Tree Growing on Farms in Northeast Luzon (The Philippines): Smallholders’ Motivations and Other Determinants for Adopting Agroforestry Systems

Abstract

The Philippines have been confronted with land use intensification and migrants cultivating marginal areas. This trend has led to the emergence of the ‘upland debate’ in the early 1980s, seeking to strike a balance between environmental and socio-economic, national and local interests. The quest for sustainable land use systems began, and agroforestry became an important element in this discussion. Despite the amount of research attention paid to the subject, the integration of trees in agricultural areas has been limited. This chapter sets out to understand this perceived lack of agroforestry adoption based on a study of underlying factors influencing farmers to integrate trees in farm fields by using logistic regression and qualitative information of 151 farmer cultivators. The results indicate that over the past 30 years tree integration in farm fields seems to be, though marginally, increasing due to shifting market imperatives in favor of tree products, decreasing competitiveness of alternative seasonal cash crops (mainly yellow corn) and decreasing availability of natural tree product supply. At the household-level on-farm tree growing is affected by age, lack of extension, total farm area, low or no capital, and non-farm labor time and at the farm plot-level, by soil texture, size of farm field, insecure land tenure and distance of field to house. Extension of agroforestry and tree growing technology can benefit from this information by more effectively targeting efforts and limited resources. Policies could be oriented at removing constraints to tree integration or focusing on resource-poor farmers vulnerable to unsustainable farming technologies.