Agroforestry would be a more profitable land-use system for many of the world's poor farmers than traditional methods such as slash-and-burn, and could make a greater contribution to offsetting the developing world's carbon emission reductions than conventional large-scale plantations, according to new research. Economic analyses to determine the relative profitability of different farming systems studied by the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn (ASB) consortium at sites in five countries in southeast Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa found that tree-based farming systems can be more profitable for small-scale farmers than annual cropping.