Throughout the tropics, there has been considerable degradation of tropical moist forests for agriculture. In Cameroon and Nigeria, forest clearance for food production intensified as poor urban people returned to farming during the economic ‘crisis’ of the 1990s. What solutions are available to help farmers improve their
livelihoods in an environmentally sustainable manner? From 1999, a DFID-funded research project and an IFAD funded development project investigated the potential contribution of participatory domestication to achieving more diversified and permanent land use systems in Cameroon, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.