Testing environmental and health pesticide use risk indicators. The case of potato production in Boyacá, Colombia

Tropentag 2010 ETH Zurich, September 14 - 16, 2010 Conference on International Research on Food Security, Natural Resource Management and Rural Developmentpesticide risk, indicators, sustainability, health, environment, Colombia, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Health Economics and Policy, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Risk and Uncertainty,

Shared value: agricultural carbon insetting for sustainable, climate-smart supply chains and better rural livelihoods

The relentless advance of climate change negatively impacts farmers, businesses, and consumers by putting greater pressure on natural resources, making the weather more unpredictable, and depressing crop productivity. To cope with climate change requires multilateral efforts that draw on the experience of farmer groups, research and development organizations, and the private sector. One increasingly important focal point for such efforts is an approach referred to as carbon insetting, which offers the private sector a means to create shared value for the benefit of all stakeholders. The approach can make a company’s value chain more productive and resilient, sustaining supplies over the long term. By creating synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation in agriculture (e.g., through practices such as agroforestry), carbon insetting can also generate incentives and funding for climate change adaptation while enhancing farmers’ livelihoods

An innovation perspective to climate change adaptation in coffee systems

Climate change is expected to have strong implications for smallholder coffee farmers and implementing adaptation measures would lessen their vulnerabilities. Adaptation measures have been identified in literature, but how these can be implemented remains unclear. Current certification programmes have the potential to provide guidance on how sustainability criteria can be addressed and taken up by farmers. We identify climate change adaptation options, their scale of application, and the necessary implementation steps. We show that implementation complexity strongly increases with the degree of climate change. With modest climatic changes, incremental adaptations might suffice, but more substantial climatic change will require radical social-institutional changes for adaptation uptake and interventions. For the majority of smallholders the implementation of any measure is largely constrained by a lack of access to knowledge networks and training material, organisational support, and (mainly financial) resources. A landscape approach that encompasses collective action and coordinated cross-sector planning can overcome some of these barriers. Certification approaches can facilitate a move in this direction. Yet, the implementation of transformative adaptations requires visioning, realignment of policies and incentives, and new market formations. This entails a repositioning and revision of certification schemes to allow for more effective adaptation uptake for the benefit of smallholders and the environment

Regenerative agriculture for low-carbon and resilient coffee farms: A practical guidebook. Version 1.0

For decades, global coffee consumption has grown, as tastes and offerings for consumers have increased around the world, and global demand for coffee will continue to grow in the years to come. At the same time, climate change presents coffee producers and other supply chain actors with major challenges. Its impacts are already reducing the area that is well suited for growing coffee, and this lends urgency to the adoption of farming strategies than can secure future coffee supplies and the livelihoods of coffee-producing families. Major efforts are also needed to lower the contribution of agri-food systems, including coffee, to climate change and other negative environmental impacts, such as land degradation and biodiversity loss. Regenerative agriculture provides coffee producers with a means to transform their farms by restoring and conserving soil, water and biodiversity, thus building resilience in the face of climate change. This approach also creates opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance carbon storage on farms, while increasing farm income through diversification. Regenerative agriculture offers the further advantage of flexibility, based on principles that apply to both small- and large-scale production across many diverse conditions. As a result, this approach can address multiple environmental and production challenges in ways that are socially and economically viable. Designed for field agronomists and technicians in the global coffee sector, this guidebook aims to help identify the best regenerative practices and adapt them to different origins, farm types and agroecological conditions. Each region and farm type has its own requirements. For this reason, we highlight key principles and a wide array of practices that can be applied flexibly and combined to enhance the sustainability and resilience of coffee farms. In other words, this guidebook describes the “what” and “why” of regenerative agriculture but does not prescribe “how” it should be implemented. Instead, we offer tools that enable agricultural extensionists to support farmers in the transition to regenerative agriculture by selecting the practices that best match specific needs, objectives and available resources, and by adapting them to the local context

Identifying opportunity areas for cocoa agroforestry in Ghana to meet policy objectives

