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Three decades of work by the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre  has turned a traditional practice — growing trees and shrubs alongside crops — into a science-based discipline. That science, agroforestry, is now recognized around the world for its potential to provide food, fodder, increase crop yields and incomes, protect watersheds, provide energy, prevent land degradation, and more. IDRC was a prime mover in the centre’s creation.

IDRC advisor John Bene, a Canadian forester who led a visionary study on tropical forestry research priorities in 1975, was the catalyst for the creation of the International Centre for Research on Agroforestry (ICRAF), as the centre was known until 2002. That study found that forestry research around the globe was sporadic, scattered, and uncoordinated and called for a new approach to the agricultural and forestry problems of developing countries.

Thus began a chain of events that led to ICRAf’s creation in 1978. Since then, interest in agroforestry and support for it has continued to grow. Asthe centre's Director General Dennis Garrity told the 2009 World Congress of Agroforestry: “Agroforestry has now come of age as an integrative science and practice. It is at the heart of the solution to so many of the challenges we face.” It can enhance food security and improve rural livelihoods; increase soil fertility; absorb atmospheric carbon, a major greenhouse gas; and provide farmers with the technologies to restore degraded land.

IDRC and the Canadian International Development Agency have supported the agroforestry centre’s activities since its beginning. And in recognition of Bene’s work, IDRC awards the John G. Bene Fellowship annually to a Canadian graduate student of agroforestry in the developing world.

IDRC's LASTING IMPACTS  > INNOVATIONS IN RESEARCH

2010-07

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