94 research outputs found
Analysis of profit inefficiency in rice production in Eastern and Northern Uganda
Rice is among the emerging crops in Uganda that play an important role both as a food and a cash crop. It ranks fourth among the cereal crops in area cultivated, occupying a total of 80 thousand hectares of land with an estimated annual output of 120,000 metric tonnes. The study analyses sources of technical and allocative inefficiency and estimates the magnitude of profit losses and suggests policy interventions. A stochastic profit function and inefficiency function are estimated using cross-sectional data from a sample of 253 households from three districts of Eastern and Northern Uganda. The results show that rice farmers are not operating on the profit frontier. The main causes of inefficiency are firm-specific which include low education and limited access to extension services. These two factors have hampered the attainment of reasonable technical and allocative efficiency. From these results, it is clear that improvement in profit efficiency would require focused programmes to increase access to education and extension services
Food Security in the Drylands of South Asia and Sub-saharan Africa: Research Challenges and Opportunities
Despite the significant agricultural research achievement that led to the
green revolution, South Asia (SA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remain the hotspots
of food and nutrition insecurity in the world. One of the reasons behind this challenge
is the failure of the green revolution to increase dramatically rainfed crop and
livestock productivity in SA. The green revolution achievement has also generally
eluded SSA despite the increased availability of high-yielding and risk-reducing
cultivars and agricultural innovations. Many factors are attributable to the lack of
productivity growth. This paper investigates the major factors that have contributed
to the food insecurity in SA and SSA and forecasts the future of the food production
and consumption and their effect on food and nutrition security to the year 2020.
Our projections of food production and consumption show that child malnutrition
in SA is decreasing much faster than the case in SSA, due to increase in per
capita income, female education and female life expectancy. Fast reduction in child
malnutrition is also possible in SSA if the countries invest significantly in improvement
in agricultural production and in addressing the constraints that impede access to
food. The demand for livestock products has been increasing dramatically mainly
due to increasing income and urban population. The livestock sector also has a
large potential to achieve food and nutrition security in the drylands. Unfortunately,
past research and development investments in livestock have not reflected the potential
and opportunities offered by the sector. Harnessing the potential of livestock would
require developing suitable crop-livestock innovations to improve productivity. Even
though returns to agricultural research investments have been high and have shown
a great potential to increase food security in both SA and SSA, government and
donor research funding has generally decreased in the SSA region where national
capacity is weak and underdeveloped. There is an urgent need to increase availability
of funds to address the research challenges and harness the opportunities in the
two regions. Returns to the research investment will also have multiplier effect
on reducing food and nutrition insecurity if the support services – such as extension
services, market services, etc. – are developed. Research also need to take seriously
farmer innovations which have shown great potential in developing technologies
well adapted to the drylands
Nitrogen-neutrality: a step towards sustainability
We propose a novel indicator measuring one dimension of the sustainability of an entity in modern
societies: Nitrogen-neutrality. N-neutrality strives to offset Nr releases an entity exerts on the
environment from the release of reactive nitrogen (Nr) to the environment by reducing it and by
offsetting the Nr releases elsewhere. N-neutrality also aims to increase awareness about the
consequences of unintentional releases of nitrogen to the environment. N-neutrality is composed of
two quantified elements: Nr released by an entity (e.g. on the basis of the N footprint) and Nr
reduction from management and offset projects (N offset). It includes management strategies to
reduce nitrogen losses before they occur (e.g., through energy conservation). Each of those
elements faces specific challenges with regard to data availability and conceptual development.
Impacts of Nr releases to the environment are manifold, and the impact profile of one unit of Nr
release depends strongly on the compound released and the local susceptibility to Nr. As such, Nneutrality
is more difficult to conceptualize and calculate than C-neutrality. We developed a
workable conceptual framework for N-neutrality which was adapted for the 6th International
Nitrogen Conference (N2013, Kampala, November 2013). Total N footprint of the surveyed meals
at N2013 was 66 kg N. A total of US$ 3050 was collected from the participants and used to offset
the conference’s N footprint by supporting the UN Millennium Village cluster Ruhiira in South-
Western Uganda. The concept needs further development in particular to better incorporate the
spatio-temporal variability of impacts and to standardize the methods to quantify the required N
offset to neutralize the Nr releases impact. Criteria for compensation projects need to be sharply
defined to allow the development of a market for N offset certificates
Online supplementary data available from stacks.iop.org/ERL/9/115001/mmediainfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Strategies and policies to reach a land-degradation neutral world
Despite the difficulties in quantifying the extent and
degree of land degradation or restoration, evidence
shows that continued land degradation will be an
impediment to meeting several SDGs. The United
Nations states that it aims for land degradation
neutrality (LDN) which in 2015 became firmly
established as an agreed-upon objective in the realm
of international environmental politics. First, as part
of the SDGs whose Target 15.3 calls to “combat
desertification, restore degraded land and soil,
including land affected by desertification, drought
and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradationneutral
world” by 2030 (UNGA, 2015). The Conference
of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Convention to
Combat Desertification (UNCCD) took the decision
to align the implementation of the Convention with
SDG 15.3 and invited its Parties to set voluntary LDN
targets (UNCCD, 2015). From that point onwards,
the key question is how to implement these global
aspirations at the national level and what is needed to
operationalize the LDN concept and translate it into
concrete strategies to meet LDN at scale..
Economics of Land Degradation Initiative: Methods and Approach for Global and National Assessments
Selecting sites to prove the concept of IAR4D in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site
Selecting sites is an essential step in enabling the assessment of the impact of Integrated
Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site. This paper
reports on the process of identifying distinct administrative territories (sites) in which to establish
innovation platforms and to monitor similar communities that are experiencing alternative
agricultural research for development interventions. We show how the research design for the Sub-
Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSACP) has been modified to take into account the key
conditioning factors of the LKPLS without relinquishing robustness. A key change is the explicit
incorporation of accessibility to multiple markets. Candidate sites were stratified according to the
national political context, followed by good and poor accessibility to markets and finally according
to security considerations and agro-ecology. Randomisation was carried out at all levels, although
the need for paired counterfactual sites required the diagnosis of conditioning factors at the site
level. Potential sites were characterised in terms of existing or recent agricultural research
initiatives, as well as local factors that would have a direct effect on the success of interventions
seeking to improve productivity, ameliorate the degradation of natural resources and enhance
incomes through better links to markets. Fourteen sites were selected during the initial phase, and a
further ten sites were added one year afterwards due to the need for more innovation platforms to
test IAR4D. The site selection was successful in pairing action and counterfactual sites in terms of
the baseline socioeconomic conditions of farming households. The unavoidable proximity of action
and counterfactual sites, however, allows the possibility of spill-over effects and could reduce the
measurable impact of IAR4D
the adoption of climate smart agriculture the role of information and insurance under climate change
Climate change adds to the existing challenges in improving crop productivity and welfare for smallholder agricultural households by affecting the mean and variability of weather conditions and the frequency of extreme weather events. In the face of such growing uncertainty, agricultural practices of small landholders need to be adapted to better manage the changing risk structures. Since government risk management programs may complement or substitute for farmer adaptation, this chapter examines how a range of institutional interventions might assist, obstruct, channel, or change smallholder agricultural adaptation to climate change. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of the informational role of the agriculture extension, suggest that insurance can lead to significant changes in farmer planting and land management decisions, and show how information about changing conditions and insurance can be complimentary in driving changes in farmer behavior
Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment
© 2019 The Authors Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design
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