Ghana is one of the world’s leading cocoa producers. Between 1994 and 2018, the area under cocoa production has nearly ripled. This has increased income, but it has also imposed costs. As rainforests have been converted into land for cocoa farming, habitat for species has decreased and become increasingly fragmented in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. Rainforest loss also has huge implications for the ability of land to capture carbon and mitigate climate change globally. Expansion of cocoa farming is expected to aggravate these issues further. To increase income from cocoa, Ghana could expand cocoa plantations but increasing yields on the plantations that it already has would be better for both farmers and the environment. Cocoa yields in Ghana are low and the prices that the crop gets on the global market are poor. This is because most plantations in Ghana are small and run by farmers who often lack the right knowledge, resources and credit to apply management practices, like pruning, pest control and managing soil fertility, that would help them to increase the quality and size of their yields. Climate change is also expected to make lives harder and put the cocoa supply chain at risk by making yields lower than they already are. Agroforestry farming systems are increasingly being proposed as a solution to address these problems and a potential way for the small-holder cocoa farmers of Ghana to improve their livelihoods and for the cocoa sector to maintain a sustainable cocoa supply. Cocoa can be grown in direct sunlight or under shade provided by taller trees. Farmers in Ghana have been advised over the years that shade would harm their cocoa production, but evidence shows that well-managed shade can also benefit it. Shade trees suppress weed growth and provide habitats for predatory species that control insect pests. Growing cocoa under shade trees also helps to create a stable microclimate beneath the canopy. It can also enhance soil fertility and provide farmers with supplemental income when these other trees produce commercially valuable fruits and timber. Most importantly, well-shaded cocoa plantations will experience lower maximum temperatures than are expected from climate change, can store up to 2.5 times more carbon than those that are unshaded and support higher levels of biodiversity that help protect valuable ecosystem services. The types and magnitude of benefits from agroforestry systems for different beneficiaries depend highly on their design and the local context. Shade trees can harbour pests. They can also compete with cocoa for resources like water. This is particularly true in drier areas. High humidity levels under canopies created by other plant species can also foster fungal diseases. These challenges are not to be ignored but, when agroforestry systems are well designed, they are outweighed by the overall benefits in smallholder production systems. Indeed, Ghana is now promoting cocoa agroforestry through national level policies such as the Cocoa and Forests Implementation plan, the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme (GCFRP) and the National Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Security Action Plan. It is not realistic to establish shaded plantations throughout the southwestern regions of Ghana all at once. The process will need to be staged as there are 2.3 million hectares of plantations and 1.9 million of them currently have little to no shade. Areas where benefits from increased shading will be highest need to be identified and prioritised. This new work looked at the locations of all cocoa plantations in the country and applied cocoa and forest national policy objectives as well as spatially explicit climate change adaptation strategies to implement a transition towards more shaded cocoa farming. Using modelling approaches, the work sought to understand the biodiversity, carbon sequestration and erosion control benefits granted by increased shading being implemented in different locations. Combined, this information generated a map that reveals the areas where the implementation of shading would be most beneficial for achieving a combination of benefits for people, nature and climate. The work shows that establishing appropriately shaded and well-managed plantations in the proposed areas has the potential to protect at least 4,000 tonnes of sediment from erosion each year and store an additional 52 million tonnes of carbon in trees. While shifting to this sort of farming will have some implementation costs and not yield the immediate financial gains that would be expected from more forests being converted into plantations, such a transition can yield significant long-term benefits as smallholder farmers face the challenges presented by a changing climate. When implemented appropriately, it will also enhance ecosystem services that benefit cocoa production, conserve biodiversity and support the livelihoods of farmers. Above and beyond all else, the carbon sequestration benefits granted by shaded plantations have the potential to play a pivotal part in combating climate change. For this to be fully realised, farmers need to be incentivised to adopt agroforestry practices by giving them ownership of the land that they are farming and the trees that grow there. Paying them for the ecosystem services that their land provides would further these incentives by strengthening and diversifying their income too. Beyond the specific situation faced by cocoa farmers in Ghana, this study demonstrates the potential for decision-makers to use spatial planning to understand where, and (partly) how, to implement cocoa agroforestry at scale to meet different objectives

In the wake of the economic crisis: Social change and welfare state reforms

The economic crisis of 2008 is a global phenomenon with far-ranging impact. Its effects reach beyond the economic sphere, impacting the lives of individuals. When confronted with job loss and financial hardship, people look for new income sources, change their world views and attitudes, and remodel their interaction with each other. As a result, societies change. Families grow closer together, and tensions between generations and between migrants and non-migrants increase. Governments have to consolidate their finances while reacting to the increasing need for welfare state intervention. In doing so, they take different approaches that reflect the country-specific history and welfare state institutions. This working paper gives an overview of social change and welfare state reform in the wake of the economic crisis. For this purpose, it presents discussions and findings from two classes that were taught at universities in Germany. The material includes the outcomes of a grounded theory study that was conducted in the framework of one of these classes, summaries from various essays that students wrote for the classes, and from a book that was used as teaching material. The arguments brought forth in the working paper illustrate how the economic crisis influences e.g. social inequalities, life-courses, family relations, anti-foreigner sentiments, migration, and welfare policies. It, thereby, serves as an excellent starting point for reflections on what societies will be like post-economic crisis

Climate change adaptation, mitigation and livelihood benefits in coffee production: where are the synergies?

There are worldwide approximately 4.3 million coffee (Coffea arabica) producing smallholders generating a large share of tropical developing countries' gross domestic product, notably in Central America. Their livelihoods and coffee production are facing major challenges due to projected climate change, requiring adaptation decisions that may range from changes in management practices to changes in crops or migration. Since management practices such as shade use and reforestation influence both climate vulnerability and carbon stocks in coffee, there may be synergies between climate change adaptation and mitigation that could make it advantageous to jointly pursue both objectives. In some cases, carbon accounting for mitigation actions might even be used to incentivize and subsidize adaptation actions. To assess potential synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation in smallholder coffee production systems, we quantified (i) the potential of changes in coffee production and processing practices as well as other livelihood activities to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, (ii) coffee farmers' climate change vulnerability and need for adaptation, including the possibility of carbon markets subsidizing adaptation. We worked with smallholder organic coffee farmers in Northern Nicaragua, using workshops, interviews, farm visits and the Cool Farm Tool software to calculate greenhouse gas balances of coffee farms. From the 12 activities found to be relevant for adaptation, two showed strong and five showed modest synergies with mitigation. Afforestation of degraded areas with coffee agroforestry systems and boundary tree plantings resulted in the highest synergies between adaptation and mitigation. Financing possibilities for joint adaptation-mitigation activities could arise through carbon offsetting, carbon insetting, and carbon footprint reductions. Non-monetary benefits such as technical assistance and capacity building could be effective in promoting such synergies at low transaction costs