This is a 10-year program which aims to support up to 200 families in the Cuero Valley area to give up the practice of slash and burn and switch to sustainable agriculture using Inga alley cropping, improving their food security and livelihoods in the process. We will do this through working with each family to implement the flexible Guama Model for Inga alley cropping in the way which best meets the individual needs of each family. At present...

The island of Madagascar is hugely rich in biodiversity with over 80% of its species found nowhere else on Earth. Yet much of this biodiversity is now endangered by deforestation, with over 90% of the country’s rainforest already destroyed. Like much of the rest of Madagascar, Ifarantsa District in the South East of the country used to be forested but now, due to the impact of slash and burn agriculture, the nearest remaining rainforest is over 2 hours walk away. The...

Like the Cuero Valley, the other main area of Honduras in which we work, the Cangrejal is also located within the buffer zone of the Pico Bonito National Park. It is therefore vital that further destruction of the rainforest in this area is prevented, in order to protect the rich biodiversity of the Park, as well as the hugely important ecosystem services it provides, which includes maintaining the flow of many of the area’s rivers. We are working to support the local...

After the Amazon, the Congo Basin is the largest remaining expanse of tropical wilderness in the world. It is also one of the most threatened. We are currently in the process of setting up a new project working to combat slash and burn farming in the Chailllu Massif in Congo (Brazzavile). Our work at the Inga Foundation is based on Inga alley cropping, a scientifically-proven agroforestry technique that provides...

In 1996 we planted 2 hectares of alley cropping research plots containing 6 Inga species at the Centro Universitario Regional del Litoral Atlantico (CURLA), in La Ceiba. From this time on CURLA has served as our demonstration center, allowing us to showcase our techniques in practice. Being right in the city, it is ideally placed to play this role as it is much more easily accessible than the plots of the farmers we working with in the mountains in the Cuero Valley. Restoring the Demonstration Plots The alley cropping plots have been largely neglected since 2002, meaning many...

  Our work has grown from purely scientific beginnings in the mid-1980′s to the present day when we are seeing Inga alley cropping being increasingly widely used on the ground.  During this time, fruitful collaborations have been conducted with over 25 institutions and communities; both large and small; and we have worked with partners from six different countries.  Today’s we are working with a range of different organisations on a variety of projects, including:     Read More