Policies for agroforestry, a narrative review of four ‘continental’ regions: EU, India, Brazil, and the United States

Rosemary Venn, Fernando-Esteban Montero-de-Oliveira, Jesse Buratti-Donham, Jonathan Eden, Sabine Reinecke

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Abstract

Agroforestry is receiving renewed interest due to its highly diversified, multifunctional nature. With a long history and roots in many indigenous farming systems, agroforestry offers a ‘win-win’ for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, on-farm profitability, resilience, and social wellbeing. However, the re-integration of trees on farms goes against the previous decades’ push for de-mixing, intensifying, and simplifying production methods, and farmer uptake remains low. As understanding and support for more integrated, complex farming systems builds, an enabling policy landscape is needed. This narrative policy review considers policies for agroforestry across four ‘continental’ regions: the EU, India, Brazil, and the United States. Using an agroecological framework, we explore the content, development, objectives, and alignment of both direct and indirect policies to provide insight into: how policies for agroforestry are currently framed; their development process; and, whether over-lapping and interconnected policy objectives are included. We find that policies for agroforestry are increasing gradually, but are typically confined to an agronomic understanding, with limited inclusion of the socio-political aspects of food and farming. Except in Brazil, policies appear to be narrow in scope, with few stakeholders included in their development. Policies do not challenge the status quo of the dominant corporate agri-food system and appear to miss the transformative potential of agroforestry. We recommend: greater coordination of policy instruments to achieve co-benefits; focused integration of agricultural and climate policies; greater inclusion of diverse stakeholders in policy development; and a widening of agroforestry systems’ objectives, both in policy and practice.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1417740
Number of pages17
JournalFrontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Volume8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Dec 2024

Bibliographical note

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was made possible thanks to the Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement no. 862993, AGROMIX. Project AGROMIX delivers participatory research to drive the transition toward resilient farming and efficient land use in Europe. Additionally, this research was supported by the German Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF) through the research project CDR-PoEt, grant number: 01LS2108A, in which the co-author Fernando-Esteban Montero-de-Oliveira develops his doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg.

FundersFunder number
European Horizon 2020862993
Federal Ministry of Education and Research01LS2108A

    Keywords

    • agroforestry
    • multifunctional
    • sustainable food systems
    • policy coherence
    • nature-based solutions

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