ALBERT

Description: This study analyzes the influence of livelihood assets on Ugandan farmers’ decisions to control Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW), a disease that has threatened banana production and the livelihoods of Ugandan farmers since 2001. The BXW control strategy is based on the simultaneous implementation of four cultural practices: de-budding, infected plant removal, disinfecting tools, and using clean planting materials. The Sustainable Rural Livelihood (SRL) framework represents a very useful theoretical architecture for examining the interplay between livelihood systems of rural Ugandan households and the external context. Empirically, this study applies a double-hurdle model with the base assumption that the two adoption decision processes (whether to adopt and the intensity of adoption of the cultural practices) are separate. Results indicate that the vulnerability context and the human, social, natural, and physical capitals are the factors that drive farmers to adopt the identified strategy. Farmers’ decisions about the extent of adoption are instead negatively influenced by natural capital and positively associated with social capital. These findings highlight the importance of supporting the improvement of livelihood assets to enable tailored support to farmers. It is particularly important to support the social and natural capitals that facilitate information exchange and provide critical resources for the adoption of the BXW control strategy.

Description: Owing to climate change, population growth and tenurial changes, the past decade has witnessed high interest among migrant and settler pastoralist groups in the vegetal-rich customary lands of the Agogo Traditional Area. This has resulted in lease grants of large land areas to pastoralists by traditional authorities and usufruct families, for reasons of ensuring optimum use and gaining the highest returns from lands. This paper examines the implications of consequent competing interests over land resources between farmers and herders on indigenous farmer’s agricultural investment decisions. The study uses qualitative methods and empirical evidence is given by primary data from semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions in the case study area. Results indicated that land owners exploit lapses in customary land administration systems to allocate lands in exchange for money, to pastoralists while neglecting indigenous farmers’ land use rights. Thus, indigenous farmers report land tenure insecurity and a sense of deprivation from their customary lands. Despite tenure insecurity concerns, farmer’s agricultural investment decisions remain unchanged because such changes in investment decisions may reduce incomes and compromise their livelihoods. The findings herein contradict theoretical expectations and provide new perspectives for understanding the relationship between tenure (in)security and investment decisions.

Description: Climate adaptation is an essential strategy for responding to climate change at local levels and required for sustainable food production to meet the growing food demand. In this light, this study analyzed the effects of climate adaptation strategies on technical efficiency of maize farmers in Northern Ghana. This involved a total of 619 maize farmers that were selected through a multistage sampling procedure. A Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier was fitted to the data. From the result, the major climate adaptation strategies adopted by the farmers include row planting, changing planting date, mixed farming, refilling, and intercropping. The frontier result shows that while climate adaptation significantly leads to higher maize outputs, only crop rotation and row planting significantly improve technical efficiency of maize farmers. Other factors that significantly influence maize output are farm size, labor, seed, and chemicals. The study concludes that climate adaptation, particularly, crop rotation and row planting, remains essential adaptation strategies for sustainable food production in the region. However, further understanding of mechanisms through which majority of the climate adaptation strategies significantly reduce technical efficiency is required.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the commoning heritage processes find application for the production of agro-environmental public goods in contexts of high socio-economic marginality and environmental vulnerability, characterized by abandonment and from the consumption of agricultural land for food use. The purpose is to understand how these processes are able to influence, at local level, the governance processes for the implementation of environmental protection strategies. The survey made it possible to verify how the commoning processes aimed at the production of agro-environmental goods generate territorial resilience, understood as a community competence able to structure specific forms of social learning based on priorities identified and defined by the communities. The followed theoretical framework and the methodological approach have allowed on the one hand to draw up a taxonomy of the different territorial dynamics and on the other to identify a mixed indicator system, applicable and replicable also in other contexts, able to describe its dimensions analytically. The assessment of the cognitive elements related to the territorial fabric carried out through the proposed approach has allowed to demonstrate how the knowledge of the territorial capital contributes to the activation of forms of collective intelligence necessary for decision-making processes.

Description: Agricultural technology change is required in developing countries to increase the robustness to climate-related variability, feed a growing population, and create opportunities for market-oriented production. This study investigates technological change in the form of adoption of improved wheat, drought-tolerant teff, and cash crops in the semiarid Tigray region in northern Ethiopia. We analyze three rounds of panel data collected from smallholder farms in 2005/2006, 2009/2010, and 2014/2015 with a total sample of 1269 households. Double-hurdle models are used to assess how the likelihood (first hurdle) and intensity of technology adoption (second hurdle) are affected by demographic, weather, and market factors. The results indicate that few smallholders have adopted the new crops; those that have adopted the crops only plant small shares of their land with the new crops, and that there has been only a small increase in adoption over the 10-year period. Furthermore, we found that high population density is positively associated with the adoption of improved wheat, and previous period’s rainfall is positively associated with the adoption of drought-tolerant teff. The adoption of cash crops is positively associated with landholding size and access to irrigation. The policy implications of these results are that the government should increase the improved wheat diffusion efforts in less dense population areas, make sure that drought-tolerant teff seed is available and affordable after droughts, and promote irrigation infrastructure for production of cash crops.

