Agroforestry practices by smallholders in Sandakan, Sabah

Agroforestry is emerging as an important land use system in Malaysia. It has both protective and productive functions and proven to be technically feasible and economically viable. Therefore, it has been made as one of the strategic action plan of the Third National Agriculture Policy (NAPS). Besides, in the Second Sabah Agricultural Policy (SAP2), agroforestly was emphasized with the objective of further optimize land use and maximize returns especially in areas where soils are marginal for agriculture. In addition, smallholders are one of the potential users of agroforestry systems. However, the scientific data on smallholders' agroforestry systems in Sabah is still lacking. Therefore, this study is carried out to investigate agroforestry practices by smallholders in Sandakan, Sabah. The study focuses on smallholders' involvement in practicing agroforestry; the type of agroforestry systems and its component; input of workers, fertilizers, and machineries; marketing of its products, and smallholders' perceptions and evaluations about agroforestry. Data were collected through questionnaire survey by face-to-face surveys. There were 58 respondents from 26 kampungs involved in this study. The study showed that 91.496 of smallholders were currently practising agroforestry. However, 77.6% of them did not understand about agroforestry. There were six types of agroforestry systems found in their farms. The systems were agrosilvicultural, agrisilvicultural, agrosilvopastoral, aqua-agrosilvicultural, silvopastoral, and aqua agrisilvicultural. The most common agroforestry systems practised by smallholders were agrosilvicultural. The components of smallholders' agroforestry systems were main crops, supplementary crops, tree species, animals, and fish ponds. It was found that input of workers and machineries were very low. Besides, the marketing channels of smallholders' agroforestry products, other than oil palm fruits, were found to be unorganized and limited. In addition, 82.8% of them agreed that agroforestry can provide a variety of products and services as well as offered more income. However, 93.1% of them strongly agreed that the lack of successful demonstration models of agroforestry practices is the main potential obstacle in agroforestry development. Besides, 82.8% of them strongly agreed that the second potential obstacle was that lack of experience and expertise in agroforestry. Due to various problems and obstacles, their agroforestry systems were appearing unorganized in terms of selection of agroforestry components, planting arrangement, and combinations between the component