COP28 plans to support economic forestry and combat desertification through building sustainable agro-industries centered on high-potential crops like moringa, palm oil, avocado, mango, cashew, and shea, with a focus on spurring community participation:

Introduction

The just concluded COP28 came with urgency towards strengthening global climate change resiliency and mitigation measures. Therefore, central pillars in these efforts must include reversing deforestation and land degradation trends while supporting sustainable rural livelihood transitions. Targeted support for high-value cash crop agroforestry systems can help achieve these dual objectives. Crops like moringa, palm oil, avocado, mango, cashew, and shea trees hold particular promise for their economic productivity potential and ecological benefits. Well-managed plantations and smallholder integration into sustainable value chains offer ways to boost farmer incomes while scaling up reforestation and community resilience.

Realizing this potential requires concerted policy efforts across sectors to facilitate private sector leadership and local participation under responsible production models. Such support forms a core focus for COP28 to spur large-scale change. Specific plans should emphasize:

1. Establishing clear governance frameworks and incentives

2. Building participatory, community-centered production models

3. Unlocking finance for smallholders

4. Supporting local cooperatives and shared infrastructure

5. Creating public-private partnerships around sustainable product sourcing

6. High Potential Crops for Economic Reforestation

Moringa, palm oil, mango, avocado, cashew, and shea trees all represent crops amenable to integration into reforestation and sustainable agroforestry farming approaches. They provide nutritious fruits, oils, and nuts while enhancing ecosystem services, soil health, and climate resilience when responsibly managed.

Moringa: A fast-growing leafy tree adapted to dry, degraded landscapes. Moringa leaves offer a nutritious vegetable, while the oil-rich seeds produce benzolive oil.

Palm Oil: A versatile, highly productive oil. While large plantations drive deforestation, small integrated models offer sustainability pathways.

Avocado: This nutritious fruit tree thrives in tropical agroforestry systems amidst shade canopy layers.

Mango: The popular fruit's sturdy tree provides shade intermixed with other cash crops.

Cashew: Drought-resistant cashew trees limit soil erosion and sustain nut harvests.

Shea Tree: An essential West African oil crop retaining soil moisture and mitigating desertification.

Each crop provides income-generating potential from global consumer markets while affordably stabilizing the landscape.

Policy frameworks to spur responsible production:

Realizing agroforestry's promise requires clear legal and policy frameworks. Potential COP28 actions include:

Establishing governance standards: Clear legal parameters and environmental policies guide responsible cultivation planning while empowering oversight. Fundamental principles span land rights, plantation management requirements like intercropping obligations, input restrictions, and sustainability certification programs for smallholders to access higher value marks.

Incentives for ecosystem services: Carbon credit programs, tax breaks, and subsidy schemes can promote biodiversity enrichment, water conservation, and soil-building cultivation practices. Compensation schemes for wildlife damage also prevent destructive land use changes.

Institutional support platforms: Landscape-level coordination bodies, public agricultural extension programs, and farmer knowledge exchanges help strengthen sustainable production capacities.

Value chain transparency requirements: Regulations requiring supply chain traceability, sustainability verification, and ethics frameworks work to counter environmental and human exploitation risks. Enforceable sourcing laws also incentivize corporates to invest more in local sustainable production models.

Multistakeholder partnerships are essential to implement these governance frameworks effectively towards shared ethical sourcing commitments.

Community Participation Models

Local smallholder farmers' participation in cash crop value chains is central to poverty alleviation aims. Shifting away from exploitative plantation models towards genuine community ownership and profit sharing helps sustainably align climate and economic justice goals while stewarding the land.

COP28 can spotlight best practice community participation models like the formation of cooperatives to increase access to finance, infrastructure, and markets: Farmer cooperatives pool resources to invest in shared collection centers, cold storage facilities, processing equipment, distribution logistics, and marketing capacities while strengthening local influence over supply chain decisions.

Contract farming schemes with firms: Long-term contracts providing training and finance for inputs and seedlings while guaranteeing crop purchases establish reciprocal relationships for meeting consumer country sourcing demands fairly and reliably.

Agroforestry cultivation integration: Intercropping cash crops with staples, vegetables, and small livestock demonstrates holistic farming practices sequestering carbon. This showcases local agroecological knowledge.

Alternative tenure models: Innovative land stewardship models like community conservancy trusts provide alternatives to dependence on rented land. This empowers long-term participation.

Such participation develops climate-smart landscape management capacities while increasing income.

Unlocking Finance

Lack of investment capital represents a significant barrier to smallholders' incorporation into cash crop systems, especially for perennial crops with long growth cycles before harvests. Targeted finance facilities can overcome the prohibitive upfront costs of establishing orchards and plantations.

Innovations COP28 can spotlight range from:

Crowdlending platforms: Online peer-to-peer finance networks let individual social impact investors contribute directly to small enterprises worldwide. Bond issuances broaden such financing pools.

Green bonds and preferential loan pools within development banks dedicated to smallholder climate-smart agriculture adoption and infrastructure.

Venture philanthropic grants specifically for community-owned cash crop cultivation collectives and marketing groups rather than individual household enterprises. This facilitates shared capabilities distribution.

Payment for ecosystem services schemes rewarding community members for carbon sequestration and erosion control outcomes from climate-resilient farming practices.

Shared Infrastructure Investment

Beyond cultivation, strengthening harvesting, processing, and marketing infrastructure catalyzes participation along value chains in producer countries. COP28 can call attention to needs across:

Distribution and warehousing hubs help cooperatives access urban markets.

Shared collection point facilities for sorting, grading, and packaging tree crops

Mobile processing equipment like cold-press oil and nut-drying machines are accessed collectively.

Quality management capabilities expansion through facilities and staff training.

Renewable electrification programs help to power equipment while limiting pollution.

Public-sector infrastructure investments and private-sector partnerships play central roles in providing such services. This aims to retain more value addition locally.

Corporate Sustainable Sourcing Commitments

Ultimately, spurring a thriving smallholder agroforestry economy depends on expanding end demand for sustainably produced oils, fruits, and nuts. This is propelled through multi-industry commitments for preferential sustainable sourcing. Corporate pledges to eliminate commodity-driven deforestation from palm oil demonstrate such market pull potential to reward responsibly managed supply chains.

COP28 represents a forum for securing and expanding ethical sourcing commitments across major consumer industries to stimulate long-term supply transitions. Partnerships between buyers, producers, and civil society organizations help implement landscape-wide programs supporting communities through change processes.

Combined purchasing leverage also helps finance the crucial infrastructure and farming support services outlined above by explicitly dedicating portions of sourcing investments to smallholder inclusion models rather than maximum efficiency extraction. Sector-wide collaboration is essential to prevent free rider issues from undermining sustainability commitments.

An Urgent Imperative

Despite minimal historical contributions, rural communities worldwide shoulder inequitable climate change burdens across forest and dryland zones. Their prospects to build prosperous livelihoods through sustainable landscape stewardship are central to climate justice aims and reversing the tide of degradation trends. Well-designed and financed cash crop agroforestry models aligned with global ethical sourcing offer paths for simultaneously delivering on these social, ecological, and economic ambitions. COP28 holds responsibility for driving consensus and commitments towards these ends from all actors. By lifting best practices linking rural communities to markets through sustainable farming models, the gathering can help write courageous new stories of opportunity from landscapes marred by exploitation.