How climate awareness influences farmers’ adaptation decisions in Central America?

Central America is one of the regions with the highest vulnerability to climate change, with negative effects projected to affect its economy and food security. To address this issue, an integrative farm management approach such as Climate-Smart Agriculture can help reorient agricultural practices towards climate adaptation and food security. Past studies have shown that several factors can either hinder or encourage the adoptions of Climate-Smart practices, including subjective expectations and perceptions. Building on this literature, we analyze farmers' climate awareness and their perceptions regarding the change in climate patterns as well as their choices of farming practices to adapt to these changes. We show that reforestation was the preferred adaptation strategy among interviewed farmers and that educational profiles and the size of landholdings drive the adoption of this and other practices. Soil management and introduction of new crops are preferred by literate farms with large farmlands, whereas illiterate farmers with smaller farmland tend to move towards farm intensification with an increase in the utilization of external inputs. Our findings provide evidence to support the design of capacity development interventions targeting specific groups of farmers according to their main crop and education profile.How climate awareness influences farmers’ adaptation decisions in Central America?acceptedVersio

Propuesta metodológica para grupos focales de género: Empoderamiento y equidad en la toma de decisiones de familias de línea base de ECA MAP Noruega

Género y equidad es uno de los temas transversales vinculados al Programa Agroambiental Mesoamericano (MAP Noruega). Uno de los cinco resultados de dicho programa busca mejorar la equidad en la toma de decisiones familiares para la seguridad alimentaria y nutricional en el hogar, patio y finca.1 El marco lógico de MAP además incluye un indicador a nivel de “Efecto Directo (Outcome indicator) que busca medir los avances en materia de equidad en la participación de mujeres, hombres y jóvenes en la toma de decisiones en el hogar, patio y finca. Las acciones de MAP Noruega para contribuir a este indicador son principalmente el fortalecimiento de las capacidades técnicas, metodológicas de las familias en el manejo agroecológico de patios y fincas por medio de las Escuelas de Campo (ECA) multirubro y multitemáticas2. Además, se incluye el fortalecimiento de capacidades para mejorar las condiciones del entorno del hogar a través de la inclusión en las ECAS de temas como la seguridad alimentaria y nutricional, buenas prácticas en el hogar, equidad género, ahorro familiar y cambio climático. La equidad de género se promueve a través de la incorporación de diferentes miembros de la familia incluyendo mujeres y jóvenes de ambos sexos en las actividades de capacitación y asistencia técnica y a través de la introducción de un conjunto de temas, contenidos en una herramienta denominada “Cápsulas para el aprendizaje y la inclusión” en el marco de las ECA. Los temas desarrollados en esta herramienta pretenden impulsar cambios culturales en las familias y organizaciones para contribuir al avance de la equidad e inclusión. Los resultados de las mediciones de monitoreo de la línea base con familias no han reflejado cambios en las actitudes y comportamientos de género en torno a la participación y toma de decisiones en la unidad productiva y familiar. Probablemente esto se deba por un lado a que los cambios culturales requieren de mayor tiempo para ver cambios concretos; por otro, a que la metodología que estamos utilizando para el levantamiento de la información en el campo no sea la adecuada para este tipo de indicador; o que el tipo de intervención que estamos realizando no sea la adecuada

New insights on the use of the Fairtrade social premium

Fairtrade standards differentiate themselves from other sustainability standards such as Rainforest Alliance and UTZ by demanding that buyers pay to farmers at least a minimum price and a Fairtrade social premium – a sum that is paid to cooperatives in addition to the agreed price to be used in projects to strengthen the cooperative and to benefit the community in the villages more broadly. The latter is often mentioned in the literature as one of the key mechanisms through which Fairtrade engenders changes in the small farm sector. However, no previous study has explicitly analyzed what the social premium is used for, which factors affect the decision-making processes, and whether farmers, workers, and the local communities more broadly benefit from projects implemented with the premium money. In this article, I use multivariate statistical techniques to analyze how patterns in the use of the premium are related to cooperatives’ organizational characteristics. To illustrate the potential benefits of the social premium to the local community, I use regression analyses to evaluate the effects of certification and educational projects financed with the social premium on household education expenditure. I find evidence that living in a village where an educational project was implemented has a positive effect on education expenditure among farmers, but does not have an effect among rural workers

Value chain transformations in the transition to a sustainable bioeconomy

The adoption of new bio-based technologies that reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is presented as a path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while creating new business opportunities. Such a transition towards a bio-based economy will require substantial investments in technological innovations that will likely affect how value chains are structured and which actors benefit from this transformation. Yet, previous studies on the bioeconomy have largely ignored the relationship between the structure of value chains and the rate of technological innovation. In this article, we analyze the link between technological innovation, value chain structures, and welfare distribution in the transition to a bioeconomy. We find that an acceleration in the rate of bioeconomy innovation is associated with shorter and more vertically coordinated value chains, bigger firms with higher market shares, increasing knowledge-sharing among value chain members, and a leading role by firms with core research capabilities. Finally, we argue that while bio-based innovation can potentially achieve environmental sustainability, it creates risks for the weakest value chain actors. Thus, we propose some lines of thought regarding the potential distributional effects of bio-based innovation. From a policy perspective, this debate is relevant to safeguarding social sustainability in the transition to a bioeconomy

Fairtrade, Agrochemical Input Use, and Effects on Human Health and the Environment

It is often assumed that voluntary sustainability standards – such as Fairtrade – could not only improve the socioeconomic wellbeing of smallholder farmers in developing countries but could also help to reduce negative health and environmental impacts of agricultural production. The empirical evidence is thin, as most previous studies on the impact of sustainability standards only focused on economic indicators, such as prices, yields, and incomes. Here, we argue that Fairtrade and other sustainability standards can affect agrochemical input use through various mechanisms with possible positive and negative health and environmental effects. We use data from farmers and rural workers in Cote d'Ivoire to analyze effects of Fairtrade certification on fertilizer and pesticide use, as well as on human health and environmental toxicity. Fairtrade increases chemical input quantities and aggregated levels of toxicity. Nevertheless, Fairtrade reduces the incidence of pesticide-related acute health symptoms among farmers and workers. Certified cooperatives are more likely to offer training and other services related to the safe handling of pesticides and occupational health, which can reduce negative externalities in spite of higher input quantities. These results suggest that simplistic assumptions about the health and environmental effects of sustainability standards may be inappropriate.ISSN:0921-800

Mind your language: Political discourse affects deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Land users make decisions in an increasingly dynamic environment. Changes in expectations are driven by market and non-market factors, but research on market related drivers of land use change so far dominates in the literature. This paper examines how political discourses affect deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon region. Relying on novel data from Twitter, we present the first causal evidence of political discourse on deforestation. Our analysis relies on municipal level monthly panel data for 2019 with alternative remotely sensed measures of forest loss and vegetation fires as outcome variables. The effect of political discourse on these outcomes is identified using a shift-share regression approach. High exposure to laissez-faire political discourses increases forest loss by 2.3-3%, and fires by 2.2%. Our findings are robust across land tenure regimes, varying levels of policy enforcement, and alternative shift-share measures. Moreover, excluding dry season periods from the analysis does not change the main result. Land use in the Brazilian Amazon is highly sensitive to whether, how, and when authorities communicate their will to enforce environmental policy regulations. ‘Walking the talk’ remains imperative to protect the world’s tropical forests, but this study suggests that policy makers must carefully choose their words while walking