The purpose of this workshop is to bring together leading scholar-practitioners from five parts of the world, Sweden, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Ecuador, to share knowledge of and aspirations for agroforestry systems. A number of well-established and highly productive agroforestry systems have been documented around the world, and yet they are rarely in the spot light when questions of food security arise. Climate change presents a number of challenges, particularly to the large scale, commercial farming systems that developed in the twentieth century.
Changing temperatures and water regimes are generating new pest problems in mono-culture crop systems, while crops are also increasingly becoming pesticide and herbicide resistant. As a result, there is a renewed scientific and policy interest in agroforestry systems that rely on diversity and mixed cropping patterns for their productivity. This workshop will probe the possibilities for scaling up agroforestry systems to address the food security needs of the twenty-first century.