Prospects for integrated timber–forage–livestock agroforestry systems for economic diversification in West Timor farming communities

West Timor is in the poorest and least developed province of Indonesia, where 80% of people live below the poverty line. It suffers both physical and cultural isolation, inadequate infrastructure and limited natural resources. For 40 years many development projects have attempted to improve income and offset the hardships experienced by farmers. Outcomes of these projects have generally fallen short of initial expectations despite the presence of programs demonstrating substantial production gains through new technology. Agroforestry offers smallholders a significant opportunity to increase their incomes because of its potential to improve dry-season fodder availability and to provide treebased incomes during drought. This could be further improved by integration of highvalue timber species along with more productive forage trees and grasses. This scoping study reviews previous agroforestry, forage and livestock projects in eastern Indonesia. It has also identified strategies for developing more acceptable systems and has proposed methods for their implementation and provided an assessment and analysis of the constraints to adoption of research results. To achieve this, the scoping study includes an extensive literature review including an in-depth look at the most relevant projects and a field investigation and social survey in West Timor conducted in September/October 2007.