Publications by authors named "Kibrom T Sibhatu"

Article Synopsis
  • The growth of the oil palm industry in Indonesia has positively impacted rural livelihoods but negatively affected biodiversity and ecosystems.
  • Researchers examined different oil palm production systems to find ways to balance ecological health with economic benefits.
  • They discovered that practices like reducing management intensity and incorporating native trees can improve ecological outcomes while maintaining or even enhancing palm yields, suggesting pathways towards more sustainable palm oil cultivation.
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In tropical regions, shifting from forests and traditional agroforestry to intensive plantations generates conflicts between human welfare (farmers' demands and societal needs) and environmental protection. Achieving sustainability in this transformation will inevitably involve trade-offs between multiple ecological and socioeconomic functions. To address these trade-offs, our study used a new methodological approach allowing the identification of transformation scenarios, including theoretical landscape compositions that satisfy multiple ecological functions (i.

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In the tropical belt of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, smallholder farming is undergoing a significant transformation from subsistence-oriented to highly specialized and market-oriented plantation systems. While understanding the transition of livelihoods of plantation farm households over time is an important development goal, available empirical evidence is scant. This study provides the first quantitative evidence on the dynamics, transitions, and determinants of livelihood strategies linked to the crop choices of commercial farm households in the tropics.

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Many of the world's food-insecure and undernourished people are smallholder farmers in developing countries. This is especially true in Africa. There is an urgent need to make smallholder agriculture and food systems more nutrition-sensitive.

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Undernutrition, low dietary diversity, and micronutrient deficiencies remain big problems in many developing countries. A large proportion of the people affected are smallholder farmers. Against this background, it is often assumed that further diversifying small-farm production could be a good strategy to improve dietary diversity and nutrition.

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Undernutrition and micronutrient malnutrition remain problems of significant magnitude in large parts of the developing world. Improved nutrition requires not only better access to food for poor population segments, but also higher dietary quality and diversity. Because many of the poor and undernourished people are smallholder farmers, diversifying production on these smallholder farms is widely perceived as a useful approach to improve dietary diversity.

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