In the developing world, human and environmental needs often are pitted against each other as a set of tradeoffs. But it doesn't need to be that way.

Five years ago, Harrison Amukoye of Ematswi village in Western Province, Kenya was living on $1 per day. His family lived in a thatched-roof hut and could not afford to send their children to school. After Mr. Amukoye began planting trees on his farm, his life was transformed.

He began to see his corn crop yields double and triple due to an increase in soil fertility. For the first time, his family was getting enough to eat. Because he now had a corn surplus, he could afford to diversify by planting cash crops like avocado, mango, passion fruit, kale and banana.

Now earning about $10 per day, Mr. Amukoye sends his children to school and lives in a new hut with a sturdy metal roof. With his life improved, he has allocated some of his farm to a cooperative nursery to provide other farmers with seedlings and knowledge so they can follow in his footsteps.

Trees planted on Mr. Amukoye's and millions of other small-scale farms sequester carbon, increase biodiversity, and improve water quality. Last year the World Agroforestry Centre helped 100,000 farmers transform their lives and landscapes by educating them about integrating trees into farms. This increases crop production and reduces hunger in the tropics - a place where 40,000 people a day die from malnutrition. But these results simply are dwarfed by the sheer size of food poverty and environmental problems in the developing world.

The Centre is focusing efforts to scale up the application of their research to empower farmers to plant 4.5 billion trees, improve the livelihoods of 25 million of the world's rural poor, and remove 86 million tons of carbon from the air.






Contributed by Metropolitan Group. Reprinted with permission from The World Agroforestry Centre.

To read another Global Envision article about programs that benefit both people and the environment, see A Raindrop Cleans the Wetlands .