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

Healthy land ecosystems are essential to sustainable development, including food security and improved livelihoods. Yet, their key services have usually been taken for granted and their true value underrated, leading to land degradation becoming a critical global problem. This pattern of undervaluation of lands is about to change in view of the rapidly rising land prices, which is the result of increasing shortage of land and high output prices. Despite the urgent need for preventing and reversing land degradation, the problem has yet to be appropriately addressed. Policy actions for sustainable land management are lacking, and a policy framework for action is missing. Such a framework for policy action needs to be supported by evidence-based and action-oriented research. The Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) initiative seeks to develop such a science basis for policy actions to address land degradation. The purpose of this methodological paper is to provide with sound and feasible standards for ELD assessment at global and national levels. Only if some basic standards are identified and adhered to, comparative assessments can be conducted between countries and useful aggregation of findings, based on these case studies, can be achieved. Therefore, using the Total Economic Value (TEV) framework, the paper identifies minimum core standards that need to be adhered to in all country case studies to generate comparable material for international assessment and ELD policy guidance. It also identifies additional and desirable areas of information and analyses that would add value to the country case study material. The proposed framework is also intended as a forward-looking agenda which can guide future research

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

Biomass Productivity-Based Mapping of Global Land Degradation Hotspots

Land degradation is a global problem affecting negatively the livelihoods and food security of billions of people, especially farmers and pastoralists in the developing countries. Eradicating extreme poverty without adequately addressing land degradation is highly unlikely. Given the importance and magnitude of the problem, there have been recurring efforts by the international community to identify the extent and severity of land degradation in global scale. As discussed in this paper, many previous studies were challenged by lack of appropriate data or shortcomings of their methodological approaches. In this paper, using global level remotely sensed vegetation index data, we identify the hotspots of land degradation in the world across major land cover types. In doing so, we use the long-term trend of inter-annual vegetation index as an indicator of biomass production decline or improvement. Besides the elimination of technical factors, confounding the relationship between the indicator and the biomass production of the land, we apply a methodology which accounts for masking effects of both inter-annual rainfall variation and atmospheric fertilization. We also delineate the areas where chemical fertilization could be hiding the inherent land degradation processes. Our findings show that land degradation hotpots cover about 29% of global land area and are happening in all agro-ecologies and land cover types. Land degradation is especially massive in grasslands. About 3.2 billion people reside in these degrading areas. However, the number of people affected by land degradation is likely to be higher as more people depend on the continuous flow of ecosystem goods and services from these affected areas. As we note in the paper, this figure, although, does not include all possible areas with degraded lands, it identifies those areas where land degradation is most acute and requires priority actions in both in-depth research and management measures to combat land degradation. Our findings indicate that, in fact, land improvement has also occurred in about 2.7% of global land area during the last three decades, providing a support that with appropriate actions land degradation trend could be reversed, and that the efforts to address land degradation need to be substantially increased, at least by a factor, to attain the vision of Zero Net Land Degradation. We also identify concrete aspects in which these results should be interpreted with caution, the limitations of this work and the key areas for future research

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