Agriculture Reference
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improve the natural resource base on which the system depends. There is often a trade-off
between maximizing immediate livelihood benefits and conserving or enhancing the soil
resource (Bezner Kerr et al., 2007), yet to be sustainable over the longer term, the cropping
systems must at least maintain or ideally improve soil fertility and quality. Resource-poor
farmers may be more likely to adopt cropping systems that benefit them both immediately
and consistently (i.e., show improved yields, income, or food supply and involve less risk
on a year-to-year basis), however, rather than systems that are most optimal for long-term
fertility improvement.
Thus, we suggest that the most sustainable cropping systems are likely to represent a
compromise between short- and medium-term benefits to farmers' livelihoods and long-
term maintenance or improvement of the natural resource base, as Ashby et al. (1996) also
observed. Stoorvogel et al. (2004) discussed the trade-offs between desirable traits associ-
ated with agricultural systems that operate over various time and spatial scales and have
employed trade-off analysis models to investigate environmental and economic impacts.
We propose that the trade-offs between goals operating at different time frames will be
based on unique local socioeconomic, cultural, and biophysical parameters, which empha-
sizes the importance of performing locally relevant research.
It is important to recognize that specific trade-offs (and their extent) are likely to vary
among households within communities based on factors such as differential economic
endowments and landholding sizes, location of landholdings (biophysical context), and
even within households based on factors such as gender, age, and health status. For exam-
ple, a system that improves yields but requires more labor may be of value only to wealth-
ier farmers. Researchers have placed increasing emphasis on understanding the role of
social
vulnerability in risk-based analyses (e.g., Kelly and Adger, 2000; Wisner et al., 2004).
While much of the research has focused on the impacts on climate change, hazards may
also result from new technologies that have a potential to cause social, infrastructural, or
environmental change (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002).
The sustainable livelihoods framework (Chambers and Conway, 1992; Department for
International Development [DFID], 2001) emphasizes the importance of addressing vul-
nerability, defined as both the exposure to shocks, risk, and stress and the inability to cope
without experiencing hardship. Vulnerability thus encompasses but looks beyond income-
poverty, a concept typically quantified by per-capita wealth generation in that it considers
individuals' security and well-being based on locally relevant, complex, and multidimen-
sional factors (Chambers, 1995). Important factors include biophysical vulnerability based
on risks related to soil type, slope, and landscape position, for example, and social vulner-
ability that relates to poverty, access to and dependency on purchased resources, diversity
of income sources, and the social status of individuals or households within a community
(Adger, 1999). As the risk introduced by new agricultural systems will likely vary based
on farmers' socioeconomic resources and degrees of vulnerability, vulnerability-based
analyses may help researchers determine the distributional impacts of new cropping sys-
tems among different community members. In fact, distributional economic analyses (Von
Braun, 2003) have frequently determined that new agricultural technologies are most prof-
itable, and at times only profitable, for better-resourced farmers, while fewer benefits have
been realized for women and poor farmers. Sustainability assessments would therefore be
improved by distributional analyses of cropping system impacts.
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