scholarly journals Agricultural Diversification in Japan

Author(s):  
Makoto Hirano
Author(s):  
Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt ◽  
Göran Djurfeldt ◽  
Ola Hall ◽  
Maria Archila Bustos

This chapter examines agrarian changes triggered by the structural transformation of the overall economy, focusing on their drivers and distributional outcomes. By means of multi-level modelling of three processes—intensification of grain yields, diversification of cropping, and non-farm diversification (pluriactivity)—it concludes that intensification has moderately accelerated and is getting more important than its twin process. Similarly, crop diversification has accelerated, while non-farm diversification seems to be more pull- than push-driven. The most important drivers of the two first-mentioned processes are commercial ones: increasing local and domestic demand for grains and for other crops and institutional changes promoting market participation of smallholders. The chapter concludes that these processes are not pro-poor, but neither are they pro-rich; middling smallholder households tend to be more involved. The gender profile of agricultural diversification seems to involve and benefit male-managed farms, whereas non-farm diversification is gender neutral.


Author(s):  
Hongyun Han ◽  
Hui Lin

Based on the value of agricultural farm products produced by different subsectors in China, the foregoing analysis reveals the dynamic character of agricultural diversification by which, this study seeks to examine the evolutionary process of Chinese agriculture through a quantitative study of agricultural diversification at both national and provincial levels. In the initial stages of reform and opening up, the degree of agricultural diversification in the southwest was relatively high; then the center of agricultural diversification gradually moved to the southeast of China; finally, the degree of agricultural diversification in the economically developed eastern provinces was obviously higher than those in other regions in 2019. It was seen that some provinces in the eastern and central south regions moved toward increasing diversification in one direction, and other provinces changed direction, first moving toward diversification and later toward concentration or vice versa. These oscillations implied that there was a cyclic tendency of agricultural diversification along with an increase in per capita GDP. Generally speaking, the patterns of diversification differed across regions due to diversified agricultural subsectors resulting from different natural and socio-economic circumstances. In particular, in less developed regions with lower agricultural diversification levels, farming agriculture persistently dominated the leading position with relatively more resistance to modernizing trends in other aspects of agriculture. It is urgent for the Chinese government to figure out ways off reconciling agricultural productivity with environmental quality through the ecological intensification of agriculture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
Shun Chonabayashi ◽  
◽  
Theepakorn Jithitikulchai ◽  
Yeqing Qu ◽  
◽  
...  

The adverse effects of weather extremes produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of household agricultural production in Zambia. Extreme weather events such as floods and drought are expected to increase in intensity and frequency due to climate change. Coupled with high poverty levels and limited institutional capacity, the country is highly vulnerable to the impact of extreme events. We quantify the effects of economic diversification on agricultural productivity of poor farm households with a skew-normal regression approach while accounting for drought and flood shocks. Our analysis finds that economic diversification is a strategy to increase agricultural productivity and mitigate the adverse impact of droughts and floods on agricultural households. The results also support the country's policies to encourage hybrid maize production and to provide crop seeds and fertiliser to poor farmers. This paper provides a framework to plan and inform interventions to enhance household economic resilience to weather shocks through agricultural diversification in Zambia and other countries.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Wanger ◽  
Xueqing He ◽  
Wolfgang Weisser ◽  
Yi Zou ◽  
Shenggen Fan ◽  
...  

