Abstract
Agroforestry and planting trees on farmers’ fields have been reported as important elements in a strategy to meet the millennium development goals of poverty reduction and climate change improvement. However, their uptake seems to be constrained by factors both internal and external to the household and related to the policy and legislative environment. This paper examines the impact of these factors on farmers’ decisions to plant trees. Cameroon is used as a case to analyse whether existing policies and legislation governing trees support or discourage tree planting, using qualitative content analyses. Although their mission papers and statements suggest most national government policies in Cameroon address tree planting and agroforestry, actual legislation designed to follow up the policies mostly contradicts the poverty reduction goals. Often legislation and regulations are more conservation-oriented and do not provide a clear procedure to distinguish between products from trees found in the wild and those gathered from farmers’ fields.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Antoine Eyebe of CARPE, Amos Gyau and Steve Franzel from ICRAF and all the members of the GRP3 theme of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) for providing useful insights during the conception and write up of this paper. The authors will also like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their wonderful comments and suggestion that helped to improve the quality of this work. This publication is an output of a research project titled ‘Agroforesty Tree Products for West and Central Africa’ donated by the Belgian Development Cooperation (DGDC) to the World Agroforestry Centre-West and Central Africa Region (ICRAF-WCA).
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Foundjem-Tita, D., Tchoundjeu, Z., Speelman, S. et al. Policy and Legal Frameworks Governing Trees: Incentives or Disincentives for Smallholder Tree Planting Decisions in Cameroon?. Small-scale Forestry 12, 489–505 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-012-9225-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-012-9225-z