4. Agroforestry: Fruit trees as Green Belts for Administrative units: Green power thanks to UNCBD

 By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

Although fence forestry is not considered agroforestry in the strict sense of the term, creative initiatives will always be welcome. 

One creative administrative way forward to realise the KMGBF Targets  is to mark district and administrative boundaries with green belts comprising fruit trees. To read and understand KMGBF or (Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework) Targets for the Indian context read it here.  It is one clear pathway to achieve green goals through administrative mechanism. After all good fences make good neighbours. Good green fences are better any day.

The Government should raise green belts around every administrative / zonal border… how about green belts made with fruit trees as borders of States, Districts, Taluks, Blocks and villages, urban local bodies etc?

This kind of Green Belts can add substantial green cover to the existing watersheds and woodlots in agroforestry interventions. Green belts serve the administrative goals very effectively.

Within these Green Belts the Government has to plan and create HDI proportionate installed capacity for schools, colleges, higher education institutes and universities, hospitals, banks and financial institutions, markets, resource compatible industries with supply chain factored in.

Supply chains and logistics need an enabling fiscal environment. This will help create and sustain livelihoods in the hinterland too. Food processing units will get a boost augmenting the supply chain and boosting the rural economy. Green power thanks to UNCBD!

More significantly fruit trees can be a local source of nutrition and help mitigate rural malnutrition. These native fruit trees can be a source of vitamins for weaker sections of society like malnourished, impoverished sections, nursing mothers, infants, malnourished children, and patients who are convalescing in hospitals.

The fruit yield will make nutrition supplements for other rural school and college students. Needless to say fruits as nutrition supplements will help mitigate malnutrition among children and supplement the nutrition of nursing mothers.

Fruit yield from these agro forestry watersheds / fences can feed food processing industries like fruit juice makers, pickle making industry etc augmenting livelihood security for rural women.

The “Green Belts” make ecologically sustainable fences for migrating animals and can foster homes for native fauna. Green belts serve as habitat for avian fauna and each tree can serve as a one tree sanctuary. Fruit trees make great aviaries. Birds from far and near colonise these fruit trees to nest, roost, and feed.

Imagine if the districts had green fences with fruit trees. 

Leaf litter makes great soil moisteurisers and facilitate decomposition, enriching the top soil in the proportion required to regenerate forests. Ecologically speaking, in the process the fallen seeds help carbon sequestration by generating peat in the sub soil. Leaf litter enriches decomposition of fallen fruit, restoring the soil nutrition infinitely. This is critical to forest regeneration and enhancing green cover, so critically needed today.

When the fruits fall, the browsing and foraging animals eat the fruit inclusive of the seeds. The seeds go through the gut and is littered by the animals. These seeds are somehow enriched by the gut bacteria of the animals and have greater resilience. The chances of germination are thus greater than of the seeds and saplings planted by Man in a pit and plant method. Thus forest regeneration is of greater value, ecologically speaking.

Agricultural research has led to many successful horticultural experiments in hybrid fruit yield. So it is not too far-fetched to foster temperate fruits in say tropical areas. Like say apricots in South India.  Musk melon has found a new use – as anti-rabies vaccination – bereft of allergies with animal based protein. That brings us to the point of nutraceuticals and vitamin supplements.  While nutraceuticals is the topic of my next article vitamin supplements are the new mantra in the day and age of post COVID 19 Climate Change induced new age viruses.

Agroforestry makes for a sustainable Green Administrative machinery.