.B. Leakey

Abstract

In response to farmers’ interest in the cultivation of indigenous trees that produce traditionally and culturally important tree products, this chapter place the outcomes resulting from participatory, decentralized, tree domestication; community capacity building through Rural Resource Centres, and the development of a value chain based on associated cottage industries, in their social and economic context. Importantly this engages community level ‘diffusion hubs’; partnerships between producers and traders; the promotion of collective action and group sales; a village-level stabilization fund; market information and the enhancement of farmers’ capacity to capture higher prices in order to create new income streams. Other initiatives include an examination of the issues around access and rights to land, product processing and value-adding, the linkages required for a viable domestication-commercialization continuum, and issues around national policy and law reform. These steps come together to promote a self-help philosophy to agricultural development that stimulates meaningful impacts on agricultural productivity, food and nutritional insecurity, poverty by reversing the cycle of land degradation and social deprivation. The chapter concludes that this bottom-up approach to domestication adds a new tool to agricultural development - ‘socially modified organisms’ - that could have great value to other parts of the tropics. However, importantly, progress still has to be made to protect farmers‘ intellectual property rights.