Science vision
Proceedings of the Meeting on S&T Capacity-Building for Sustainable Development
Bibliographic details
Additional authors
COMSATS
Summary
Pakistan is essentially a farming community, with 72 percent of the country's population living in rural areas and 50 percent of them engaged in livestock and agricultural professions. The country is facing an acute shortage of food, fuel and fibre. Also, it is struggling to devise effective production-technologies which could raise productivity, on the one hand, and are viable economically, ecologically and socially, on the other. In this situation, agroforestry has great potential not only to conserve and improve the deteriorated natural resources, but also to increase farm production. Agroforestry has recently been introduced to the country's farmers, making them realize its value as a business-ententerprise and highlighitng its benefits as a farming-system. the government is making dedicated efforts, at several levels, to promote this innovation amoung the farming community. However, more efforts must be made by the national extension service. The success of an extension effort depends upon its degree of acceptance by farmers. The low literacy rate (14.8%) of rural Pakistan presents special problemto the extension efforts. Of the various extension methods discussed, one of the more potentially effective ones is the model agroforestry farm at the village level or, at least, the union council level. It has been noticed that farmers learn from the fellow farmers and farmer-to-farmers. Television, movies and slide shows could be other effective extension tools and efficient means to deliver the message and the technical information. Early adopters could fbe offered attractive incentives/subsidies. In this paper, various extension-strategies for promoting agroforestry are outlined and discussed at length. Researchers, managers, planners and policy makers, all need to recognise the importance of agroforestry and are urged to play their role in the development of sustainable agroforestry programs to meet the national needs.