Government asks International Fund for Agricultural Development to continue support for agroforestry
Beginning of the letter from the Bupati Buol to IFAD. Source: Kantor Bupati Buol
The District Government of Buol in Central Sulawesi Province, Indonesia wants continued international support for a project led by the World Agroforestry Centre that helps with sustainable agricultural development based on agroforestry
Amiruddin Rauf. Photo: World Agroforestry Centre/Sacha Amaruzaman
Amiruddin Rauf, the head of Buol District in Central Sulawesi Province, Indonesia has written a formal request to the International Fund for Agricultural Development asking for the continuation of a project that has been helping his government support ‘sustainable agricultural development by improving the quality and productivity of the agricultural sector, environmental management and community-based economic development’.
In the letter, dated 23 May 2016, Rauf writes that, ‘As the Smart Tree-Invest project will terminate in March 2017, the District Government of Buol believes that the remaining period is too short to scale up the current activities and carry out collaboration with our existing programs in Buol. Therefore, we would like to request the addition of ICRAF and the Smart Tree-Invest project for another two years in Buol’.
Smart Tree-Invest (full name: Climate-smart, Tree-based, Co-investment in Adaptation and Mitigation in Asia) is an action-research project led by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). It has been operating at sites in Indonesia, Viet Nam and the Philippines since 2014 and is set to close next year. In Indonesia, the project’s site is in Buol, which is well-known as the biggest palm-oil producer in the province, with almost 10,000 hectares of primary and secondary forest replaced by plantations between 1996 and 2014.
There is now a moratorium on further oil-palm expansion and Rauf’s government had instigated both land-reform and poverty-alleviation-through-agriculture programs. Despite the success of these programs…
The project is also supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry
