Production and access to quality planting material (QPM) are vital criteria for ensuring the success of plantations as well as for upscaling agroforestry. This has been reiterated numerous times, and steps have been taken to bring in guidelines for ensuring QPM at all levels of planting. Non-availability of quality planting material (QPM) of woody perennial species has been a major constraint in plantation forestry, including agroforestry in India, since its inception. Section 2 of the National Agroforestry Policy mentions that ‘agroforestry has not gained the desired importance as a resource development tool due to various factors, including the dearth of quality planting materials, and the policy also underlines the need for an ‘institutional mechanism for registration of nurseries and their accreditation should be established’.
ICAR-CAFRI has been designated as a nodal agency by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare for Agroforestry and supports the implementation of the agroforestry component of RKVY.
To enable this, the ICAR-CAFRI has brought out this accreditation protocol for agroforestry nurseries. This protocol is based on the fundamental aspects of any nursery, which remain the same irrespective of size, nature, and choice of propagation material used. This protocol envisages that accredited nurseries will follow certain criteria, which can be eventually assessed for the foundational establishment of QPM.