The socioeconomic area of HarvestPlus LAC seeks to generate information to guide the decision related to biofortified crops in the region. The idea of this seminar is to present advances made in three socioeconomic studies: a. Potential departments/regions for an intervention with biofortified crops (cassava, rice, beans and maize) in Colombia; b. Adoption, consumption and commercialization of improved rice varieties in Bolivia and c. Preliminary results of a consumer acceptance of a High Iron Bean variety (Super Chiva) in Guatemala.

Swidden farming is the main agent of conversion of primary forests to secondary forests in the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia, but there is a deterioration and decline of the practice with land use intensification. The population growth in northern Thailand has forced lowland farmers practising permanent wet rice cultivation to turn to short rotation swidden in the foot hill zone. Highland swidden agriculturists are adopting more intensive forms of swidden or are shifting to permanent farming.

Socio-economic and agrodevelopment trends and drivers for Asia

Spatially explicit models are becoming increasingly important tools for simulating land-use change. In this study, we formulated and tested models that incorporated spatial correlates of agricultural expansion and used them to predict local- and landscape-scale patterns of agricultural land-use change and its implications in the Maasai-Steppe of Northern Tanzania. We evaluated the relationship between agricultural land-use and its spatial correlates using Multiple Logistic Regression on data derived from satellite imageries for the year 2000.