Social Forestry and Agroforestry

• Social forestry is the raising and management of trees on land outside reserved forests, through afforestation of barren, degraded and common lands, to meet the needs of local people and to secure environmental benefit and rural development.
  • Unlike conventional industrial or reserved forestry, it is oriented to the needs of communities living around degraded and marginal land, not to commercial timber alone. It is forestry of the people, by the people and for the people.
• Agroforestry is the deliberate growing of trees and shrubs with crops and/or livestock on the same land unit. It is the farm-level core of social forestry and today the main way India adds tree cover outside its forests.
• Both answer the same problem: pressure on natural forests for fuel, fodder and small timber, which drives deforestation and forest degradation.

Social Forestry

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Origin, definition and objectives

• Jack Westoby, an FAO forest economist, first used the term “social forestry” in 1968, in his address to the Ninth Commonwealth Forestry Congress in New Delhi: forestry that aims to produce flows of benefits for the local community.
• In India, the National Commission on Agriculture (NCA) gave the idea its programme form. After an interim report on social forestry, its final report of 1976 recommended a nationwide social forestry programme. From then on India formally embarked on social forestry projects with twin aims:
  • taking pressure off existing natural forests, and
  • making productive use of all unused and fallow land in the country.
• The initial focus was the reforestation of government forest land close to human settlements, degraded over the years by continuous human use. In practice, planting spread across a wide range of land categories:
  • in and around agricultural fields;
  • along railway lines, roadsides, and river and canal banks, the classic linear or strip plantation model;
  • on village common land, government wasteland and panchayat land.
• Incentives for survival: the government extended financial and material incentives so that saplings would be cared for after planting, since unprotected saplings on common land survive poorly.
• Usufruct species: it first encouraged the free distribution of usufruct species, trees whose fruit, fodder, fibre or other yield the planter can use or sell directly, as opposed to pure timber species whose benefit comes only after decades.
• Mass mobilisation: the programme was launched as a mass mobilisation programme, to involve the common population in afforestation rather than leave it to the Forest Department alone.
• Objectives in short: fuelwood, fodder, small timber and minor produce for rural households; employment; soil and water conservation; shelter for crops; and recreation and amenity near towns.

How social forestry was implemented

• India’s drive was not a single scheme but a family of state projects, many of them externally aided, rolled out from the late 1970s through the 1980s.
  • World Bank credits began with the Uttar Pradesh Social Forestry and Gujarat Community Forestry projects (from about 1979–80).
  • The World Bank’s National Social Forestry Project (from 1985) continued support in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat and extended it to Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.
  • About 14 externally aided projects, funded by the World Bank, USAID, SIDA, ODA, CIDA and DANIDA among others, ran in as many states during the 1980s.
• State programmes were adapted to local land tenure and agro-climatic conditions. Gujarat became the model for strip plantations and farm forestry; Uttar Pradesh and Haryana ran large programmes in the plains.
• Delivery: Forest Department nurseries, later decentralised kisan and school nurseries, supplied free or subsidised saplings. Village institutions (panchayats, the older Van Panchayats of the Kumaon hills, and later Joint Forest Management committees) took on local protection.
• This mass-mobilisation, incentive-driven model produced both the programme’s successes and its structural failures.

Classification of social forestry systems

• Social forestry is an umbrella term, not a single land-use category. Its systems are classified mainly by who owns the land and who benefits from the trees.
• The recognised systems are farm forestry, extension forestry, urban forestry and rural forestry; rural forestry is divided into community forestry and agroforestry.
  • Extension forestry, strip plantation along transport and canal corridors, is sometimes folded into farm or community forestry and sometimes kept as its own category.

Farm forestry

• In almost all countries with social forestry programmes, both commercial and non-commercial farm forestry are promoted in one form or another.
• Individual farmers plant trees on their own farmland to meet the domestic needs of the family. In many areas this tradition existed long before any government scheme.
• Non-commercial farm forestry is the main thrust of most social forestry projects in the country.
• Farmers do not grow trees only for fuelwood. Very often the reasons are non-economic:
  • shade for crops and livestock;
  • a wind shelter;
  • soil conservation on bunds and slopes;
  • productive use of an idle patch of wasteland on the farm.
• Commercial farm forestry grows poles and pulpwood for sale: eucalyptus, poplar, casuarina, Melia dubia and subabul (Leucaena).

