Consortium of Industrial Agroforestry:An Institutional Mechanism for Sustaining Agroforestry in India

India is among the few tropical countries which have been reporting a progressive increase in forest cover over the past two decades. Our country being a major consumer of wood and wood products, the role of agroforestry as a viable land-use system is gaining significant attention owing to its contribution towards meeting domestic and industrial wood requirements. Growing demand coupled with legal issues in wood supply from Government-owned forests has resulted in a total mismatch between demand and supply of wood and wood products. The Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) conceived and implemented ‘a value chain model’ and created sustainability in industrial wood generation and supply in the state by involving a wide range of stakeholders. In order to strengthen the value chain and promote agroforestry based on the objectives envisaged in the National Agroforestry Policy of 2014, TNAU established a ‘Consortium of Industrial Agroforestry’ (CIAF) by linking stakeholders to address the issues related to production, processing and consumption in agroforestry. Keeping in line with the guidelines provided in the National Agroforestry Policy of 2014, CIAF has successfully established decentralized institutions for supply of quality planting materials to the farmers besides facilitating organized plantation developers, harvesting and marketing institutions. The activities of CIAF have paved the way for creating the much needed database in tree cultivation, development of price supportive mechanism for important farm-grown industrial wood species and reducing the risks faced by tree growers through innovative approaches like tree insurance and value addition technologies. This consortium-mode value-chain model in agroforestry holds great potential for adoption and replication across India, which would help create self-reliance in raw material security besides augmenting tree cover in the country.