Transcript
Planting trees or shrubs among food crops could provide a safety net for Pacific island countries in the event of a natural disaster.
The University of the Sunshine Coast, Southern Cross University and the Pacific Community have come together to promote the practice known as agroforestry to Fiji, PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands.
A spokesperson for the project, Richard Markham explained to Lucy Smith how the project could help farmers in the Pacific use their land more effectively, and economically.
RICHARD MARKHAM: It's a combination of agriculture and forestry so a lot of the traditional systems in the Pacific were essentially agroforestry although not necessarily by that name. People tended to have permanent planting of trees, like breadfruit those are useful for livelihood and various cultural purposes, we'd plant there food crops like taro between the permanent planting of trees these plantings or these systems can be evolved in different ways to support livelihoods, and food security or to generate income from the tree part of it and the crops part of it.
LUCY SMITH: What sort of difference does it make in terms of business or in terms of livelihood?
RM: It's a win economically, environmentally and socially. Yeah I think there's been a tendency for people to think about extreme weather events, in particular floods as acts of god, as things they can't do anything about, rather than as a land management issue. If we can change peoples mind set to think that they can actually actively do things to improve the situation to reduce the dangers of flooding and soil loss, and so on. You can change the system quite fundamentally with what might seem like a relatively small change in agriculture and land use. We hope to think there are major gains in several different dimensions of this really. We think that the widespread adoption of agroforestry can really reduce the severity of these weather events, you reduce the run off of water, you get more of it infiltrating into the soil so it takes a while to work its way downstream so it should reduce the severity of flooding events.
