Livelihood Improvement through Agroforestry Compared to Conventional Farming System: Evidence from Northern Irrigated Plain, Pakistan

Abstract

The concept of sustainable livelihood garnered a prominent status in humanitarian and international development organizations that aim to calculate and build a livelihood for agroforestry farmers. However, it is difficult to measure and analyze as well as visualize the data of livelihood improvement from agroforestry (AF). This paper comparatively assessed 400 smallholder farmers’ livelihood through AF and conventional farming (CF) systems in the Northern Irrigated Plain of Pakistan. The findings showed that AF has a mixed impact on farmers’ livelihood capital, including human, physical, natural, financial and social capital. Specifically, AF significantly improved financial capital in terms of timber, non-timber and fuel wood income. Furthermore, the physical capital (buffalo plough, generators and sprinklers), natural capital (the extent of cultivated land and land ownership; the number of households (HHs) growing vegetables, fruit crops and medicinal crops) and social capital (the number of social groups that HHs involved and number of HHs sharing crop seeds) of AF farmer HHs were significantly improved compared to those of CF farmers. However, the results show that financial capital gain through crop income, HHs owning high-value vehicles (tractors) and farmers trust and collective activities were significantly higher in CF farmers than AF ones. Therefore, to enhance the contribution of AF to rural livelihood, advanced extension services and government involvement on research planning and implementing are needed.

Agroforestry Adoption Decision in Green Growth Initiative Programs: Key Lessons from the Billion Trees Afforestation Project (BTAP)

“…The discussion on ensuring the timely adoption of agroforestry is largely missing in the literature. Most studies in the literature on the factors affecting the adoption of agroforestry focus on socioeconomic factors (Amare and Darr, 2020 ; Koussihouèdé et al, 2020 ; Gosling et al, 2021 ), policy (Amadu et al, 2020 ), social capital (Amare and Darr, 2020 ; Ahmad et al, 2021 ), external agents (Brockington et al, 2016 ), and access to information by farming households (Arimi and Omoare, 2021 ). There are also some studies on the temporal aspects of agroforestry adoption, which discuss the effects of initial adoption on farmer’s retention of plants (Brockington et al, 2016 ), promotion of positive agro-ecological system (Rosati et al, 2021 ) and economic and social benefits to farming communities (Romanova et al, 2022 ).…”

Farmer’s Perceptions of Agroforestry Practices, Contributions to Rural Household Farm Income, and Their Determinants in Sodo Zuria District, Southern Ethiopia

“…Tis is because when there is a large amount of land, there will be more component diversifcation, which increases the system's income and is consistent with the discovery of new components [148][149][150][151]. According to the fndings of [58,138], increasing the components of agroforestry can increase the system's income, but the diversifcation of the component is directly afected by the farm's size.…”

“…And the environmental management advantages of agroforestry practices, as reported by agroforestry practices, that included more than one component (trees/ shrubs/annual crops; tree/shrubs/annual crop/livestock components) favored the community's access to food and income throughout the year [134][135][136]. As a result, as discussed by agroforestry practices, signifcantly improved the fnancial and food status of households in the communities [137][138][139]. Motiur et al [140] found that agroforestry practices contributed 15.9 and 11.8 percent of household income in southwest and northern Bangladesh, respectively.…”

Clusterization of Agroforestry Farmers using K-Means Cluster Algorithm and Elbow Method

“…Farmer families also assist in land cultivation through various activities such as collecting poultry eggs, feeding farm animals, and weeding in farm fields. Therefore, they do not have leisure time to go and play with other kids (Ahmad et al 2021). For a low-income family, women's family members involved in agriculture could be intent during the seasons when areas need more labor (Mulyoutami et al 2020).…”