Participatory Domestication of New Crops using Agroforestry Techniques

Abstract

Tropical forests and savannas provide many tree, shrub, liana and herbaceous species whose products (fruits, kernels, roots, leaves, bark and bark extracts) are commonly used for food, income generation, shelter building, mate-rials, and medicine by local people. These indigenous species most often have multiple uses, and are virtually wild. Some of these multipurpose species have been identified in regional farmers' surveys as priority species for domestication. Participatory domestication, as implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre and its partners in Africa, is farmer-driven and market-oriented, and involves the selection, propagation and integration of these species in farmlands. In Latin America, tree domestication is participatory, and consists of farmer-driven tree selection, testing and adaptation of provenances, seed zone delimitation and trans-fer guidelines, and accelerating the delivery of high-value germplasm to farm-ers. In Oceania, tree domestication consists of the selection of a wild genotype or a seedling of a cultivated form, improvement of the plant's environment, and improvement of the crop's population composed of well-established selected seedlings. In Southeast Asia, tree domestication involves tree breeding, explo-ration and collection of populations of crops enrolled in the domestication pro-gram, development of propagation techniques, dissemination, multiplication and assessment of germplasm, facilitation of farmers' access to the market and market information, marketing of tree products, integration of high-value germplasm into land-use systems, dissemination of technical information, and empowerment of farmers with tree domestication techniques.