Updated from the DGIB internal management system 'MIS'
May 1998
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DGIB MIS System
internal management system
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| Title : | Alley Cropping vs. Shifting Cultivation, Ph. III |
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| Description : | 1) On the basis of findings in the project so far, to evaluate alley-cropping (AC) with Inga species as an acceptable technique with subsistence farmers in indigenous reserves or buffer zones.
2) To enable key local institutions, in areas affected by widespread slash-and-burn agriculture, to conduct their own evaluation of, and experiments upon, alley-cropping using local-provenance Inga species.
3) To enable those institutions to evaluate and demonstrate the use of Inga (as outlined above) in the re-establishment of forested strips which may function as "biological corridors" linking isolated forest stands across degraded pasture.
4) To enable those institutions to demonstrate, to farmers' groups and field workers, mature and fully functioning alley-cropping systems on a realistically large scale.
5) To establish the logistical basis for the demonstration and future expansion (seed banks) of a-c with Inga in two regional centres of Central America, including three critical localities in the humid tropical Northern zone of Honduras.
6) To prepare dissemination material for the use of field workers and farmers' groups.
7) Using findings and experience gained in earlier project phases, to develop, jointly with one of the Honduran scientific institutions, the appropriate analytical techniques required to establish an index-of-performance for the evaluation of subsistence farming systems in Northern Honduras.
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| Objectives : | To protect tropical rainforest threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture and to rehabilitate formerly forested land which has already been degraded by slash-and-burn agriculture and subsequent cattle ranching by :
ú providing the technical means (AC) enabling long-term policies to be implemented for the protection of remaining primary and secondary rain-forest fragments and their reconnection across degraded landscapes by biological corridors and forest tracts.
ú enhancing local scientific capacity in monitoring the nutrient cycle in slash and burn cultivation and AC systems.
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| Justification : | This long-term research program which CUDG has been executing with the support of the EC (DG XII / DG IB) has focussed upon slash-and-burn agriculture, and AC as an alternative,in the context of the leached, acid latosols which are typical of rainforest zones and upon which some of the greatest ecological impacts of our age are to be seen. This acid-soil context was a conscious decision in which the project draws upon, and contributes to, a somewhat narrow field of knowledge. Very few studies have concentrated upon acid rainforest soils, yet it is highly probable that findings and insights into the processes and nature of such soil types will prove to be valid for more-favourable soil types, but not vice versa. Moreover, it is onto these extensive, but agriculturally marginal, soil types (e.g. widely in Amazonia, Philippines, Central America, etc.) that shifting cultivators are inevitably driven and destroy large areas of primary forest, having been displaced by plantation agriculture, war or other demographic pressures. Recent (UNEP) estimates of the numbers of families engaged in shifting agriculture have been placed at the 200-300 million mark, but such figures are notoriously difficult to confirm. The problem of deforestation by shifting cultivation is especially serious in Honduras, which lost 40 % of its forest cover since 1950. |
| Execution : | The project will be based in La Ceiba, where a central office will host a core-team consisting of a CU research associate , graduate volunteers, a full-time administrator and a half-time secretary. The administrator will be appointed by agreement between CUDG and the EC; he/she may be of local or european origin.
La Ceiba is optimally-placed for access to all the sites requiring most immediate attention, such as the demonstration plots, and has international air links. Some aspects of the logistics (e.g. accomodation) will need to be improved near the on-farm trials sites, especially in the Mosquitia, where almost no infrastructure exists.
Collation of monthly data from expenses at all the project locations and overall accounting to the Commission will be done according to the reporting schedule from La Ceiba to Cambridge and hence to Brussels. To this purpose , CUDG will put at disposition of the project an accounting clerk (20 % of time) ,based in Cambridge.
Written arrangements will be established with all partners concerned.
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Information in the TROPICS system is provisional only
Comments and suggestions to tropics@odi.org.uk |
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