53% of rural households in Bangladesh comprise small and marginal farmers and their families - each having less than one ha of cultivable land and 34% having no land except for their homesteads. The large majority of these households depend on their homesteads for about half of their requirements in food and cash. This income is gained through agroforestry – the mixed cultivation of diverse species of trees and crops along with the rearing of poultry and livestock. SDC’s first Sustainable Land Use Programme (1986 – 2003) promoted the development of private nurseries in the northwest region through the Village and Farm Forestry Project in order to make planting material of fruit trees and timber trees readily available to small farmers. A self-reliant professional network of 1,800 nursery owners now exists selling 19 Mio trees per year (2003).
Despite this success, the quality of the planting material remained poor – limiting the return to the farmer. SDC thus initiated the Fruit Tree Improvement Project in June 1999 and the Agroforestry Improvement Project in January 2001 to address this issue. These projects were technically successful yet proved institutionally unsustainable. The lesson learnt was that the supply of quality planting material was a long-term and national issue requiring a sustainable national solution. Discussions with the main mandated stakeholders (research institutes, extension agencies, nursery owners) have elicited considerable interest in developing systematic and collaborative systems of quality planting material (QPM) development and distribution and they have already started taking action.
AFIP is the third project within SDC’s new Sustainable Land Use (SLU) programme announced in the Entry Proposal 'Sustainable Land Use' (Sept. 03 to Dec. 08). It takes over the essential objectives of the former fruit and agroforestry improvement projects but aims for greater sustainability through encouraging the ownership of the concerned stakeholders. Key stakeholders are the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) for fruit tree improvement and the Bangladesh Forest Research Institute (BFRI) for timber tree improvement.
The goal of AFIP is that ‘Small farmers throughout Bangladesh have ready access to quality planting material of required varieties of agroforestry species – as a result of a systematic national programme of quality planting material development and a national quality-control system and distribution system involving key stakeholders'. AFIP's contribution to the achievement of the above goal lies in i) supporting and promoting collaboration between the concerned national stakeholders and, ii) developing the distribution system through promoting linkages between public institutions, private nursery owners, and small scale farmers with a focus on the Rajshahi division in the North West region of Bangladesh.
The majority of the ultimate beneficiaries of the entire SLU Programme will be small and marginal farm families - especially women.
The Planning Platform for this project was approved in June 2004. This proposal is the outcome of wide reflections involving programme beneficiaries in Rajshahi and a variety of stakeholders such as nursery owners, national research institutes and Department of Agricultural Extension.
