The benefits of backing family agroforestry businesses – food for thought
International Coffee Day, held at the start of October, is an annual opportunity to celebrate coffee and raise awareness of the work of smallholder farmers worldwide. This year’s event comes at a time when the livelihoods of smallholder farmers are being increasingly threatened by the impacts of climate change. Here, IIED’s Duncan Macqueen explains why diversified family-run agroforestry businesses offer a sustainable, nature-based solution for smallholder farmers, including coffee growers, in climate-vulnerable nations such as Belize.


Smallholder farmers around the world are highly productive, producing around a third of the food consumed globally on only quarter of the agricultural land area. This includes 25 million smallholders who produce approximately three quarters of the world’s coffee.
However, as climate change continues to intensify, smallholder farmers who rely on only one crop are increasingly at risk.
Nearly a decade ago, International Coffee Day was launched as an annual opportunity to support coffee farmers and mobilise support for growers whose livelihoods are threatened by various challenges. Since then, coffee yields have continued to be hit by the changing climate, due to unpredictable weather patterns, more frequent and intense droughts and floods, and rising temperatures.
It’s not surprising, with these increasing risks, that many young people from smallholder farming families do not see a viable long-term future on the land. Take, for example, Belize, where I recently visited.
The role of agroforestry
In this Central American country, forest areas are a patchwork of natural reserves and family farms. However, many of the latter lie abandoned as youth head to town in search of education in science, technology, markets. But for the older generation, with pensions in short supply, many are going back to the land. The hope is that Belize’s natural bounty will feed them and let them make a little income in retirement.
The Mesh family tells a different story. Coffee farmer James Mesh wanted to grow coffee in traditional diverse farming systems at low altitude – not monoculture plots in the hills. Experts told him that planting low elevation coffee in Belize at 750 feet could not be done. He disagreed, found a coffee variety he could grow, and pioneered a family coffee business that bucked the trend.
The result, Oxmul Coffee is christened after the Mayan name – Oxmul Kah – for his home town, renamed by the Spanish as San Antonio. James’ family business buys and processes environmentally friendly coffee. And his daughter, Sulema Mesh, now uses her marketing expertise to promote the brand on social media. The coffee’s distinctive feature is its origin in traditional Mayan farming systems – agroforestry – that involve more than 100 species of native grains, tubers, vines, fruit and timber trees.
I met the Meshes when they were invited to present their business case at an IIED-led ‘Making a business of agroforestry’ training course, held at the Belize Botanic Gardens near San Ignacio in August 2024.
Participants came because they believe in the power of agroforestry: an adaptive approach to land management that involves combining trees with crops and animals. By re-introducing trees into their farming systems, farmers in the coffee sector and beyond can harness the potential of agroforestry to make their farms more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
Participants on the course included smallholder farmers, and government and NGO forest restoration specialists. They came together at the event to learn how to aggregate and sell a wide range of potential products grown in many diverse agroforestry smallholdings. Coffee was one of the better-known products, but others included tree crops such as allspice, avocado, bread fruit, breadnut, custard apple, guava, jackfruit, lime, kinep, malay apple, mango, velvet apple, soursop, ziricote and many, many more.
The training was sponsored by ‘Planting Baskets’, a project funded by the UK government’s Darwin Initiative promoting the conservation of biodiversity by innovative means.
In a true demonstration of innovation, the Belize training session saw our diverse set of participants learning how to grow and distribute as many as 130 species to plant in agroforestry systems. For instance, local food crops, spices and peppers, exotic and native fruit trees, and timber species – including some on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) endangered ‘red list’.
Resilient farming in the face of climate change
Implemented by the Belize Botanical Gardens (BBG) with support from the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE) and managed by the University of Edinburgh, the aim of ‘Planting Baskets’ is to restore local forest cover and biodiversity. But the project also provides local farmers with many species that improve their nutrition and climate resilience. And beyond that, there are many things that farmers can sell from agroforestry business.
Making agroforestry businesses work – to repeat the name of the training course – requires aggregation of small quantities of any one product from many smallholder farms. Working together is therefore vital.
During the training, a guest from the Association of Forest Communities of Petén (ACOFOP), an umbrella organisation in the adjacent Guatemalan Peten, emphasised that collaboration is key to making agroforestry businesses work. They explained how, in the Peten, there is a rich history of cooperation across 24 community organisations within ACOFOP.
Farmers work together to sell certified sustainable timber, as well as a range of non-timber forest products such as xate palm leaves, ramon bread nut flour and chicle (a natural gum), alongside conventional crops. Farmers also club together in fire brigades to protect their diverse agroforestry systems.
Examples such as this show the potential of community agroforestry businesses. Indeed, at the training event, restoration specialists from Belize’s Forestry Department said that the innovative training format could now be replicated by several ongoing restoration initiatives. They see it as a vital training process through which to deliver the country’s ‘National Landscape Restoration Strategy for Belize 2022-2030' (PDF), which targets 130,000 hectares of national landscape restoration, including 80,000 hectares of agro-landscape restoration by 2030.
At IIED, we would encourage others to contact us to find out how they too can ‘make agroforestry businesses work’ in their contexts. Since agricultural lands now make up the largest component of global land use (46%), putting nature back into farms through agroforestry is likely to be critical for climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience.
By bringing together smallholder farmers, restoration programmes, family agroforestry businesses and established smallholder producer organisations, ‘Planting Baskets’ is inspiring a new family-friendly model of forest restoration and development.
This International Coffee Day and beyond – and as the COP biodiversity and climate summits approach – we encourage governments, NGOs and supply chain actors alike to commit to supporting many more families like the Meshes to make agroforestry businesses work.
That way, old and young, forest and farm, environment and development, can walk happily together and cooperate for the benefit of both people and planet.