Urban forestry

• Urban forestry is the raising and management of trees on private or publicly owned land in and around urban centres, to improve the urban environment. It is broader than it first appears:
  • it covers individual trees as well as groups of trees: street avenues, park clusters, institutional campuses;
  • it is not restricted to planted trees. Many urban trees establish naturally from dispersed seed, but where competition for land is intense they rarely survive unless cultivated and managed;
  • it extends to forests at the urban fringe, where city expansion and green belts compete directly.
• Functions: shade and cooling against the urban heat island, dust and noise screening, groundwater recharge, recreation and urban biodiversity.
• Nagar Van Yojana (2020), funded from the national CAMPA fund, creates urban forests of 10–50 ha each, with a target of 1,000 Nagar Vans by 2027.

Rural forestry: community forestry

• Rural forestry is conventionally divided into community forestry and agroforestry, the latter large enough to be a land-use science of its own.
• Community forestry is the raising of trees on community land, not on private land as in farm forestry. It aims to benefit the entire community, not any single individual.
  • Under the standard arrangement, the government supplies seedlings and fertilisers, and the community protects the growing trees.
• Outcomes vary:
  • Some communities manage their plantations sensibly, so the village keeps benefiting over the long term.
  • Others take advantage of the arrangement and sell the timber for short-term individual profit: a classic “tragedy of the commons”. Because common land is in principle everyone’s land, it is easy for any one group or individual to over-exploit it.
• Eucalyptus everywhere: over the decades, large-scale planting of eucalyptus, a fast-growing exotic, has spread across India under the banner of social forestry to create a rural timber supply. This reinforces the species-selection critique below.

Benefits of the social forestry programme

• Diversified income: it was meant to diversify non-farm and non-crop income for poor farmers and landless labourers, a livelihood stream independent of seasonal crop output.
• Better land use: it brought wasteland into productive forestry use instead of leaving it idle.
• Forest cover: it was one of the initiatives under the afforestation drive, aimed at the national goal of one-third of the land under forest or tree cover.
• Watershed protection: as part of the wasteland development programme, it encouraged forestry on slopes and in upstream catchments, linking it to soil and water conservation.
• Community rights: the government formally recognised local communities’ rights to forest resources and began to encourage rural participation in managing natural resources.
• Participation: it institutionalised community participation in afforestation and in rehabilitating degraded forest and common lands, a forerunner of Joint Forest Management (1990).

Socio-economic impact on rural areas

• Fuel and fodder security: farm and village trees supplied fuelwood, lops and fodder near homes. This cut the time women and girls spent collecting fuel, and reduced the burning of dung that could go to the fields as manure.
• Income and employment:
  • Nursery raising, planting, protection and harvesting gave seasonal work, much of it to women and the landless.
  • Pole and pulpwood sales gave farmers a lump-sum cash crop, a “savings bank” that can be felled in a bad year.
  • In farm forestry villages of tribal Dahod (Gujarat), seasonal out-migration fell sharply as tree income and local work grew.
• Rural industry: trees fed cottage and small industries: bamboo and cane work, rope, sericulture, sawmills, and the plywood and pulp industries.
• Institutions: Van Panchayats, forest protection committees, user groups and women’s groups built local capacity for managing commons.
• Uneven gains:
  • Larger farmers with spare land and irrigation captured most of the farm forestry benefit.
  • Eucalyptus on cropland displaced food crops and farm jobs: in Kolar (Karnataka) it replaced finger millet (ragi), and most of the wood went to pulp mills.
  • The landless lost grazing and gathering access where commons were planted and fenced.
• Net effect: social forestry commercialised tree growing on farms and raised rural incomes, but did less for the poorest than it promised. That gap is why later policy shifted to joint management and secure tree rights.

