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| Titel |
Agro-Forestry system in West Africa: integrating a green solution to cope with soil depletion towards agricultural sustainability |
| VerfasserIn |
Filipa Monteiro, Patricia Vidigal, Maria Manuel Romeiras, Ana Ribeiro, Maria Manuela Abreu, Wanda Viegas, Luís Catarino |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2017
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 19 (2017) |
| Datensatznummer |
250152485
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2017-17326.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| During the last decades, agriculture in West Africa has been marked by dramatic shifts with
the coverage of single crops, increasing pressure over the available arable land. Yet, West
African countries are still striving to achieve sustainable production at an increased scale for
global market needs. Market-driven rapid intensification is often a major cause
for cropland area expansion at the expense of deforestation and soil degradation,
especially to export commodities in times of high prices. Cashew (Anacardium
occidentale L.) is nowadays an important export-oriented crop, being produced under
intensive cultivation regimes in several tropical regions. Particularly, among the main
cashew production areas, West Africa is the most recent and dynamic in the world,
accounting for 45% of the world cashew nuts production in 2015. Considering its
global market values, several developing countries rely on cashew nuts as national
economy revenues, namely in Guinea-Bissau. Considering the intensive regime of
cashew production in Guinea-Bissau, and as widely recognized, intensive agriculture
linked with extensification can negatively impact ecosystems, affecting natural
resources availability, soil erosion and arability compromised by excessive salinity.
Ultimately this will result in the disruption of carbon - nitrogen cycle, important to the
agricultural ecosystem sustainability. As such, tree intercropped with legumes as cover
crops, offers a sustainable management of the land area, thus creating substantial
benefits both economically and environmentally, as it enhances diversification of
products outputs and proving to be more sustainable than forestry and/or agricultural
monocultures. Soil fertility improvement is a key entry point for achieving food security,
and also increment agriculture commodities of the agro-system. Without using
inorganic fertilizers, the green solution for improving soil management is to incorporate
adapted multi-purpose legumes as cover crops, reducing soil erosion as well as
insect pests and associated diseases, while improves the yield of the main crop. The
integration of legume in agroforestry systems offers an alternative and resilient
strategy to increase N availability without increasing mineral N additions. As such, we
present a case study of a forest-based system under intensive agriculture regime and
propose an alternative sustainable system - the agroforestry system - by intercropping
legumes, thus ensuring the sustainability of a cash crop sector both in terms of food
security and soil resources. Results obtained from this case-study will therefore be
important to demonstrate the global importance of agroforestry systems as key
strategy for land use planning, sustainability of the agricultural systems as well as
the preserving the environment of smallholder farms in the sub-Saharan Africa. |
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