The Shamba system: an indigenous system of food production from forest areas in Kenya

The Shamba system, a form of Taungya where agricultural crops are grown together with forest tree species, has been quite widespread in the high-potential areas of Kenya since the early 1900s, and still is very popular. When properly practiced, the system allows sustained, optimum production of food crops along with forestry species from the same land and thus meets most of the social and economic needs of the shamba farmer. This paper briefly describes the system's productivity and functioning and analyses its ecological as well as socio-economic characteristics.