Global advantages as well as positive externalities of agroforests are widely recognised as a whole but are not always properly valued. The direct benefits of agroforests are recognised at farm level but not entirely valued either, on the contrary, they are widely under-assessed and sometimes not even taken into account at the community level. To put it in another way: going beyond individual farmers, the impact and use of resources as well as the generation of income and product benefits needs to be considered at the level of what French agronomists call the “territory”, i.e., as “anthropic land” and for some components - including biodiversity - at global level. We should considered 2 periods with rubber: i) the immature period (first 5 to 7 years) with mostly intercropping with annual or pluriannual and ii) the mature period (from 7 to 35 years) with combination of mostly trees (fruit, timber a,d resin…) with rubber. If intercropping during immature period is relatively well developed almost everywhere, RAS during mature periods with rubber and associated trees are less developed for many contextual reasons. Rubber Agroforestry Systems (RAS) are an important component of world agroforestry due to the importance of RAS adoption in some countries. In Vietnam RAS are not well developed.
Penot et al. (Wed,) studied this question.