Highlights
- Forest landscapes and their services are critical to the well-being of smallholder farmers, local populations, and indigenous communities. However, global food systems are under pressure, with climate change further driving land degradation and declining crop yields.
- Food security and the resilience of communities depend to a large extent on individual farm households in rural areas. These small-scale producers live from and manage various socio-economically and ecologically complex production systems.
- Resilience management is becoming more important at the community level as the scale and magnitude of ecosystem change increase. Resilience to climate change requires diversification in four key areas of development – social, ecological, infrastructural, and economic.
Enhancing resilient tree-based value chains in Madagascar and Togo
Forest landscape restoration (FLR) can help improve food security and the resilience of local communities. Collaborating in different African countries, GIZ’s Forests4Future (F4F) and the FAO’s Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) are two projects that enhance agroforestry systems and business activities by linking producers and their organizations with processing enterprises, thus professionalizing tree-based value chains.
- Project 1 – F4F works with women’s and farmers’ organizations in Madagascar and Togo to enhance and promote agroforestry systems for food security and land restoration. Approaches link agriculture with trees and forestry implementation; for instance, focusing on cocoa, vanilla, maize, beans, and cassava.
- Project 2 – FFF is a partnership between FAO, IIED, IUCN, and Agricord. The FFF has enabled forest and farm producers in Madagascar and Togo to respond to climate change at the landscape scale by encouraging them to diversify and improve their production systems, landscapes, infrastructure, and institutions.
Both projects also support sustainable economic development, e.g., through professionalizing value chains of products like Karité and Néré (shea butter and African locust bean), aiming at enhancing yield and livelihoods, food security, and resilience to the impacts of climate change. The ultimate goal is to improve the income of beneficiary households for better socioeconomic and environmental well-being.
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