Agroforestry: Proprietary dimensions

This paper examines the changes in our thinking over the past several years concerning how tenure, or property rights in land and trees, affect farmer incentives for an adoption of agroforestry practices. We deal here with three quite different tenure situations:

• trees on the agricultural holding;
• trees as commons (a communal forest, or a village woodlot); and
• trees in reserves managed by the state.

Agroforestry has tended to be associated primarily with forestry on the holding, but agroforestry is the incorporation of trees into a farming system and the farming system often involves use of resources outside the holding, especially as regards tree products. The farmer's decisions about trees are made in terms of his or her overall access to tree products, whether on or off the holding. The farmer may have tenure (rights) in all these situations. The tenure will be most extensive over the agricultural holding but the farmer may also have use rights in a communal forest as a member of the community, and may hold a license, for instance for gathering dead wood, in a state forest. A farmer's options concerning trees in any of these tenure situations cannot be defined in isolation from the options in the other situations. (author)