Intercropping forest and coffee in Seka Chekorsa, Jimma.

The remnant natural forests are still being converted and socio-economic disparities keep increasing to the detriment of rural areas of Ethiopia. Over decades, forest landscapes are being increasingly fragmented and resulting mosaic landscapes that have fragments of natural habitats. In response to this, the government has begun taking some measures to rehabilitate the degraded lands. However, the current state of biodiversity conservation, forest development and utilisation are unsatisfactory to provide the multiple uses and services. Among many reasons the ineffectiveness of sector-based programmes that ignore the cross-sector linkages between forestry, agriculture, nature conservation and economic development are causes for unsatisfactory achievements. The concept of forest landscape governance is currently being developed to stimulate such integration incorporating forest-farm relationships at the landscape level in land use planning. Hence, sustainable conservation and utilization of the remaining natural vegetation resources and rehabilitation of those that have already been degraded would provide economic, social and ecological benefits. Understanding farmer’s perception of natural resource management is one of the important factors to have effective natural resource conservation intervention.

However, there is a gap in documenting existing smallholder’s forest farm interface landscape management practice in Ethiopia in general and in Jimma zone study area in particular. The present study is, therefore, aimed at filling the information gap by assessing the interaction between forests and agricultural land management practices for biodiversity conservation and wood product supply for the benefit of rural poor natural resource dependent community in Jimma zone, Ethiopia.