Alternatives to land grabbing: exploring conditions for smallholder inclusion in agricultural commodity chains in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) believes that open access contributes to its mission of reducing hunger and poverty, and improving human nutrition in the tropics through research aimed at increasing the eco-efficiency of agriculture. CIAT is committed to creating and sharing knowledge and information openly and globally. We do this through collaborative research as well as through the open sharing of our data, tools, and publications.

Landscape context does not constrain biological control of Phenacoccus manihoti in intensified cassava systems of southern Vietnam

“…Climate-based niche modeling revealed that other key production areas in eastern Indonesia and the Philippines are also climatically suitable for P. manihoti (Yonow et al, 2017). As Southeast Asia houses a multi-billion dollar cassava industry and accounts for nearly 95% of the world's cassava exports (Cramb et al, 2017), the (socio-)economic impacts of this pest were projected to be exceptionally large.…”

Soil fertility regulates invasive herbivore performance and top-down control in tropical agroecosystems of Southeast Asia

“…Such changes are particularly relevant for smallholder agriculture in the tropics, where soil fertility (and resulting plant communities) is drastically altered by a variety of management practices and larger-scale patterns in land-use change. In Southeast Asia, cassava (Manihot esculenta) production has expanded considerably over the past few decades and now occupies more than 4 million ha throughout the region (Cramb et al, 2016;Mahanty & Milne, 2016). Cassava is typically managed as an annual crop and grown under a range of biophysical and socio-economic conditions, from shifting cultivation in the uplands of Laos and Cambodia, to large-scale monocultures in the lowlands of southern Vietnam (e.g., Howeler et al, 2011).…”

Representing large-scale land acquisitions in land use change scenarios for the Lao PDR

“…Firstly, there is an ongoing debate on whether the advantages of a larger-scale trump the disadvantages. Large operations are arguably better at organizing supply to a processing plant or pioneering a crop in a new area, while smallholders enjoy significantly lower costs of labor management, and often acquire higher yields due to higher-precision management for different crops (Byerlee 2014; Cramb et al 2016). Empirical studies on this debate indicate that throughout Southeast Asian history, there has been a transition from large-scale to small-scale agriculture, making the recent surge in LSLA an aberration (Bissonnette and De Koninck 2017).…”