ALBERT

Description: Soil fertility in smallholder farming areas is known to vary strongly on multiple scales. This study measures the sensitivity of the recorded satellite signal to on-farm soil fertility treatments applied to five crop types, and quantifies this fertilization effect with respect to within-field variation, between-field variation and field position in the catena. Plant growth was assessed in 5–6 plots per field in 48 fields located in the Sudano-Sahelian agro-ecological zone of southeastern Mali. A unique series of Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) images were used to calculate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). In this experiment, for half of the fields at least 50% of the NDVI variance within a field was due to fertilization. Moreover, the sensitivity of NDVI to fertilizer application was crop-dependent and varied through the season, with optima at the end of August for peanut and cotton and early October for sorghum and maize. The influence of fertilizer on NDVI was comparatively small at the landscape scale (up to 35% of total variation), relative to the influence of other components of variation such as field management and catena position. The NDVI response could only partially be benchmarked against a fertilization reference within the field. We conclude that comparisons of the spatial and temporal responses of NDVI, with respect to fertilization and crop management, requires a stratification of soil catena-related crop growth conditions at the landscape scale.

Description: This article investigates the transition dynamics related to Jatropha developments in Mozambique. The analysis focuses on how structural conditions (infrastructure, institutions, interaction and collaboration and capabilities and resources) enable or constrain interactions between niche-level Jatropha experiments and incumbent energy, agriculture and rural development regimes in Mozambique. Investors in agro-industrial Jatropha projects focused on establishing projects in areas with relatively good infrastructure, rather than in remote rural areas. Furthermore, they predominantly focused on Jatropha production instead of investing in the entire Jatropha value chain, which turned out to be a challenge in itself, as growing a productive Jatropha crop was much more complex than initially anticipated. The development of institutions that could nurture and protect Jatropha projects from the prevailing regimes lagged behind Jatropha project establishment, leading to an insecure investment climate. Strong inter-ministerial collaboration and organized civil society interaction and representation contrasted with non-organized private sector and rather isolated smallholder Jatropha projects. The global financial crisis and limited adaptive capacity reduced the time and space for experimentation and learning to overcome disappointing crop performance. Together, this hampered Jatropha’s potential to challenge the energy, agricultural and rural development regimes. Nevertheless, the Jatropha experience did initiate the development of policy and regulation and stimulated interaction and collaboration between specific groups of stakeholders, which could provide the basis to capture future biofuel momentum in Mozambique.

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 1990: Institutional Perspectives of Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Systematic Literature Review Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10061990 Authors: Edmond Totin Alcade C. Segnon Marc Schut Hippolyte Affognon Robert B. Zougmoré Todd Rosenstock Philip K. Thornton Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is increasingly seen as a promising approach to feed the growing world population under climate change. The review explored how institutional perspectives are reflected in the CSA literature. In total, 137 publications were analyzed using institutional analysis framework, of which 55.5% make specific reference to institutional dimensions. While the CSA concept encompasses three pillars (productivity, adaptation, and mitigation), the literature has hardly addressed them in an integrated way. The development status of study sites also seems to influence which pillars are promoted. Mitigation was predominantly addressed in high-income countries, while productivity and adaptation were priorities for middle and low-income countries. Interest in institutional aspects has been gradual in the CSA literature. It has largely focused on knowledge infrastructure, market structure, and hard institutional aspects. There has been less attention to understand whether investments in physical infrastructure and actors’ interaction, or how historical, political, and social context may influence the uptake of CSA options. Rethinking the approach to promoting CSA technologies by integrating technology packages and institutional enabling factors can provide potential opportunities for effective scaling of CSA options.