Abstract Agricultural diversification of intensified farming systems is being proposed as a solution for achieving both food security and agricultural sustainability, but so far there has been little implementation of such policy at a larger scale. In China, major policies promote the “High-standard farmland consolidation” (HSFC) strategy to improve productivity and reduce environmental degradation in the world’s largest food production areas by simplifying instead of diversifying landscapes on large instead of small fields. As China’s Central government is asking for scientific innovations to improve its sustainable development strategy, we argue that China can become a role model to integrate agricultural diversification in its major policies, if HSFC builds on five decades of diversification research to achieve the national food security and sustainable development goals. We use text mining to analyze the past 17 years of China’s most important agricultural policy, the No. 1 Central Documents (1CD) policy and show that agricultural diversification at the field and supply chain level has received limited attention. Based on global synthesis studies covering five decades of research, we provide practical recommendations of how to integrate agricultural diversification in the China’s major policies from the national (the National 5-Year Plan and 1CD) to the provincial level. We use the major agricultural commodities rice, tea, wheat, and rapeseed in Zhejiang province as a case study to discuss how diversification can help to reach China’s sustainable agriculture targets. Diversification of China’s major food production areas on small fields could be an important example globally of how scientific progress informs policy and facilitates the food system transition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (6supl2) ◽  
pp. 3553-3566
Author(s):  
Natalia Ramos Mertz ◽  
◽  
Fernanda Soares Sales ◽  
Elsa Judith Guevara Agudelo ◽  
Alcides Moino Junior ◽  
...  

In an agricultural system, to increase natural biological control, plants that attract natural enemies can be grown alongside the main crop. However, the effects of these plants on entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs), important agents for controlling soil pests, and the action of their conservation are unknown. To assess the impact of these plants on EPNs, two experiments were carried out in a greenhouse. The first measured the effect of Crotalaria spectabilis, Crotalaria breviflora, and Tagetes erecta on the persistence and infectivity of Heterorhabditis amazonensis isolate RSC 5 for 27 days, compared to a control treatment without plants. The second trial evaluated the effect of C. breviflora and T. erecta on the displacement of the nematode. Additionally, the influence of predator Calosoma granulatum in this system was evaluated. The plants did not influence nematode behaviour in terms of persistence, infectivity, or displacement. However, C. spectabilis allowed the most significant persistence of nematodes in the substrate for a short time, and T. erecta caused the fastest suppression of the initial population of infectives juvenile. In the second experiment, neither the predator nor the plants affected the nematode’s ability to move in the soil within 5 days. These results show that prior knowledge in agricultural diversification can help to control pests by inundative application of EPNs.


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sri Hery Susilowati

<strong>English</strong><br />Qualified human resources with a good commitment to develop agricultural sector is one of the determining factors toward sustainable agricultural development. However, agricultural development deals with significant issue especially reduction in the number of young farmers. This paper aims to review structural changes from perspective of aging farmer and declined number of young farmers in Indonesia and other countries. Specifically, this paper identifies various factors causing the changes and describes the policies needed to support young workers to enter agricultural sector. The method used in this paper is both descriptive analysis and cross tabulation. The results show that aging farmers and young farmers decline in Indonesia keep increasing. The phenomena are also found in other countries in Asia, Europe, America and Australia. Various factors causing lack interest of young workers in agricultural sector, namely less prestigious, high risk, less assurance, unstable earning. Other factors are small size land holding, limited non-agricultural diversification and agricultural processing activities in rural areas, slow farm management succession, and lack of incentive for young farmers. To attract youth to enter agricultural sector, it is necessary to transform youth’s perception that agricultural sector currently is interesting and promising. The government needs to development agricultural industry in rural areas, introduces technology innovation, offers special incentives for young farmers, modernizes agriculture, and conducts training and empowerment of young farmers.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Indonesian</strong><br />Sumber daya manusia yang berkualitas dan memiliki komitmen membangun sektor pertanian merupakan salah satu faktor keberhasilan pembangunan pertanian berkelanjutan. Namun, pembangunan pertanian menghadapi permasalahan cukup serius, yaitu jumlah petani muda terus mengalami penurunan, baik secara absolut maupun relatif, sementara petani usia tua semakin meningkat. Tujuan makalah ini adalah melakukan review tentang perubahan struktural tenaga kerja pertanian dilihat dari fenomena aging farmer dan menurunnya jumlah tenaga kerja usia muda sektor pertanian di Indonesia dan di berbagai negara lainnya, mengidentifikasi berbagai faktor penyebab perubahan tersebut, serta kebijakan yang diperlukan untuk mendukung tenaga kerja muda masuk ke  sektor pertanian. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah analisis deskriptif dan tabulasi. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa secara umum fenomena penuaan petani dan berkurangnya petani muda di Indonesia semakin meningkat. Kondisi seperti ini bukan hanya terjadi di Indonesia, namun juga di negara-negara lain di Asia, Eropa, dan Amerika.  Berbagai faktor penyebab menurunnya minat tenaga kerja muda di sektor pertanian, di antaranya citra sektor pertanian yang kurang bergengsi, berisiko tinggi, kurang memberikan jaminan tingkat, stabilitas, dan kontinyuitas pendapatan; rata-rata penguasaan lahan sempit; diversifikasi usaha nonpertanian dan industri pertanian di desa kurang/tidak berkembang; suksesi pengelolaan usaha tani rendah; belum ada kebijakan insentif khusus untuk petani muda/pemula; dan berubahnya cara pandang pemuda di era postmodern seperti sekarang. Strategi yang perlu dilakukan untuk menarik minat pemuda bekerja di pertanian antara lain mengubah persepsi generasi muda bahwa sektor pertanian merupakan sektor yang menarik dan menjanjikan apabila dikelola dengan tekun dan sungguh-sungguh, pengembangan agroindustri, inovasi teknologi,  pemberian insentif khusus kepada petani muda, pengembangan pertanian modern, pelatihan dan pemberdayaan petani muda, serta memperkenalkan pertanian kepada generasi muda sejak dini.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Waha ◽  
Francesco Accatino ◽  
Cecile Godde ◽  
Cyrille Rigolot ◽  
Jessica Bogard ◽  
...  

