The objective of Wanakaset is to generate an ecologically balanced environment with the greatest possible varieties of trees, plants, animals, micro-organisms and human activities that are harmonious in nature. Within this objective, some forms of economic activity are necessary to meet the funding required to operate, run and maintain the 20 acres of land in Sri Lanka and the 150 acres of land in France.

This project is still in its infancy and our teams prepare different areas of the lands while collecting diverse, rare, and sometimes extinct, fruit trees from here and there. Our present goal is on the one hand to understand the climate, the landscape and its topography, the accessibility of the different areas and its possible uses (housing, vegetables, wood trees, water storage, etc..) and on the other hand, the determination of the productive function of each plant and fauna in the different areas of the land. Agroforestry is probably as old as human kind. It has been defined in several ways.

For information, the most commonly used definition is the one used by Lundreen, Raintree, Leakey and Spinger: “Agroforestry is any land-use system, practice or technology, where woody perennials are integrated with agricultural crops and/or animals in the same land management unit, in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence.” Overall, agroforestry is a dynamic and ecologically based natural resource management system. It refers to the deliberate introduction or retention of trees on farms to increase, diversify, and sustain production for increased social, economic and overall environment benefits to humans and the surrounding fauna and flora. Trees contribute to productivity in agroforestry through fertilization, soil conservation and biomass development.

Tree’s fertilization implication, is through the symbiotic fixation of nitrogen, root turnover, nutrient cycling, and their involvement in the formation of the humus layer. Maintenance of the physical properties of the soil is accomplished through erosion control and its stabilization by the roots.