Rising global demand for vegetable oil during the last few decades has led to a drastic increase in the land area under oil palm. Especially in South- east Asia, the oil palm boom has contributed to economic growth, but it has also spurred criticism about negative environmental and social effects. Here, we discuss palm oil production and consumption trends and review environmental, economic, and social consequences in different parts of the world. The oil palm expansion has contributed to tropical deforestation and associated losses in biodiversity and ecosystem functions.
Though extension services have long since proved their value to agricultural production and farmer prosperity, their record in sub-Saharan Africa has been mixed. To study the impact of such programs on farmers' learning about agricultural technologies, we implemented a quasi-randomized controlled trial and collected detailed panel data among Malawian farmers. Based on those findings, we develop a two-stage learning framework, in which farmers formulate yield expectations before deciding on how much effort to invest in learning about these processes.
In recent decades, the confluence of different global and domestic drivers has led to progressive and unpredictable changes in the functioning and structure of agri-food markets worldwide.
Organic agriculture has experienced remarkable growth in recent decades as societal interest in environmental protection and healthy eating has increased. Research has shown that relative to conventional agriculture, organic farming is more e cient in its use of non-renewable energy, maintains or improves soil quality, and has less of a detrimental e ect on water quality and biodiversity. Studies have had more mixed findings, however, when examining the impact of organic farming on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate change.
Since development agencies often implement interventions through collective-action groups such as farmer cooperatives and self-help groups, there is a need to understand how participation is affected by group-level and leader attributes. This study collected gender-disaggregated, quantitative and qualitative data on sixty-eight self-help groups in Zambia to understand the participation of men and women farmers in different crop-production activities. Results show that participation rates of men and women are the same across all maize production activities except harvesting.
One of the key challenges for agriculture today is feeding an increasing population without contributing to climate change. Increasingly, digital agriculture is discussed as a new sociotechnical regime that could help limit emissions for farmers worldwide. While sustainability is an important issue, recent papers in the field of digital agriculture do not address the problem directly. After a literature review, this paper will focus on the importance of shared perspectives as enablers in socio-technical transitions.
The rapid transformation of agri-food value chains in Africa and other developing countries has important implications for economic growth and poverty reduction. Policy makers increasingly recognize this but there is a need for a better understanding of what value chain transformation entails and what the main policy options are. This paper provides an overview and analysis of different value chain models that have emerged in the past decades and reviews the literature on the main development implications.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of International Earth Day on April 22 2020, UNDP launched a new way of helping farmers: Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Systemic Change: A New Approach to Strengthening Farmer Support Systems, a guidance note which encourages and guides governments to develop new partnerships, enable innovation and strengt
Ghana’s cocoa production belt also serves as the main forests repository of the country. Cocoa farm- ing is both a direct and indirect driver of deforesta- tion in Ghana (UNEP, 2008). This implies that critical interventions are needed to deal with deforestation emanating from cocoa production.
This report presents and reflects on the opportunities that new technological developments related to automation and precision agriculture (e.g. robotics) can offer to agriculture in developing countries. These technologies are mainly targeted to support farmers that struggle with the cost of labour when harvesting crops and to tackle the declining availability of manpower for general cropping operations.