Contents & Foreword, Characterizing And ... - IRRI books

Both biophysical and socioeconomic constraints influence land-use decisions andlimit the production and income of rice-farming families in Asia. Accounting for thebiophysical environment in agricultural research is essential in understanding productionoutcomes and the decisions of farm operators. Without proper characterizationof the constraints imposed on farms by climate, topography, soils, and similarfactors, efforts to understand outcomes in order to design and disseminate new technologiesto bring about outcomes are likely to fail. An understanding of the socioeconomicenvironment in which farms operate is equally important in agricultural research,technology development, and agricultural extension. Socioeconomic constraintssuch as the availability of agricultural inputs and presence of buyers for agriculturaloutput, or noneconomic constraints such as cultural sanctions against certain castesor against women engaging in particular production activities, exert significant influenceover farm households. Characterizing both types of constraints and understandingtheir relation to each other is essential to the development of technologies andpolicies to increase rice production and the incomes of rice farms. Integration of traditionaleconometric techniques with data organized in a geographic information system(GIS) offers a promising method for modeling both types of constraints.This paper is divided into two parts. The first part provides an overview of thegeneral theme of geo-informational techniques combining biophysical and socioeconomicvariables in the characterization of rainfed areas. We describe some of thetechniques applied in carrying out such integration, and discuss some of the problemsfaced in such research. To make these points more concrete, in part two we reviewresearch applying these methodologies that the International Rice Research Institute(IRRI) and the Institute of Agricultural Sciences (IAS) of Vietnam are carrying out inthe Mekong River Delta.Geo-informational techniques in the characterization of rainfed environmentsGeo-informational techniques, which include remote sensing, GIS, and related technologies,offer a useful framework for integrating spatially referenced socioeconomicdata and biophysical information. GIS facilitates capturing the spatial dimension andspatial analysis of the effects of these factors and their interactions.Characterizing rainfed lowland ecosystems:Which characteristics are important?In work characterizing rainfed areas, we view the objective of research to be to identifybiophysical constraints that limit agricultural production rather than to provide aholistic description of the environment. Agricultural scientists are accustomed to thinkingabout biophysical constraints to agricultural production and to using maps ofbiophysical characteristics in designing in-field experiments or explaining variationin farm outcomes across seasons. Because the biophysical environment provides manyof the essential inputs to plant growth, the link between biophysical conditions andagricultural outcomes is relatively clear. Relative to biophysical characterization, socioeconomiccharacterization is less developed, and features a much greater range of442 Edmonds and Kam