PROJECT ASSESSMENTS - Science for Agriculture and Rural Development in Low-income Countries - page 172

• Examination of the broad scope for technology and policy changes and identi-

fication of technically feasible, short (2001-2005) and long term (2010-15)
development scenarios for (four) selected regions in E and SE Asia.

• Further development of the multiple-goal linear programming technique (IMGLP)

and its operationalization in the form of the land use planning and analysis system
(LUPAS) for land use explorations at the regional level - making use of most
recent GAMS commercial software components.

• Development of farm household models (FHM) for analysing the options for

optimizing resource-use (e.g., intensification of cropping systems or growing
new crops) within the constraints (e.g., the availability of labour and capital and
the product prices) at the farm level.

• Development of Technical Coefficient Generators (TCG) that describe the input-

output relationships of all relevant production activities (i.e., yields and costs for
feed, fertilizers and other inputs for the main cropping and animal production
systems) for present and possibly future production techniques; these relation-
ships are used in IMGLP and FHM.

• The integration of results from farm household modelling with the regional

policy analysis framework, and the analysis of effects of policy interventions on
the adoption of improved (knowledge-intensive) management practices and
assessment of their contribution to regional development goals for the various
case studies.

2) Can you identify disciplinary and multi-disciplinary activities?

Most of the activities are multi-disciplinary. For example, agricultural intensification
and diversification, technology changes and changing socio-economic conditions
strongly interact in the four case study regions characterized by rice-based production
systems that are under rapid transition. A major goal is to develop methods and tools
that integrate the various biophysical and socio-economic dimensions of alternative
land use options. Depending on the assumptions made in future scenarios about
technology and policy changes, agricultural production systems, employment and
environmental pollution will vary in the study regions (in the Mekong Delta, Red
River Basin (Vietnam), Northern Luzon (Philippines) and Zhejiang Province (China)).
In general, the changes currently observed cause increasing shortage of scarce
natural resources such as water, land and clean air. Agriculture has to compete with
other land uses /sectors for the scarce land and water resources. Multi-disciplinary
and interdisciplinary approaches are required to be able to make these complex
problems transparent and identify technically feasible and socially acceptable solutions.

D) General project outputs

1) What are the scientific contributions of the project?

A major innovation is the development of a multi-scale framework for land use
policy analysis (a combination of farm household and regional land use optimization