Shortcomings of the social forestry programme

• Although the concept was genuinely revolutionary, its implementation in India met with limited success.
• Wrong incentive design: incentives were tied to land under trees, not to sustained community benefit. Many farmers diverted agricultural land to plantations to capture the subsidy, compromising crop output and local food security.
• Wrong species: the design recommended usufruct species (fruit, fodder and fibre trees that benefit the community directly). Lacking ecological understanding and clear species directives, most plantations defaulted to eucalyptus, a fast-growing exotic that is not ecologically suitable in most Indian settings.
• Industry, not people: the produce went largely to pulp, rayon and pole markets, not to the fuel and fodder needs the programme was meant to meet.
• Little participation:
  • Projects were run top-down by Forest Departments; villagers were rarely consulted on sites or species.
  • Forest Departments were reluctant to hand over woodlots, so benefits were small, uncertain and inequitably shared.
• Weak tenure and markets: unclear rights over trees on common land, and felling and transit permits for farm trees, discouraged planting; prices crashed when many farmers harvested at once.
• Poor survival and monitoring: targets counted saplings distributed, not trees surviving; protection on commons was weak against grazing and encroachment.

The eucalyptus controversy

• Why it was favoured: eucalyptus grows quickly, is easy to raise in nurseries, is unpalatable to cattle, and yields a marketable pulpwood or pole crop on a short rotation.
• Why it was criticised:

• This mismatch between the stated objective (community usufruct benefit) and the actual species planted (a commercial exotic monoculture) is the single biggest structural failure of social forestry in India.
• Current view: eucalyptus on farm boundaries and in agroforestry rows, with mixed species and outside water-stressed areas, is now accepted as a legitimate farm cash crop; the objection is to block monocultures replacing crops and commons.

Agroforestry

Definition and character

• Agroforestry is a land-use system that integrates trees and shrubs on farmland and rural landscapes to enhance productivity, profitability, diversity and ecosystem sustainability.
  • It is a dynamic, ecologically based natural resource management system. Through the deliberate integration of woody perennials on farms and in the agricultural landscape, it diversifies and sustains production and builds social institutions around shared management.
• The standard definition (International Council for Research in Agroforestry, 1982): a collective name for land-use systems and technologies in which woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos) are deliberately used on the same land-management unit as crops and/or animals, in a spatial arrangement or temporal sequence, with ecological and economic interactions between the components.
• The term came into use in the mid-1970s through a study led by John Bene of Canada’s International Development Research Centre, which led to the founding of ICRAF in 1978.
• Distinctive properties:
  • It produces multiple outputs while protecting the resource base of soil, water and biodiversity.
  • It emphasises multiple indigenous tree and shrub species, not a single exotic monoculture.
  • It suits low-input conditions and fragile environments, where high-input monoculture is neither affordable nor sustainable.
  • It involves socio-cultural values more than most land uses: species choice, tree tenure and harvest rights are often governed by custom as much as by economics.
  • It is structurally and functionally more complex than monoculture, because several species and production goals interact on one plot.
• Scope: it includes traditional and modern arrangements in which trees are managed with crops and/or animals. It is practised under irrigated and rain-fed conditions.
  • It produces food, fuel, fodder, timber, fertiliser (green manure and leaf litter) and fibre, contributing to food, nutritional and ecological security, rural livelihoods and poverty alleviation.
• Ecosystem services: carbon storage, prevention of deforestation, biodiversity conservation, and soil and water conservation. Applied at scale with the right mix of species, it helps farmland withstand extreme weather such as floods and droughts and builds resilience to climate change.
• Social forestry and agroforestry overlap but differ: social forestry is a programme defined by its beneficiaries (communities, on public and private land); agroforestry is a land-use system defined by its components (trees with crops or animals), practised by farmers with or without a programme.

Types of agroforestry systems

• Agroforestry is classified on four bases (P. K. Ramachandran Nair, 1985): structural (components and their arrangement), functional (productive or protective role), socio-economic (commercial, intermediate, subsistence) and ecological (agro-ecological zone).
• By components (silvi- = trees, agri- = crops, pasture = grass and livestock):

• By arrangement in space and time:
  • Alley cropping: crops grown between hedgerows of nitrogen-fixing shrubs such as Leucaena or Gliricidia, pruned for mulch.
  • Boundary and bund planting, windbreaks and shelterbelts: rows that cut wind speed and soil drying, as in the Thar canal areas.
  • Scattered trees on farmland (parkland): khejri in Rajasthan, Faidherbia albida in the African Sahel.
  • Taungya: forest trees planted with food crops between the rows for the first few years. It was introduced in Burma under Dietrich Brandis in the 1850s for teak, and later in Indian forest villages.
  • Improved fallows: fast-growing trees planted to restore soil during the fallow of shifting cultivation, as in the alder-based jhum of Nagaland.

