Spatiotemporal dynamics of soybean crop in the Matopiba region,Brazil (1990–2015)

Brazil is a world leader in the production and export of grains, particularly soybeans. The newest agricultural frontier in Brazil is the Matopiba region, which is a continuous zone formed by the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia, located mostly within the Cerrado biome. The objective of this study was to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of soybean production and yield in the Matopiba region. We analyzed municipality-based planted areas and production data obtained by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics during 1990–2015. Yield was estimated from the production and planted area, and the data were analyzed using global and local Moran indices. The results showed that soybean production in the Matopiba region does not occur randomly. Positive and significant autocorrelation was found at the beginning of the time series among those municipalities located in the west of Bahia. This region influenced the soybean expansion from south to north. Currently, high-production areas are concentrated in two autocorrelated blocks: one in western Bahia and the other in the central Matopiba region. Analysis of spatial autocorrelation involving yield showed a decreasing trend at the end of the time series. The presence of municipalities with high yield surrounded by others with low yield, and vice-versa, were observed. The findings of this study could assist local and regional agricultural planning in the Matopiba region, and support related analyses in other fields of agriculture, the environment, and logistics.     

Women farmers’ participation in the agricultural research process: implications for agricultural sustainability in Ethiopia

Empowering women farmers to participate in agricultural research is a key strategy for sustainable agricultural development. Women empowerment has the potential to improve their roles in agricultural production while enhancing nutrition and food security. Although new agricultural development policies are focusing on improving women engagement in agriculture, there is limited literature on women empowerment in relation to agricultural research. This study used mixed methods to analyse women farmers’ participation in four stages of the agricultural research process – design, testing, dissemination, monitoring and evaluation. Two hundred and thirty individual interviews with women farmers and 16 focus group discussions with men and women farmers were conducted in four Woredas (districts) of Ethiopia. Quantitative data were analysed using binary and multivariate probit models. Qualitative data were analysed using line-by-line coding. The results showed that several empowerment indicator variables significantly (p?≤?.001) influenced women’s participation in different stages of agricultural research. Specifically, input in production decisions, autonomy in plot management, membership to farmer groups, and ability to speak in public enhanced women’s participation in different stages, in addition to access to information and extension services, education and land size. Cultural norms hindered women’s empowerment and engagement in research. To foster sustainable agriculture development, it’s important to integrate holistic and proactive gender perspectives into research strategies to increase women’s participation in farmer research groups, access information and knowledge, have voice and challenge constraining cultural norms and traditions.     

European farmers and participatory rural appraisal: A systematic literature review on experiences to optimize rural development

Farmers are those who daily supervise and manage rural areas, but still their collaborations with those institutions entitled to decide the transformation of these territories are not managed properly. The experiences of participatory processes with the involvement of farmers are analyzed in many agricultural studies. A systematic review has allowed us to analyse experiences related to 35 participation paths aimed at rural regions’ development. The analysis has been made on the basis of 14 variables describing the path followed and its purpose, the agricultural holding involved and the areas surveyed.The work has the objectives to identify some strengths and weaknesses in the involvement of farmers in decision-making and the strengths and weaknesses of the processes themselves. The review has shown that too often in participatory processes farmers are considered only as a source of information to be used by researchers rather than as active participants in the choices for the protection, management and transformation of the rural territory. An effective participatory rural appraisal requires greater empowerment of farmers. In general, compared to the methods and tools used, farmers are wary of paths that are too complex and prefer the use of low-tech tools. This result can be attributed to the farmers’ demand of direct contact with the researchers to build trust and also to the average age of European farmers, which is pretty high.In participation contexts, it is not possible to establish standardized methods and tools, because each process should be tailored for the community that expresses it. Nevertheless, the work has highlighted the need to establish some minimum principles to avoid considering unsuccessful some participation paths which, in reality, have been only scarcely participated. In the work, these principles have been presented through the development of key questions, to which those who design the path for an effective engagement of agricultural stakeholder must respond: representativeness, empowerment, empirical knowledge, relationships, group type, numerosity and involvement stage.     

Addressing climate change cause and effect on land cover and land use in South Asia

This paper evaluates the role of trade liberalization and agricultural intensification in mitigating climate change cause and effects on land use and emissions using a computable general equilibrium model. Our results indicate that cropland expansion triggered by climate-induced crop productivity changes results in deforestation and increases emissions in South Asia and globally. Global full trade liberalization on all goods is the optimum policy for South Asia despite significant global deforestation, but for the world, unilateral partial trade liberalization on all goods is a more appropriate policy while ensuring a considerable emissions reduction for South Asia. These results indicate that mitigation responses to climate change are location specific and no one trade policy is suitable at the regional and global levels. Lastly, agricultural intensification by improving productivity growth is the best strategy in land-based emissions mitigation, thereby avoiding the transformation of forest and pasture lands for agricultural cultivation both at regional and global levels.     

The influence of land-use change paradigm on Romania’s agro-food trade competitiveness—An overview

The current transformations of the Romanian agricultural sector have imposed new paradigms in using the land resources. The objective of this study is to assess Romanian agro-food products competitiveness on world market, in terms of land use changing paradigms. The research question is whether the land is cultivated with crops which are competitive on world market. For assessing agro-food competitiveness, Balassa index is calculated. The findings show relative performance for barley, maize, triticale, wheat, poultry meat, oilseeds, and tobacco. But the areas cultivated with barley and wheat decreased in the period under analysis, although these products have highest relative performance of exports. The paper also proposes structural changes of land use needed for encouraging those crops and products which have high revealed comparative advantages on world markets.     

