Changes in the agriculture sector are essential to mitigate and adapt to climate change, ensure food security for the growing population, and improve the livelihoods of poor smallholder producers. What agricultural strategies are needed to meet these challenges? To what extent are there synergies among these strategies? This paper examines these issues for smallholder producers in Kenya. Several practices emerge as triple wins in terms of climate adaptation, GHG mitigation, and productivity and profitability.

The agricultural Sector in Cambodia still contributes the dominant quantity to the GDP. It is the most important source of income and rural livelihood for around 80% of the Cambodian population. Cambodia’s rural population faces new challenges like high population growth, embracing market economy and international private investment, nationwide food security and decreasing agricultural production conditions as a result of rapidly changing socio-economic conditions since 1990.

This article discusses two important concepts of food security and food sovereignty in the context of Vietnam’s post-reform economy. It examines Vietnam’s persistent choice of the food security framework, its resulting policies and their implications. The article argues that the choice of food security framework has served to justify the promotion of industrial agriculture and international trade. While this model has led to increased food productivity, it failed to guarantee access to and quality of food, the other two important pillars of the food security framework.

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.

In recent years the Lao government has provided many foreign investors with large-scale economic land concessions to develop plantations. These concessions have resulted in significant alterations of landscapes and ecological processes, greatly reduced local access to resources through enclosing common areas, and ultimately leading to massive changes in the livelihoods of large numbers of mainly indigenous peoples living near these concessions.

This paper attempts to define the factors which determine emigration and rice doublecropping, i.e. rice cultivation on the same plot twice per year, by rural households in Cambodia, and investigates whether these decisions influence each other using data from a two-period panel survey of 231 households in three provinces in rural Cambodia. In the analysis, we take into account possible correlation between these decisions (through estimating a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model) and unobserved heterogeneity among farmers (through estimating a random-effects probit model).

This article examines the transition from shifting cultivation to rubber production for a study area in northern Laos PDR using an agent-based model of land-cover change. A primary objective of the model was to assess changes in household-level inequality with the transition from shifting cultivation to rubber adoption. A secondary objective was to develop explanations for the rate of rubber adoption in the study area.

In the recent past there has been increasing recognition that local knowledge of farmers can yield insight into soil quality. With regard to constraints and possibilities for the production of irrigated rice in the south of Brazil there is no documentation on local soil knowledge. The goals of this study were to answer the following questions: (1) Which soil quality perceptions do rice farmers have? (2) Which soil quality indicators are most important to them?

This contribution outlines the potential of the category of gender in critical analyses of land use policy and the perspectives it offers for the development of conceptual strategies for sustainable land management. It illustrates gender mainstreaming in urban development approaches, thus showing the potential for enhancing the quality of planning and the reduction of land consumption. The paper goes on to discuss the potential for extended and differentiated communication and participation within participative planning support systems.