Agroforestry systems of India

Benefits of agroforestry

Environmental benefits

• Less pressure on natural forests, since farm-grown wood substitutes for wood otherwise taken from natural stands.
• More efficient nutrient recycling: deep-rooted trees act as a nutrient pump, lifting nutrients leached below the shallow crop roots and returning them in litter. Nitrogen-fixing trees can add about 50–100 kg N per ha per year.
• Better protection of ecological systems, through the structural complexity trees bring to a farm landscape, with habitat and corridors for wildlife in fragmented landscapes.
• Less surface runoff, nutrient leaching and soil erosion, because roots, stems and litter slow water and bind soil.
• Improved microclimate: shade and mulch lower soil-surface temperature and cut evaporation; windbreaks reduce wind speed and crop desiccation.
• Richer soil: litterfall adds nutrients as it decomposes, and the constant supply of organic matter improves soil structure and nutrient cycling.
• Tree-cover target: agroforestry is perhaps the only realistic way to raise India’s forest and tree cover from 25.17% (ISFR 2023) to the one-third goal of the National Forest Policy, since an increase of this scale cannot come from reserved forests alone.
• Climate change mitigation and adaptation:
  • In the short run it moderates the microclimate and conserves resources; in the long run it sequesters carbon.
  • It stores several times more carbon than crop or grass systems, much of it below ground in roots and soil organic matter.
  • Globally, trees on farms captured about 0.75 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year in the 2000s.

Economic benefits

• More output of food, fuelwood, fodder, fertiliser and timber from the same unit of land.
• Less risk of total crop failure, a danger of single-crop systems that is diluted where several species and production streams coexist.
• Higher farm income, from sustained productivity across several outputs rather than one crop.
• Employment in production, industrial use and value addition, in both rural and urban areas.
• Wood security: trees on farms meet about half of India’s fuelwood, two-thirds of its small timber, most plywood wood and about 60% of the raw material for paper pulp. This is why farm-grown timber is now central to India’s wood economy.

Social benefits

• Better rural living standards from sustained employment and higher income.
• Better nutrition and health from more diverse, better-quality food at the household level.
• More stable communities, because farmers no longer need to shift the sites of farm activities periodically, especially where they would otherwise depend on shifting (jhum) cultivation.

Constraints on agroforestry

• Felling and transit rules: permits to fell and move farm-grown trees deter planting, especially for species also found in forests.
• Tenure: tenants and sharecroppers rarely plant trees on land they do not own, and tree rights on common land are often unclear.
• Markets and prices: long gestation, few buyers and price crashes make tree income uncertain, as poplar growers in the north-west have repeatedly found.
• Competition: trees compete with crops for light, water and nutrients; badly chosen species or spacing cut crop yields.
• Inputs and knowledge: shortage of quality planting material, weak extension, and little credit or insurance for tree crops.

