Identifying the factors that influence the decision of farmers in the Imam Sahib District of Kunduz Province, Afghanistan to plant trees

Abstract. Omerkhil N, Ahmad L, Khurram S. 2024. Identifying the factors that influence the decision of farmers in the Imam Sahib District of Kunduz Province, Afghanistan to plant trees. Asian J For 8: 147-157. For years, agroforestry has been employed as a sustainable management approach to enhance and provide services and products traditionally obtained from natural forests. This study focuses to analyze the factors that influence farmers' farm tree planting decisions. We focused on the Imam Sahib District of Kunduz Province, Afghanistan and collected data from 160 households in 32 villages, and within each village, five farmer families randomly selected for a face-to-face interview and data collection using a randomized snowball sampling strategy. A binary logistic regression model was developed using the acquired data to identify the features influencing farmers' tree-planting decisions. The findings reveal that several variables affect the propensity of tree planting and the intensity of agroforestry technology. These factors include the income of the head of farmer households, availability of irrigated farmland, large cropping land, and prior tree planting experience. Conversely, factors such as education, limited access to planting materials, large family size, availability of tree seedlings, and age of the head of the households, loan, and insurance facilities can influence farmers' decisions and adaptation practices. So far, education plays an important role in strengthening farmers' understanding of the limits, opportunities, and needs of new technologies in the form of short-term training. This might mitigate the unfavorable relationship between the age of the family head and willingness to use agroforestry practices on their farmland. These findings, particularly the potential of education to improve farmers' adoption of agroforestry practices, can help strengthen the National Agroforestry Policy to promote tree planting among the farmers, achieve targets for tree coverage, and reduce pressure on natural forests in Kunduz and other provinces and countries with similar situations.