Institutions and Forest Management: A Case Study from Swat, Pakistan

Deforestation in the North western part of Pakistan is a long standing problem. The Forestry Department, as formal managers of the forest resources, has been undergoing a long reform process aimed at improving its performance. This reform process has not resulted in less deforestation. From the policy perspective this has been leading to stated intentions to further reform the Forestry Department, the question is whether organizational reform is the answer. We think there are more limiting bottlenecks to sustainable forest management in Pakistan. De facto property rights are not as simple as denoted by statutory law. In this article we explore the mechanisms behind the deforestation and try to uncover mechanisms to reverse the process. Although our conclusions are not very optimistic, we provide a framework for determining the bottlenecks in the management of common resources from the perspective of institutions. We show that in circumstances where institutional change is necessary we are faced with a trade-off between the transaction costs related to the enforcement of “improved” institutional arrangements and the transaction costs improving enforceable institutional arrangements. Incurring these transaction costs only makes sense if the benefits from improved institutional arrangements outweigh them and the transition costs. When we relate this dilemma to the management regime of the forest in North west Pakistan, we identify at the one end of the spectrum the ideal forest management system; at the other end we see the spontaneous evolution of self organization. The current situation is an intermediate form with an incoherent set of external interventions and strategic reactions by different agents in the local communities. The emergent system of management is the one producing the present dismal outcome.New institutional Economics, Corruption, Forestry, Swat

Foresight model inventory (Version 1)

This report is part of the documentation component of Work package 3 of the foresight and metrics initiative supporting the Documentation and improved access to standardized, regularly updated, and interoperable versions of CGIAR’s core foresight models, tools, and databases spanning food, land and water systems

Satellite Data and Supervised Learning to Prevent Impact of Drought on Crop Production: Meteorological Drought

Reiterated and extreme weather events pose challenges for the agricultural sector. The convergence of remote sensing and supervised learning (SL) can generate solutions for the problems arising from climate change. SL methods build from a training set a function that maps a set of variables to an output. This function can be used to predict new examples. Because they are nonparametric, these methods can mine large quantities of satellite data to capture the relationship between climate variables and crops, or successfully replace autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to forecast the weather. Agricultural indices (AIs) reflecting the soil water conditions that influence crop conditions are costly to monitor in terms of time and resources. So, under certain circumstances, meteorological indices can be used as substitutes for AIs. We discuss meteorological indexes and review SL approaches that are suitable for predicting drought based on historical satellite data. We also include some illustrative case studies. Finally, we will survey rainfall products existing at the web and some alternatives to process the data: from high-performance computing systems able to process terabyte-scale datasets to open source software enabling the use of personal computers

Ex-ante evaluation of tightening environmental policy: the case of mineral use in Dutch agriculture

Non-point source pollution is notoriously difficult to asses. A relevant example is mineral emissions in the Netherlands. Since the mid 1980s the Dutch government has sought to reduce emissions through a wide variety of measures, the effect of which in turn is monitored using modeling techniques. This paper presents the current generation of mineral emission models from agriculture based on microsimulation of farms in combination with a spatial equilibrium model for the dispersion of manure from excess regions with high livestock intensities within the country to areas with low livestock intensities. The micro-simulation approach retains the richness in the heterogeneity of farm household decision making that are the core cause of the difficulty of assessing non-point source pollution, while using the best available data to track corresponding pollution. Using scenario analysis we are able to assess the possible effects of further tightening of agro-environmental policy.micro-simulation, spatial-equilibrium model, non-point source pollution, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

Potential impacts of Ukraine-Russia armed conflict on global wheat food security: A quantitative exploration

Violent conflict is a major cause of acute food crises. In 2021, at least 155 million people in 10 countries were severely food insecure and eight of those countries were experiencing armed conflict. On February 24, 2022, an armed conflict between Russian Federation (Russia) and Ukraine escalated. As Russia and Ukraine are major wheat exporters, this will aggravate the already precarious food security situation in many developing countries by disrupting wheat production and export and by accelerating price hikes in import-dependent developing countries. This study examines the potential impacts of this ongoing armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine on wheat price, consumption, and calorie intake from wheat. In doing so, it applies the conditional mixed process estimation procedure using information collected from 163 countries and territories for the years 2016–2019 from online database of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The study shows that, on average, a 1% decrease in the global wheat trade could increase the producers' price of wheat by 1.1%, and a 1% increase in the producers' price could reduce the yearly per capita wheat consumption by 0.59%, daily calorie intake by 0.54% and protein intake by 0.64% in the sampled countries. Based on this, the study demonstrates that a 50% reduction in wheat exports by Russia and Ukraine could increase the producers’ price of wheat by 15%, which would induce a reduction in wheat consumption and dietary energy intake by at least 8%. Since wheat export has reduced from both Russia and Ukraine, to avoid a food crisis in developing countries, policies are suggested, including near term improvement of domestic wheat production by promoting improved agronomic practices to close yield gaps to meet a substantial portion of wheat self-sufficiency goals. In the long run, countries in Africa, East Asia and South America can explore expanding wheat into new land area. International donor agencies can play a key role in supporting the ongoing wheat research and development activities

Exploring opportunities around climate-smart breeding for future food and nutrition security

There is a 95% chance that warming will exceed 2°C by the end of the century (Raftery et al. 2017). Global crop productivity is projected to fall by 5-10 % per degree of warming (Challinor et al. 2014), with even greater losses likely for some crops in some areas. The challenge of meeting future food demand is increasing, and climate change is already diminishing our ability to adapt through crop breeding (Challinor et al. 2016; Aggarwal et al. 2019). Recent research is suggesting that increases in climate variability are already affecting the number of food-insecure people, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations may affect the nutrient content of some food staples, with serious implications for food and nutrition security (Smith and Myers 2018). New crop varieties will be needed that can deliver higher yields as well as possessing the ability to withstand heat and greater tolerances for the secondary effects of a warmer world, such as increased pressures from drought, water-logging, pests and diseases, and reduced nutritional quality due to higher levels of CO2. The systems for accelerated delivery of climate-resilient varieties into food producers’ hands need to be massively upgraded (Cramer 2018). Innovative holistic breeding strategies for multiple traits will be needed that embrace the full pipeline from trait discovery to varietal deployment and seed system development

Thinking big for smallholder agriculture: realizing agricultural potentials in changing times

Recent advances in approaches to quantitative strategic foresight have enabled new insights into understanding potential futures of the agriculture sector. Quantitative foresight approaches facilitate understanding of different plausible scenarios, especially as related to both endogenous and exogenous factors (e.g., global markets and climate change). These approaches tend to be macroeconomic in nature and resolve trends relative to coarse-grained drivers. In order translate these outputs into strategies that realistically benefit producers across scale, finer resolution and context specific understanding is needed. This paper offers perspective on how foresight analysis can be combined with more pointed assessment of the specific policies, institutions and market requirements needed create more inclusive agricultural investment strategies