Can agroforestry spring the trap?
Interestingly, two papers in this conference provide examples of industrially important natural products that are produced in agroforestry systems by small-scale farmers (gum arabic -see Seif el Din and Zarroug; damar resin and jungle rubber-see Michon and de Foresta). This suggests that commercial interests and small-scale production, as in agroforestry, are not necessarily incompatible. Agroforestry has been a collective term for land-use systems and practices in which woody perennials are deliberately integrated with crops and/or animals on the same land-management unit, either in a spatial mixture or a temporal sequence. The trees in agroforestry practices generally fulfil multiple purposes, involving the protection of the soil or improvement of its fertility, as well as the production of one or more products (Cooper et al. 1996). The domestication of these agroforestry trees should enhance their capacity to fulfil either or both of these service or production functions. Domesticat
