Agroforestry in Madagascar: past, present, and future

Agroforestry systems promise a high multifunctionality providing cash and subsistence yields as well as other ecosystem services. Such land systems may be particularly promising for smallholders in tropical landscapes due to high labour intensity and productivity on limited land. Focusing on Madagascar, we here describe the history of agroforestry in the country and review the current literature on agroforestry outcomes as well as factors promoting and hindering agroforest establishment and maintenance. From this, we discuss the potential future of agroforestry in Madagascar. Historically, many crops farmed today in agroforestry systems were originally introduced as plantation crops, mostly in the nineteenth century. Since then, people co-opted these crops into mixed agroforestry systems, often focusing on clove, vanilla, coffee, or cocoa in combination with fruit trees or, for clove, with livestock. Other crops are also integrated, but shares are comparatively low. Overall, 27.4% of Malagasy exports are crops typically farmed in agroforestry systems, providing income for at least 500,000 farmers. Outcomes of agroforestry for biodiversity and ecosystem services are commonly researched, showing benefits over annual crops and monocultures. Social-economic outcomes, including yields, are more scarcely researched, but findings point towards financial benefits for smallholder farmers and a sense of community and collective memory. However, findings emphasize that research gaps remain in terms of geographic and crop coverage, also for ecological outcomes. Looking to the future, we highlight the need to overcome hurdles such as land tenure insecurity, financial barriers to implementation, and unstable value chains to scale agroforestry in Madagascar to the benefit of multifunctional land systems and human wellbeing

Agricultural commercialization in borderlands: Capturing the transformation of a tropical forest frontier through participatory mapping

Forest-frontier landscapes in the humid tropics display distinct land use change dynamics compared to other world regions, providing useful examples of current global environmental and development challenges. In northwestern Laos, part of the former Golden Triangle region, investments in value chains for commercial crops—mainly to fulfill Chinese market demands—have triggered various land use changes and put increasing pressure on remaining biodiverse forest areas. Capturing the existing land use change trajectories is a key initial step toward further studies assessing land use change impacts. However, methodological challenges arise when conducting spatially-explicit change assessments in these regions, given the high temporal variability of land use at the plot level, compounded by the paucity of good quality satellite imagery. Thus, we applied a novel approach combining analysis of very high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery with participatory mapping. This enabled joint collection of annual land use information for the last 17 years together with local land users, shedding light on temporally dense land system dynamics. For decades, the government of Laos has sought to halt shifting cultivation, labeling it environmentally degrading, and to reduce poverty through promotion of permanent commodity-oriented commercial agriculture. Among other things, this gave rise to a boom in banana and rubber investments in Luang Namtha province in order to satisfy growing Chinese demand for these commodities. The present paper investigates the impact of these cash crop booms on land use transitions and whether they reduced pressure on forest-frontier areas, as ostensibly desired by government authorities. Our study is among the first to demonstrate in a spatially-explicit manner that subsistence agriculture—in less than two decades—has virtually disappeared in northern Laos due to diverse cash-crop production and agricultural commercialization initiatives linked to Chinese investments. As subsistence-focused cultivation systems are being replaced by land uses solely aimed at commercial production for export, a telecoupled land system is being developed in northwestern Laos with potentially manifold impacts for sustainable development

The cash crop boom in southern Myanmar: tracing land use regime shifts through participatory mapping

Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing vast transformations. Myanmar was long an exceptionto this trend–until recent policy reforms put economic development at the forefront. Underambiguous land rights, commercial agriculture has spread rapidly, causing an unprecedentedloss of biodiversity-rich forest. In south-eastern Myanmar, where land tenure is highly contesteddue to several decades of conflict, scientific evidence on these complex social-ecological pro-cesses is lacking. In the absence of past satellite data, we applied a participatory mappingapproach and co-produced annual land use information with local land users between 1990and 2017 for two case study landscapes. Results show that both landscapes have undergonea land use regime shift from small-scale farmers’shifting cultivation to plantations of rubber, betelnut, cashew, and oil palm. These changes are likely to have long-term impacts on land users’livelihoods and the environment. We call for a reconsideration of land governance arrangementsand concerted land use planning that respects the rights of local land users and strengthens theirrole as environmental stewards. Applied with careful facilitation, participatory mapping could bean important tool to engage communities in the highly challenging process of transforming landgovernance to achieve more sustainable outcomes in this post-conflict context

Precariedad, exclusión social y modelo de sociedad: lógicas y efectos subjetivos del sufrimiento social contemporáneo (IV). Innovación docente en Filosofía

El PIMCD “Precariedad, exclusión social y modelo de sociedad: lógicas y efectos subjetivos del sufrimiento social contemporáneo (IV). Innovación docente en Filosofía” constituye la cuarta edición de un PIMCD que ha recibido financiación en las últimas convocatorias de PIMCD UCM, de los que se han derivado actividades de formación para estudiantes de Grado, Máster y Doctorado y al menos 3 publicaciones colectivas publicadas por Ediciones Complutense, Siglo XXI y Palgrave McMillan