Land owners’ perception of land consolidation and their satisfaction with the results – Slovenian experiences

Land consolidation has been an important instrument of rural development for over a century throughout Europe. Nowadays, land consolidation can be an integral part of both rural and urban development projects, but the focus of our study is on land consolidation in rural areas. In addition to the efforts aimed at making agriculture and forestry more competitive through a comprehensive reallocation process, improvement of road and drainage networks, landscaping, environmental management, conservation projects, and other functions may be implemented in land consolidation. There are differences in the objectives and procedures of land consolidation among the countries. Beside the formal institutional framework of land consolidation, informal institutions can have a substantial influence on the implementation of land consolidation. In the article, the past experiences in the field of land consolidation in Slovenia are presented, which are still reflected in the limited acceptability of this instrument among land owners. Furthermore, the current institutional (legal) framework is analyzed in detail. The main objective of the research was to investigate the opinion of land consolidation participants about land consolidation. Based on the field survey conducted on a sample of private land owners involved in selected land consolidation projects we tried to define the advantages and disadvantages of the current practice. The main finding is that the active participation of land owners contributes to their comprehension of the aims and to their satisfaction with the results of the land consolidation. It has been shown that the active participation of land owners in the land consolidation is the basis for developing good practices; moreover, it affects the land owners’ perception of land consolidation. The transfer of knowledge and representation of good practices among actors are still needed, in particular because of bad experiences in the past (i.e. enforced and environmentally unfriendly projects) and the traditional emotional attachment to land among land owners. In parallel, there is a great need to provide an optimization of the land consolidation process in Slovenia.     

Drivers of adoption of agroecological practices for winegrowers and influence from policies in the province of Trento,Italy

Many agricultural practices are negatively impacting the environment and threatening the ecological foundations of the global food system. Therefore, agroecological practices are being proposed as viable and desirable alternatives. Biophysical, economic, social, and political factors, matched with farmers’ psychological attributes, may all be governing the choice of agricultural practices. Public policies can play a significant role as they can stimulate the adoption of innovative farming practices. The main objective of this research was the evaluation of farmers’ motivations for the adoption of agroecological practices in the viticulture sector in the province of Trento, Italy. A specific focus was laid on the influences from the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) measures. For the evaluation of farmers’ perceptions of their systems of practices, the Cognitive Mapping Approach for Analysing Actors’ Systems Of Practices (CMASOP) was applied. Based on information collected during in-depth interviews, Individual and Social Cognitive Maps were generated, representing the most frequently adopted agroecological practices and the major drivers of adoption of such practices, as mentioned by farmers. Drivers of adoption were categorized according to the self-determination theory of human motivations. Farmers reported that adoption of agroecological practices was mainly driven by existence of site-specific pedoclimatic conditions, followed with decreasing importance by requirements from wineries, availability of material, appreciation for aesthetics, health concerns, influence from irrigation consortia, and legal requirements, among which a local legislation for integrated pest management based on a CAP measure. Overall, results show that farmers reported to adopt agroecological practices mainly because of autonomous choices rather than coercion. Therefore, wineries and local policy-makers might incentivize the adoption of agroecological practices by promoting autonomy-supportive policies that foster farmers’ identified and intrinsic motivations.     

Economic and Household Impacts of Projected Policy Changes for the Irish Agri‐food Sector

The policy environment for the Irish agri‐food sector could change rapidly in the coming decade. A potentially positive factor will be the elimination of milk quotas in 2015, although a potentially negative factor will be further trade liberalisation and increased import competition. These changes come on top of the move to decouple direct aids to farmers in 2005 as part of the Mid‐Term Review of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy agreed in 2003. This paper examines these reforms and their impacts on the Irish economy and income distribution using a CGE model particularly rich in detail on the agri‐food sectors, differentiated household groups, and agricultural policy instruments including their links to productive factors and households. The results suggest that the past and projected changes in the policy environment have, in sum, a small positive impact on GDP and household income. However, the gains and losses are unequally distributed across sectors and household groups due to the highly differentiated distribution of support and protection. Although all households generally gain from the sequence of policy reforms in the long run, some experience strong adverse effects from particular reforms and in the medium term.     

The effects of China's Sloping Land Conversion Program on agricultural households

In the late 1990s, China aimed to mitigate environmental degradation from agricultural production activities by introducing the world's largest “Payments for Environmental Services? program: the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP). We develop a microeconomic Agricultural Household Model, which can model the production, consumption, and nonfarm labor supply decisions of agricultural households in rural China in a theoretically consistent fashion. Based on this theoretical model, we derive an empirical specification, which we econometrically estimate using the Hausman–Taylor method and a large longitudinal farm household data set. The empirical results significantly differ between regions, but are generally consistent with the results of our theoretical comparative static analysis, for example, that the SLCP significantly decreases agricultural production. While the SLCP only increases nonfarm labor supply and total consumption in some regions, these effects could not be observed in others. The recent reduction of the SLCP compensation payment rates generally had negligible effects on agricultural production and off‐farm work and only very small effects on household consumption.     

The productivity of agricultural credit in India

This study examines the nature of the relationship between formal agricultural credit and agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in India, specifically the role of the former in supporting agricultural growth, using state level panel data covering the period 1995–1996 to 2011–2012. The study uses a mediation analysis framework to map the pathways through which institutional credit relates to agricultural GDP relying on a control function approach to tackle the problem of endogeneity. The findings from the analysis suggest that over this period, all the inputs are highly responsive to an increase in institutional credit to agriculture. A 10% increase in credit flow in nominal terms leads to an increase by 1.7% in fertilizers (N, P, K) consumption in physical quantities, 5.1% increase in the tonnes of pesticides, 10.8% increase in tractor purchases. Overall, it seems quite clear that input use is sensitive to credit flow, whereas GDP of agriculture is not. Credit seems therefore to be an enabling input, but one whose effectiveness is undermined by low technical efficiency and productivity.