Innovation in banana value chain development in Metema district, northwestern Ethiopia: IPMS experiences

Ethiopia has a diverse agro-ecology and sufficient surface and ground water resources, suitable for growing various temperate and tropical fruits. Although various tropical and temperate fruits are grown in the lowland/midland and highland agro-ecologies, the area coverage is very limited. For example, banana export increased from less than 5,000 tons in 1961 to 60,000 tons in 1972, but in 2003 declined to about 1,300 tons worth less than USD 350,000. The limited development of fruit sector in the country could be attributed to constraints such as limited inputs, skilled manpower and extension approaches and, focus of agricultural development efforts on grain production amongst others. The current government’s policy and development strategy prioritizes intensive production and commercialization of agriculture, including fruit production. In an effort to support this change, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MoARD) initiated a five-year project with financial assistance from Canada, called improving productivity and market success (IPMS) of Ethiopian farmers. IPMS follows participatory value chain and innovation systems perspectives and focuses on knowledge-based development of identified agricultural commodities with market potential in 10 pilot learning weredas (districts) in four regional states. One of the weredas is Metema where the project introduced banana production. The objective of this paper is to share IPMS experiences in promoting innovation in banana value chain development in Metema wereda. The paper provides a brief history of banana introduction in Ethiopia, describes the value chain in banana production, input supply and marketing and the various innovations that have been introduced to develop the chain, with a focus on actors and action learning processes. The future outlooks of banana value chain and the reasons for the successful adoption of the innovation and the options to sustain it so that the value chain can respond to changing conditions are highlighted

Tanzania Country Climate Risk Profile Series, Kilolo District

The agricultural sector in Tanzania has been exposed to high climatic risks for the past several decades (Arce & Caballero, 2015). Experts and farmers assert that climatic risks including unpredictable rainfall, prolonged drought, and increased incidences of pests and diseases have resulted in declining agricultural productivity. Concomitantly, the rivers, streams, soils, and forests from which the rural poor build their livelihoods are on the verge of depletion. The situation has been further exacerbated by unstable commodity prices. Future climatic projections show that the climate trends are likely to worsen in the coming years. For instance, mean annual temperatures in Tanzania are predicted to increase by up to 2.7°C by 2060, and by close to 50% by 2090 (Irish Aid, 2018). Similarly, day and night temperatures are also expected to increase. Rainfall will become increasingly erratic both locally and regionally, with both floods and droughts growing in intensity and frequency. Smallholder farmers have the poorest access to resources such as land tenure, water resources, crop and livestock insurance, financial capital, and markets, and thus are the least risk-resilient. Women farmers in particular suffer systematic discrimination in terms of access to these resources. Women are also culturally expected to execute the most laborious agricultural tasks in addition to their household responsibilities of caregiving, preparing meals, and collecting fuel and water. Meanwhile, men tend to be responsible for tasks involving financial exchange, such as land acquisition, sourcing capital for production, purchasing and applying chemicals, and identifying buyers. This cultural norm is reinforced by the tenure system, which assigns land ownership almost exclusively to men. These factors make women the most vulnerable sub-group of smallholder farmers (Irish Aid, 2018). The national government, donor community, private sector, and development partners have invested in helping households prepare for such climate scenarios. A number of policies, strategies, programmes, and guidelines have been documented with the goal of boosting the adaptation capacity of vulnerable groups. Prominent among these are the National Agricultural Policy (NAP 2013), the National Climate Change Strategy (NCCS 2012), the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA 2007), and the Climate-Smart Agriculture implementation guideline. Despite these efforts, several issues remain unaddressed due to a lack of coordination among relevant actors. The development of a local Climate-Smart Agriculture Profile can support the clarification of roles and crucial points of coordination to assist in this effort. This Kilolo District profile thus underscores the climate-smart agriculture (CSA) investments undertaken by farming households in the region. This profile is an output of the CSA/SuPER project on Upscaling CSA with small scale food producers, organized via the Village Saving and Lending Association (VSLA) Project, and implemented by Cooperative Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE International), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (now part of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT), Sokoine University of Agriculture, and Wageningen University and Research. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to gather the information herein, in accordance with the methodology employed by Mwongera et al. (2015). Secondary information was collected through an extensive literature review. Primary information was collected from interviews with agricultural experts, farmer focus group discussions, stakeholder workshops, and farmer interviews in Kilolo District. This profile is organized into six major sections based on the analytical steps of the study. The first section describes the contextual importance of agriculture to Kilolo livelihoods and households. The second describes historic and future climatic trends. The third section highlights farmers’ priority value chains. The fourth section addresses the challenges and cross-cutting issues in the sector. The fifth section details climate hazards experienced by farmers, as well as the current and proposed adaptation strategies. Finally, the sixth section outlines the policies related to CSA and the institutions that facilitate implementation of climate change initiatives

