lished in four leading agroforestry journals (1991–1996) was much lower:
only 10 percent. Second, the focus has been almost exclusively on small-scale
forestry (i.e., plot, field, or farm level). Nair (1998) found that less than 5 per-
cent of the articles in his sample were based on global, regional, or watershed
scales. Issues that have to be assessed on larger scales have been neglected.
Given these findings, it is not surprising that very little research has been con-
ducted to directly assess the impact of agroforestry on deforestation.
A third and interesting observation is how the claim that 1 ha of agro-
forestry saves 5 to 10 ha of forest has become almost an established truth in
the agroforestry community. It is therefore fascinating to track the origin of
this 1:5 ratio and how it has been absorbed in the agroforestry literature. This
figure appears to be based on a single study from Yurimaguas, Peru, originally
reported in the prestigious journal Scienceby Sanchez and Benites (1987). The
article does not discuss the impact of deforestation directly but states that “to
produce the grain yields reported in Table 1, a shifting cultivator would need
to clear about 14 ha in 3 years, in comparison to clearing 1 ha once, by means
of the low input system.” (1526) The low-input system described in the arti-
cle was not agroforestry but rather an improved cropping system with selected
varieties of rice, cowpea, and chemical weed control.
In subsequent articles, Sanchez and colleagues applied their results more
directly to the deforestation and global warming debates. Sanchez (1990) and
Sanchez et al. (1990) claim that “for every hectare put into these sustainable
soil management technologies by farmers, five to ten hectares per year of trop-
ical rainforests will be saved from the shifting cultivator’s axe, because of their
higher productivity.” (378; 218) Brady et al. (1993), presenting the Alterna-
tives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Programme, make a similar extrapolation:
“Research has suggested that for every hectare converted to sustainable soil
management technologies, 5 to 10 ha/year of tropical rain forest will be saved
from unsustainable slash and burn.” (5)
The link from higher yields to reduced deforestation is explicit in these
articles, but none of the articles states explicitly that rainforest will be saved by
agroforestry but rather by “sustainable soil management technologies.” Both
of the Sanchez articles present tables that list the hectares saved from defor-
estation for various management options. But no figure is presented for the
number of hectares saved from deforestation by agroforestry systems; it is “not
determined.” Although no actual yield or revenue figure for agroforestry was
available from the Peruvian study, agroforestry is presented as one of the prin-
cipal sustainable management options and alternatives to slash-and-burn,
along with paddy rice production on alluvial soils, low-input cropping, con-
tinuous cultivation, and legume-based pastures (Sanchez et al. 1990).
This distinction between the actual production systems studied in the
Peruvian case and agroforestry disappears in articles by other authors on agro-
forestry and global warming in the 1990s. Schroeder et al. (1993) discuss the
- Is Agroforestry Likely to Reduce Deforestation? 89