Description: Periurban farming systems are characterized by the need to adapt the farming practices coping with a modified natural and social environment. Questions are thus posed on the efficient use of the inputs. The purpose of this study is to estimate the technical efficiency and the productivity of periurban farms. To do so, the study employs a data envelopment analysis that properly captures the heterogeneity of the periurban farming system. The sample considered livestock and crop farms, located in the South Milan Agricultural Park, where 50 farms were selected and interviewed. Results show that crop farms are more efficient than livestock farms, but they have a less productive technology. The participation in short food supply chains and the multifunctional agriculture does not affect the levels of technical efficiency of the farms. Policies are thus needed to improve the education level of farmers and to sustain the efficiency of farms that diversify the farm’s economy.

Description: The transition from a linear to a circular economy is a research trend topic, as well as the possibility to measure the degree of circularity of products and systems. In a linear economy, raw materials are taken from nature and transformed into final products, which are subsequently used and become waste. On the contrary, a circular economy is an economic model that is restorative by intent and design. To measure the degree of circularity is fundamental for understanding processes and improving them. Moreover, this kind of measure could be useful for driving policies on the topic and achieving a higher level of sustainability. Until now, only few studies have been focusing on how to effectively measure the circularity level of a product, a supply chain, or a service. Moreover, in the circular economy paradigm, there are two types of cycles: the technical and biological ones. Biological cycles are mainly connected to the agricultural sector, and for this kind of cycle, the lack of measurement is even bigger. However, some agricultural productions, such as intensive meat production processes, have basically a linear structure. Intensive broiler production, for instance, uses a quite high rate of inputs, which is not entirely converted into edible products but instead results in a percentage of wasteful outputs. The aim of this work is to propose a modification of one of the few available tools for measuring the circularity, the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI), for adapting it to biological cycles. The modified MCI was applied to the poultry sector, integrating the results with the Life Cycle Assessment methodology.

Description: The purpose of the research is to evaluate the impact of different kinds of information disclosures of milk labels, investigating the interest among consumers based on their consumption behaviours and characteristics. In this research, all the actions which lead to a healthiness, become expressions of a production process, among which consumers’ food choices, purchase, preparation, and also self-production. Therefore, in the “health creation” production process, information and knowledge about food become “investments”. In this context, label disclosures become a tangible expression of this kind of “investment”. The research question is: what impact do purchase preferences and consumers’ characteristics have on their interest towards the label information provided? Several information disclosures, both mandatory and voluntary, are investigated. Therefore, some choice attributes will be analysed as indicators of the consumer’s behaviour in relation to his investment in food information. The methodology used for the analysis is an Ordered Logit. The analysis of the consumer’s behaviour has been performed by transposing Ménard’s analysis of firm corporate governance (Ménard, Agribus. 34:142–160, 2018) to the consumer as producer of welfare equity. The reduction of information asymmetry is a cost for the producer, and this research may be able to measure how much it would be convenient to invest in this reduction, based on the analysis of the consumer’s behaviour toward his personal investment in food information acquisition.

Description: Several studies have focused on the behaviour of consumers towards organic wine, finding varying and sometimes conflicting results. Some scholars have noted that consumers may perceive wine labelled as organic to be of a lower quality, whereas others have found that consumers are willing to pay a premium price for it. Starting from these discrepancies found in the literature, this study seeks to investigate how the organic certification influences consumers when purchasing a bottle of red wine, evaluating the possible presence of attribute non-attendance (ANA) behaviour. A choice experiment was carried out on a sample of Italian wine consumers. Findings highlight that although, on average, consumers do not prefer organic wine, there is a relevant niche in the market consisting of consumers who benefit from purchasing it. Moreover, we have found that the majority of the sample ignores the organic attribute when choosing a bottle of wine, which reveals ANA behaviour.

Description: Home-grown protein crops as an alternative to soya in dairy cattle meals, as well as other sustainable ethical-based practices, have been proposed to increase the sustainability of dairy production. Data on consumer acceptance of the three novel sustainable production strategies of ‘agroforestry’, ‘prolonged maternal feeding’ of young cattle and ‘alternative protein source’ were collected through an online survey on consumer in six European Union countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy and the UK. Using Chen’s extended version of the Theory of Planned Behaviour model, the underlying model hypotheses on the attitudes and intentions of these consumers towards these production practices were tested, to establish the explanatory power of the model in the specific context of novel sustainable production strategies. Furthermore, the influence of gender and consumer ethical choices on their attitudes towards these innovative practices was also tested. These data show that ‘prolonged maternal feeding’ is the novel production practice that has the highest level of acceptance by consumers in all of these countries, with the least accepted practice as ‘alternative protein source’. Unexpectedly, increased availability of home-grown feed, which is grounded on both farmer and societal interests for higher input self-sufficiency and more sustainable production practices, was little appreciated by consumers, although their intentions appear to be dependent on their moral norms.