&lt;p&gt;Diversity and diversification in agricultural systems are often presented in the literature as having multiple benefits such as enhancing resilience, increasing food production and decreasing risks in production systems and is often postulated to benefit food and nutrition security in low- and middle-income countries. Our study aims to provide an overview of the potential for agricultural diversification to improve food security status as reported in recently published research articles analysing the diversity-food security relationship. We consider results for different scales, from individual to global and for different food security dimensions: availability, access, stability and utilisation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We carried out a literature review that includes exhaustive, comprehensive searching. We search for peer-reviewed publications in the Web of Science core collection (v.5.32) written in English, between 2010 and February 2020 on the association between diversity in agricultural systems and at least one dimension or measure of food security. From the original list of articles we exclude all publications that (1) focus on a study area outside a low- to middle income country; (2) do not include at least one metric of farm-, regional-, or global-level diversity as specified with the search terms; (3) do not explicitly measure at least one food security dimension, or (4) were exclusively focussed on describing drivers and trends in diversity or food security.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We find that a total number of 87 research articles assessed a total of 328 diversity-food security relationships using one or more statistical modelling approach. About half of them are positive (54%) and mostly refer to the diversity-food access relationship on the individual, household and farm scale as this was the food security dimension and spatial scale most analysed. Of all results for food access 60% were positive relationships and only 4% were negative relationships with the remainder having no or ambiguous relationships. Twenty-nine studies used household dietary diversity as a measure of food access and 10 studies used at least one food access indicator that is a validated proxy for nutrient adequacy. Positive relationships were more often reported for food availability (65%) than for food utilisation (33%) also because for food utilisation there are a lot of mixed findings for different measures of anthropometric and nutritional status. The most common spatial scale assessed was the household and farm scale (58%).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no food security dimension that primarily has a negative relationship with agricultural diversity but there is a considerable number of relationships that are found to be neutral or ambiguous. Diversity can be an important driver of food security, but the magnitude of the contribution depends on the&amp;#160; socio-economic and biophysical characteristics of the local farming system. We conclude that farmers mostly see diversification as a potential strategy to improve livelihoods, agricultural production and/or food and nutrition security where other strategies are more expensive but not as a desirable characteristic of the agricultural systems at all costs especially in the presence of other strategies that can achieve the same outcome.&lt;/p&gt;


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