Abstract
A questionnaire survey was conducted among 72 randomly selected households in Bukoba district, Tanzania from August to November 1991. The objective of the study was to identify the major constraints to increased productivity in homegardens and farmers response to these constraints. Declining of homegarden productivity seems to have been influenced by the gradual decline of soil fertility mainly as a result of decrease in cattle population, the serious outbreak of banana weevils, nematodes and later Panama disease, fragmentation of homegardens due to population growth and lack of cash. As a result, homegardens can no longer subsist farm families for the most part of the year. The actual decline in banana yield is 66% over the last 20 years. Incomes are too low to support modest investment to improve productivity in homegardens. Farmers' responses to these problems have been out-migration, a shift towards cultivation of root crops, planting of beer banana and decrease in homegarden management intensity. These responses however are likely to offer only short term and partial solutions.
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Rugalema, G.H., Johnsen, F.H. & Rugambisa, J. The homegarden agroforestry system of Bukoba district, North-Western Tanzania. 2. Constrainsts to farm productivity. Agroforest Syst 26, 205–214 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00711211
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00711211