ABSTRACT
Increasing the tree cover in dryland areas will help to control desertification by protecting soil from erosion and reducing the pressure on existing forest resources for fuelwood and fodder, but in most countries there are simply not enough personnel in government forestry departments to undertake all the afforestation which is desirable; hence the need for social forestry schemes that involve varying degrees of participation by local people. The last chapter showed that communal tree planting (true community forestry) has so far met with only limited success. The most successful kind of social forestry has actually been farm forestry, the establishment of plantations on private farmlands for profit. Farm forestry is but one of a number of agroforestry techniques which combine agriculture and forestry, and make drylands more productive and less vulnerable to degradation. The first part of this chapter describes progress made in farm forestry, and puts it in the wider context of other agroforestry techniques, such as silvopasture (mixed grazing and forestry). Instead of tree planting, another strategy may be to prevent deforestation from ever taking place. The second part of the chapter, therefore, looks at recent experiments in managing natural woodlands in dry areas, previously considered to be much less productive than plantations. Natural woodlands might actually supply just as much wood as plantations, and many other useful products besides, so it is possible that they will receive much greater support from local people than plantations which only produce fuelwood.
