Asia Plantation Capital welcomes the UN’s recognition of Agroforestry as integral to global green growth. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for Agroforestry and Agriculture to be scaled up to address food scarcity and help meet the challenge of climate change.
The diversification amongst crops of plantation trees with intercropping of fruit, vegetable and other resource & consumable crops is seen as a practical measure to utilise land, maintain and improve soil nutrition, increase food supply and help address rural poverty, malnutrition and local economic development. These wise words at the Third Global Conference on Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Security and Climate Change held recently in Johannesburg, were welcomed by Asia Plantation Capital.
Barry Rawlinson, CEO of Asia Plantation Capital, commented how “at Asia Plantation Capital we whole heartedly support this UN backed initiative. As a specialist plantation company operating in some economically challenged rural areas across Southeast Asia we have actively sort-out viable intercropping and supplementary food production opportunities. In Northeast Thailand for example banana features heavily as an intercrop during the early life of both Teak and Aquilaria tree plantations, and we also encourage our local plantation managers to grow vegetable and salad crops for their own and extended family needs.”
This important event was organised jointly by the Governments of South Africa and the Netherlands and partially funded by the World Bank and the UN FAO. Influential institutions representing a global strategy to increase climate-smart and sustainable agricultural practices, as well as to fuel green growth.
Natural Resource Management is a core concern for Asia Plantation Capital. Their in-house expertise not only covers plantation management & forestry skills on their established operations in Thailand & Sri Lanka, with their expansion into other countries they have added in-house forest auditing and are in negotiation with strategic universities to expand their Forestry R&D Partnerships into wider research on the economic advantages and social impact of agroforestry.
“We have seen how our strategy of grouping speciality plantations into clusters has given a far greater economic improvement to local communities than the previous practice of spreading operations across a far wider area. It is now our intention to measure this positive impact so we can share credible knowledge of social & economic changes & benefits with our own stakeholders, academia and the wider green growth community, as well as to learn more ourselves and fine-tune our practices and strategy as necessary” stated Barry Rawlinson.
Sustainability is recognised as a very complex topic. With the agriculture and agroforestry sectors it is the flow and exchange of expertise by downscaling global climate models and combining this with grassroots knowledge and expertise that is widely accepted as one of the fundamental building blocks in the formation of constructive development recommendations and policies. Asia Plantation Capital sees their organisation as embedded in this constructive global process.
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