ABSTRACT
In many developing countries, a political recognition is dawning that the rapid growth of populations in the past three decades has eliminated the validity of traditional rights to fuelwood and fodder as free goods. Agroforestry is a general term for the planting of trees on farmland for fuelwood, poles, shade, shelter, or fruit. The East African Agriculture and Forestry Organization found that tea yields are responsive to total daily radiation at the plucking surface. The main tropical tree commodity crops can be grown in combination, sometimes affording high cash returns per hectare. In western Nigeria, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture has experimented with leucaena interplanted with maize in an area of 1500 millimeters annual rainfall. An age-old form of community tree planting in watershed development was based on the collection of water running off from hill slopes. Trees have greater ability than cereal crops to survive on such erratic irrigation of pockets of deep alluvial soil.