Policy, Programmes and Global Context

Indian policy framework

• National Forest Policy, 1952 first set the goal of one-third of India’s area under forests; the National Forest Policy, 1988 reaffirmed the 33% forest and tree cover target (two-thirds in the hills), which both social forestry and agroforestry are designed to help meet.
  • The 1988 policy put people’s fuel and fodder needs first and asked industry to raise its own raw material, for example on farms.
• Joint Forest Management (JFM, 1990) and related community institutions still carry the “community protects, government supplies inputs” model of community forestry, now with a share of produce for villagers. The Forest Rights Act, 2006 later recognised community forest rights in law.
• National Agroforestry Policy, 2014: approved by the Cabinet on 6 February and launched on 10 February 2014 at the World Congress on Agroforestry in Delhi. India was the first country in the world to adopt a dedicated agroforestry policy.
  • It aims to expand tree planting in farming systems, integrated with crops and livestock, for productivity, livelihoods and climate resilience.
  • It called for an agroforestry mission or board, simpler felling and transit rules, secure tenure, quality planting material, credit, insurance, market access, and research led by ICAR and ICRAF.
• Sub-Mission on Agroforestry (SMAF), under the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture, ran from 2016–17 to 2021–22 with the motto “Har Medh Par Ped” (a tree on every bund). It planted about 1.2 lakh ha in 23 states and UTs.
  • Since 2023–24 it continues as the Agroforestry component of the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY), focused on nurseries for quality planting material.
• Trees Outside Forests in India (TOFI): a MoEFCC–USAID programme launched in September 2022 in seven states (Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh). It aimed to add about 2.8 million ha of tree cover outside forests through better rules, finance, planting material and markets.
  • It ended in 2025 with the closure of USAID. The ministry is working to keep selected TOFI tools alive with CIFOR-ICRAF and ICFRE.
• GROW report (NITI Aayog, February 2024): mapped the suitability of wastelands for agroforestry in every district with an Agroforestry Suitability Index on the Bhuvan portal.
• Model Rules for Felling of Trees in Agricultural Lands (2025): uniform rules for registering, felling and transporting farm trees through the National Timber Management System portal. Felling 10 trees or fewer needs only self-declaration; more needs field verification.
• Research: ICAR’s All India Coordinated Research Project on Agroforestry (from 1983) and the Central Agroforestry Research Institute, Jhansi, develop region-specific agroforestry models.
• Mass planting campaigns such as Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam (from June 2024) and urban Nagar Vans extend social forestry’s mobilisation model.
• Species debate: fast-growing exotics such as eucalyptus still dominate commercial woodlots for their short rotation and assured market. Melia dubia (increasingly popular for pulpwood) and poplar (in agrisilviculture across Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh) diversify the species base. Indigenous multipurpose trees remain under-planted.
• Two halves of one strategy: the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 and its 2023 amendment, CAMPA and the Green India Mission guard and restore existing forests, while social forestry and agroforestry add trees outside them and so relieve the demand that degrades forests.

Trees outside forests: the current picture

• Trees outside forests (TOF) are trees on land outside the recorded forest area: on farms, bunds, homesteads, village commons, roadsides and in towns.
• India State of Forest Report 2023 (released December 2024):
  • Forest cover 7,15,343 km² (21.76%) and tree cover 1,12,014 km² (3.41%); together 25.17% of the geographical area.
  • TOF extent about 30.7 million ha, some 37% of India’s total forest and tree cover.
  • Of the 262 million m³ increase in growing stock since 2021, about 171 million m³ came from trees outside forests.
  • Potential annual timber production from TOF is about 91.5 million m³.
• Area under agroforestry: about 28.4 million ha, or 8.65% of India’s geographical area (ICAR–Central Agroforestry Research Institute, Jhansi, 2022). The often-quoted older estimate was about 25 million ha.
• India plans to restore 26 million ha of degraded land by 2030 and to build an additional carbon sink of 2.5–3 billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent. Agroforestry is central to both targets.

Global context

• Agroforestry is not a uniquely Indian innovation. It is recognised worldwide as a central strategy for reconciling farm production with ecosystem conservation, especially in the tropics.
• ICRAF (founded in Nairobi in 1978, now World Agroforestry) joined the CGIAR in 1991 and merged with the Center for International Forestry Research in 2019 to form CIFOR-ICRAF. It is the leading global institution for agroforestry research, technology transfer and policy advocacy.
• Scale: in 2010 about 43% of the world’s agricultural land had more than 10% tree cover (Robert Zomer and colleagues, 2016), and tree cover on farmland is rising.
• Climate frameworks recognise agroforestry as a nature-based solution serving both mitigation (carbon sequestration) and adaptation (resilience to floods and droughts). It features in many countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement and in land-restoration pledges.
• Traditional analogues worldwide combine woody perennials with crops or livestock:
  • home-garden systems of Southeast Asia, such as the Javanese pekarangan;
  • the dehesa and montado oak silvopastures of Spain and Portugal;
  • shade-grown coffee and cocoa in Latin America and West Africa;
  • the Faidherbia albida parklands of the African Sahel.
• Agroforestry also restores landscape connectivity between forest patches and supports biodiversity and sustainable development together.