Category Archives: Non classé

Medium-scale farmers are often neglected in policies and discourses on agricultural development. Most of the agricultural development literature centers around efforts to target small-scale producers for poverty reduction and sustainable development, whereas many countries have specific policies to foster and attract large-scale commercial investments. But the specific role of medium-scale or emergent farmers in localContinue reading “The role of medium-scale farming in rural development in Mozambique”

Smallholders in Mozambique call their fields machambas. Machambas constitute a key source of income and food to most smallholders in this region. Definitions of what constitutes a smallholder are manifold, but in the majority of cases, the term relates to the land area available for production. As such, “smallholder” is an umbrella term for diverseContinue reading “Machambas”

Our work on Northern Mozambique starts from the premise that this region might constitute an emerging frontier for land use investments and expansion. Before digging into the question of whether this premise is verified, let us discuss why we focus on “emerging frontiers”.  A large share of current agricultural expansion and deforestation takes place inContinue reading “Challenges in emerging frontiers”

This blog post is based on Bey et al. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ac26ab and this Twitter thread In this study we present a remote sensing technique to map tree plantations with high accuracy in a challenging context (Miombo dry forests, little spectral & phenological differences between plantations and natural forests). We show that in Northern Mozambique, ~70%Continue reading “Mapping large-scale tree plantation expansion and land use change trajectories in Northern Mozambique”

This blog post is based on Rodriguez García et al. 2021 https://doi.org/10.3390/f12040431 and this Twitter thread Many works assess Environmental Kuznets curve for forest; but crucial is to understand mechanisms linking economic development and de/reforestation (governance, changing economies, technologies, displacement..?). We assess this in this study using a co-integration approach on a long-term cross-country panelContinue reading “Theories on Long- and Short-Run Forest Dynamics: Forest Transition, Environmental Kuznets Curve, Ecologically Unequal Exchange”

This blog post is based on Kronenburg García et al. 2022 https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-13159-270140 and this Twitter thread Thick ethnographic study in Niassa (Mozambique). Niassa is often described as the “forgotten” province of Mozambique – large, remote, sparsely populated, poor; but has also been “marketed” by the government as a land of opportunities with abundant natural resourcesContinue reading “How do successive waves of pioneers and investors build the conditions for land-use frontiers to emerge?”

This blog post is based on Abeygunawardane et al. 2022 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01682-z and this Twitter thread by @dilini_abey We looked at transnational agriculture and forestry investments in understudied frontiers in Southern and Eastern Africa across Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Our sample covers ~11% of the investments recorded in the four target countries. We reconstructed theContinue reading “Resource frontiers and agglomeration economies: Understanding the diversity of investment logics in Southern and Eastern Africa”

This blog post builds on Rodriguez García et al. (2020) https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab8b14 Agricultural intensification can allow sparing land for nature, but it can also drive further expansion of cropland, i.e. a rebound effect. Conversely, constraints on cropland expansion may induceintensification. We used an innovative cointegration approach to assess long and short-run mutual causation relationships between changesContinue reading “Complex relations between agricultural intensification and land use change: Assessing induced intensification, land sparing and rebound effect”