IssuE 8 – ApRIl – JuNE 2011 - Winrock International India

field experience
for fuel dilemma, since less land
is available for agricultural food
production.
One potential solution to avoid this
problem is the establishment of
agro-forestry systems on land that is
unsuitable for agricultural production,
such as salt-affected soils. Worldwide,
933 million hectares of land are
badly degraded by salts and cannot
be productively used for traditional
agriculture. More than 8 million
hectares of previously productive land
in India is now salt affected. These
huge tracts of land can potentially be
used to grow fast-growing salt-tolerant
tree species that can be used for a
variety of energy and other products.
This study reviewed in this article has
focused on the economic feasibility
and socio-economic effects of working
bio-saline agro-forestry systems in
Haryana, India. The socio-economic
effects constitute of potential benefits
to the farmers and other actors that
may come from the use of agroforestry
systems. These benefits
include, for example, extra income,
higher yields, higher employment and
more divers products from the land
(fuel wood, fodder etc.). In line with
this stands the economic feasibility
of these systems, if the system
is not viable it will not have any
benefit to the farmers and users and
implementation of the system will not
be successful.
energy and processing) to produce a
unit of output product (ton or kWh).
These data are used for the calculation
of the Net Present Value (NPV) and
cost of production (COP) of the
produced products.
The plantations were established as
part of the Haryana Social Forestry
Project. Through this program, the
state government is encouraging
the establishment of agro-forestry
plantations on salt-affected Panchayat
lands. The initial cost of plantation
establishment and maintenance in
the first three years is financed by the
government. The benefits of selling
the trees or using the trees in the
community are allocated entirely to
the Panchayat. This can potentially
make agro-forestry very lucrative
for the local communities. The case
studies plantations were all established
under this project. In Haryana, a
survey was conducted in four villages
(Figure 1) to determine the inputs
needed to maintain and harvest the
agro-forestry system present, as
well as the annual and total biomass
yields. Prior to plantations, all land
was highly alkaline in nature and
no traditional agriculture could be
performed (Figure 2 on next page).
The land was essentially a wasteland
and only scarce vegetation such
as grasses and some Acacia nilotica
were present. The land was used for
fuelwood collection and grazing of
livestock. Table 1 (next page) gives a
quick overview of the specifics of each
plantation that was established in
each individual village. Figure 3 (next
page) shows an example of a biosaline
plantation at the Central Soil
Salinity Institute (CSSRI) in Karnal.
Each output product requires a
different amount of processing before
the finished product can be used or
sold to the market. In addition to
surveying the villages for the biomass
production phase, several processing
facilities were visited with the aim to
establish the inputs and outputs to get
The aim of the study was to construct
and analyze three value chains that
are derived from the bio-saline agroforestry
plantations. Every value chain
begins with the biomass production
phase and has three different output
products. These are fuelwood, timber,
and charcoal. The analysis includes all
inputs (costs, labour, transportation,
Figure 1: Case study locations in the state of Haryana. (source: Stille et al, 2011)
April-June 2011
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