Norms and Law: Putting the Horse Before the Cart

Law and society scholars have long been fascinated with the interplay of formal legal and informal extralegal procedures. Unfortunately, the fascination has been accompanied by imprecision, and scholars have conceptually conflated two very different mechanisms that extralegally resolve disputes. One set of mechanisms might be described as the shadow of the law, made famous by seminal works by Professors Stewart Macaulay and Marc Galanter, in which social coercion and custom have force because formal legal rights are credible and reasonably defined. The other set of mechanisms, recently explored by economic historians and legal institutionalists, might be described as order without law, borrowing from Professor Robert Ellickson\u27s famous work.1 In this second mechanism, extralegal mechanisms—whether organized shunning, violence, or social disdain—replace legal coercion to bring social order and are an alternative to, not an extension of, formal legal sanctions. One victim of conflating these mechanisms has been our understanding of industry-wide systems of private law and private adjudication, or private legal systems. Recent examinations of private legal systems have chiefly understood those systems as efforts to economize on litigation and dispute-resolution costs, but private legal systems are better understood as mechanisms that economize on enforcement costs. This is not a small mischaracterization. Instead, it reveals a deep misunderstanding of when and why private enforcement systems arise in a modern economy. This Essay provides a taxonomy for the various mechanisms of private ordering. These assorted mechanisms, despite their important differences, have been conflated in large part because there has been a poor understanding of the particular institutional efficiencies and costs of the alternative systems. Specifically, enforcement costs have often been inadequately distinguished from procedural or disputeresolution costs, and this imprecision has produced theories that inaccurately predict when private ordering will thrive and when the costs of private ordering overwhelm corresponding efficiencies. The implications for institutional theory are significant, as confusion in the literature has led to overappreciation of private ordering, underappreciation of social institutions, and Panglossian attitudes toward both lawlessness and legal development

Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics

When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, (reason's) conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attained with difficulty (Hume, 1739/, p 507). we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules (of caring intervention to do visible 'good') of the small band or troop, or our families to the (extended order of cooperation through markets), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were to always apply the (noncooperative) rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. (Hayek, 1988, p 18). (Italics are his, parenthetical reductions are mine).behavioral economics; experimental economics

Village Baseline Study – Site Analysis Report Ma village-Yen Binh district, Vietnam

Ma village, Vinh Kien commune, Yen Binh district, Yen Bai province has been selected to be one of Climate Smart Villages (CSVs) under the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in Southeast Asia. The village baseline survey (VBS) of Ma village, was therefore conducted as part of the baseline effort. This VBS aimed to provide baseline information at the village level about some basic indicators of natural resource utilization, organizational landscapes, and information networks for weather and agricultural information, which can be compared across sites and monitored over time. The study was conducted using the method developed and provided by CCAFS. The study’s findings show that Ma Village is rich and diverse in natural resources. There are three main resources of vital importance for the local people livelihoods, namely farmland, forest and water resources. However, improper exploitation and management have caused negative impacts on these resources. As mentioned by farmers, in the past, farmland of the village used to be very fertile, but has now become severely degraded due to overexploitation and improper management. Regarding forest resources: before 1980s, natural forests existed in large areas and consisted of valuable timber and wild animals. Today, much of the forest area has been converted to production forests or to food crop production land. Water resources, including lakes, rivers and streams have been severely polluted with pollutants from processing cassava, wood and also from animal husbandry and crop production. Degradation of water, farmland and forest resources are causing increasing challenges to agricultural production and also to other human activities. Results of farmer group discussions also demonstrate that there are 34 organizations operating in the village. Most of them are governmental. Very few are private or non-governmental organizations. The number of organizations involving in food security accounts for nearly 50%, the figure for those involving food crisis is 41.6% and in natural resources management is 25%. Those organizations working in food security and food crisis focus mainly on providing support (financial, seed and agricultural inputs) to local farmers to implement some production activities. Insufficient attention and input spent for sustainable development by these 34 organizations, especially those working in the area of natural resources management, could be one of the main reasons for the degradation and erosion of natural resources. There was no activity supporting Ma Village to develop production systems which can respond well to climate change. The study findings however show that local people are very flexible and creative, especially in exploitation of information. Among media channels, television is the most popular. Nevertheless, organizations, in particular, extension networks, Farmers’ Union, local authorities, etc., also have an important role in information dissemination. Exploitation of information from the internet and mobile phones has also been given attention, but mostly by young people only

Audience Effects in Cognitive Task Performance in Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella)

Primates as a taxonomic Order have the largest brains corrected for body size in the animal kingdom. These large brains have allowed primates to evolve the capacity to demonstrate advanced cognitive processes across a wide array of abilities. Nonhuman primates are particularly adept at social learning, defined as the modification of behavior by observing the actions of others. Additionally, primates often exploit resources differently depending on their social context. In this study, capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) were tested on a cognitive task in three social contexts to determine if social context influenced their performance on the task. The three social contexts included: alone, having a dominant individual in an adjacent compartment, and having a subordinate individual in the adjacent compartment. The benefits to this design were thatthe social context was the only variable influencing performance, whereas in previous studies investigating audience effects other animals could physically and directly influence a subject\u27s performance in an open testing situation. Based on past studies, Ipredicted that the presence of a dominant individual would reduce cognitive task performance compared to the other conditions. The cognitive test used was a match-tosample discrimination task in which animals matched combinations of eight geometric shapes. Animals were trained on this task in an isolated context until they reached a baseline level of proficiency and were then tested in the three social contexts in a random order multiple times. Two subjects (Mt and Dv) have successfully completed trials under all conditions. Results indicated that there were no significant difference in taskperformance across the three conditions (Dv x^2 (1) = 0.42, p=0.58; Mt x^2 (1) = 0.02, p=0.88). In all conditions, subjects performed significantly above chance (i.e., 39/60 trials determined by a binomial distribution). Results are contrary to previous studies thatreport low status monkeys \u27play dumb\u27 when testing in a mixed social context, possibly because other studies did not account for aggressive interference by dominants while testing. Results of this study suggest that the mere presence of a dominant individualdoes not necessarily affect performance on a cognitive task, but rather the imminence of physical aggression is the most important factor influencing testing in a social context