Agrarian change affects the supply and demand of ecosystem services (ES) by reducing the extent of natural ecosystems. Agricultural intensification can lead to changes in land covers and livelihood opportunities and it remains unclear how such changes align or misalign with the desires of local communities. Using participatry mapping, we assessed ES uses and desires of Indigenous people and local communities provided by different land cover types along a gradient of agricultural intensification (forest subsistence, agroforestry mosaic, and monoculture and market-dependence) in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. We found that mapped ES use diversity was highest in the forest-dependent zone and lowest near monoculture agricultural systems. The expressed ES uses and desires varied greatly among land cover types amidst loss of old-growth forest and greater reliance on secondary forest and shrub land. The spatial analysis showed that high priority areas of ES use was related to access in the landscape, demonstrating the importance of attending to place-based social values in ES assessments. From this study, we call for a people-centric spatial modelling approach to address the divergence of social and cultural ES values associated with land covers under different intensification contexts. Participatory mapping clarifies the ES desires of local communities, which state policy often fails to address. We recommend a place specific management strategy to reduce ES trade-offs of specific land use practices, which are currently apparent with agrarian change in Indonesia and relevant for other tropical developing countries.
Tag: agricultural intensification
Agronomic gain: Definition, approach, and application
Meeting future global staple crop demand requires continual productivity improvement. Many performance indicators have been proposed to track and measure the increase in productivity while minimizing environmental degradation. However, their use has lagged behind theory, and has not been uniform across crops in different geographies. The consequence is an uneven understanding of opportunities for sustainable intensification. Simple but robust key performance indicators (KPIs) are needed to standardize knowledge across crops and geographies. This paper defines a new term ‘agronomic gain’ based on an improvement in KPIs, including productivity, resource use efficiencies, and soil health that a specific single or combination of agronomic practices delivers under certain environmental conditions. We apply the concept of agronomic gain to the different stages of science-based agronomic innovations and provide a description of different approaches used to assess agronomic gain including yield gap assessment, meta-data analysis, on-station and on-farm studies, impact assessment, panel studies, and use of subnational and national statistics for assessing KPIs at different stages. We mainly focus on studies on rice in sub-Saharan Africa, where large yield gaps exist. Rice is one of the most important staple food crops and plays an essential role in food security in this region. Our analysis identifies major challenges in the assessment of agronomic gain, including differentiating agronomic gain from genetic gain, unreliable in-person interviews, and assessment of some KPIs at a larger scale. To overcome these challenges, we suggest to (i) conduct multi-environment trials for assessing variety × agronomic practice × environment interaction on KPIs, and (ii) develop novel approaches for assessing KPIs, through development of indirect methods using remote-sensing technology, mobile devices for systematized site characterization, and establishment of empirical relationships among KPIs or between agronomic practices and KPIs.
Measuring household legume cultivation intensity in sub-Saharan Africa
Legumes form part of an ecological-based solution to intensification in areas with limited access to external inputs. Despite a number of decades of intervention, uptake of legumes has been slow within smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa. We explore the drivers behind the adoption of legumes by developing an indicator of household legume cultivation (HLC) from a bespoke survey of small-scale farm households in Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A beta regression framework identifies the range of intensities across sites and farms, indicating a limited influence of agro-ecological zones and formal institutions on uptake. Age, income and gender have positive but very marginal effects. Intensive legume cultivations were less driven by commercial growth objectives or access to market oppourtunities indicating lack of legume markets to incentivize production. There was little interest in expanding farm area, which reflects the lack of assets available to these farmers and leads to the use of legumes for providing home nutrition, or supporting farm fertility and livestock feed. Further development of this HLC metric would be enabled by consistent data gathering across regions, or at least equally detailed studies of legume uptake. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Bringing evidence to bear for negotiating tradeoffs in sustainable agricultural intensification using a structured stakeholder engagement process
Sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) has the potential to increase food security without detrimental effects on ecosystem services. However, adoption of SAI practices across sub-Saharan Africa has not reached transformational numbers to date. It is often hampered by lack of context-specific practices, sub-optimal understanding of tradeoffs and synergies among stakeholders, and lack of approaches that bring diverse evidence sources together with stakeholders to collectively tackle complex problems. In this study, we asked three interconnected questions: (i) What is the accessibility and use of evidence for SAI decision making; (ii) What tools could enhance access and interaction with evidence for tradeoff analysis; and (iii) Which stakeholders must be included? This study employed a range of research and engagement methods including surveys, stakeholder analysis, participatory trade-off assessments and co-design of decision dashboards to better support evidence-based decision making in Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. At the inception, SAI evidence was accessible and used by less than half of the decision makers across the three countries and online dashboards hold promise to enhance access. Many of the stakeholders working on SAI were not collaborating and tradeoff analysis was an under-utilized tool. Structured engagement across multiple stakeholder groups with evidence is critical.
Innovative agronomic practices for sustainable intensification in sub-Saharan Africa. A review
Africa’s need to double food production and feed the burgeoning human population, without compromising its natural resource base, has raised the momentum for sustainable agricultural intensification on the continent. Many studies describe agronomic practices that can increase productivity on existing agricultural land without damaging the environment and without increasing the agricultural carbon footprint. However, there is limited information on specific practices with the greatest potential to contribute to sustainable intensification on smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa, while simultaneously keeping the carbon footprint low. The objectives of this review were to (1) identify good agronomic practices with potential for contributing to sustainable intensification across sub-Saharan Africa, (2) synthesize available information on benefits and synergies from these technologies, and (3) discuss bottlenecks in their adoption in order to obtain insights that inform the formulation of supportive policies. Agroforestry, cereal-legume intercropping, conservation agriculture, doubled-up legume cropping, fertilizer micro-dosing, planting basins, and push-pull technology were identified as key agronomic innovations widely promoted in sub-Saharan Africa. We show that these innovations can build synergies and increase resource use efficiency while reducing agricultural carbon footprint. We outline the benefits, trade-offs, and limitations of these practices and discuss their potential role in strengthening food sovereignty and climate change adaptation and mitigation.