India adopts a national agroforestry policy

In India, FTA partners are currently involved in the technical group for achieving the Agroforestry Mission, created as part of the country’s agroforestry policy. India was the first country to adopt a national agroforestry policy in 2014, with support for the process by FTA and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) scientists. The historical segregation between forestry and agriculture as policy domains was identified as the primary constraint. It is still too early to estimate the full impact of the implementation of the policy, but thus far, 18 states have changed the laws that had so far blocked mass adoption of agroforestry, especially involving smallholder timber production and marketing; eight states, representing 39 million landholdings, now show significant public and private agroforestry investments.

Assuming only 30 percent of landholdings (households) use agroforestry practices, at least 11.7 million households, representing about 11 million hectares, are already benefiting from changes arising out of the policy. The strategic investment of FTA support has had a huge multiplier effect on financial resources: at the federal level, India committed about US$410 million (2016-2020) of federal and state government resources to implement the agroforestry policy accompanied by a new “% of green cover” criteria for allocating an additional US$9 billion funds to states. India identified agroforestry as the major tool to fulfil its nationally determined commitments (NDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).