DAHBSIM is a dynamic, bio-economic model of agricultural households that was designed to be applied to a rural, developing country-setting, for the purpose of addressing questions around the biophysical constraints to on-farm agricultural productivity, and the whole-farm implications of alternative strategies to sustainable agricultural intensification. The model links socio-economic and biophysical aspects, in order to better illustrate the environmental and human welfare implications of different agricultural production practices, as they are influenced by policy-driven changes in prices of inputs or outputs, or by changes in the physical environment.

Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.

Part I: Introduction; Part II: Valuation of ecosystem services and biophysical indicators of NRM impacts; Part III: Methodological advances for a comprehensive impact assessment; Part IV: NRM impact assessment in practice.

This book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far. The model assumes that households are price-takers and is therefore recursive. The decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor. Comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies. The empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive. The book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households, marketed surplus, the demand for nonagricultural goods and services, the rural labor market, budget revenues, and foreign exchange earnings. In addition, it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition, nutritional status, health, saving, and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings. Methodological topics, primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions, along with aggregation, market interaction, uncertainty, and market imperfections are discussed. The most important methodological issues - the question of the recursive property of these models - is also discussed.

Deforestation, overgrazing, and unsustainable methods of cultivation are threatening agriculture and food security in the highlands of East Africa. In response, economists and other development professionals have turned their attention to combating the pr

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book defines the new field of "Bioeconomy" as the sustainable and innovative use of biomass and biological knowledge to provide food, feed, industrial products, bioenergy and ecological services. The chapters highlight the importance of bioeconomy-related concepts in public, scientific, and political discourse. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the authors outline the dimensions of the bioeconomy as a means of achieving sustainability. The authors are ideally situated to elaborate on the diverse aspects of the bioeconomy. They have acquired in-depth experience of interdisciplinary research through the university’s focus on “Bioeconomy”, its contribution to the Bioeconomy Research Program of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, and its participation in the German Bioeconomy Council. With the number of bioeconomy-related projects at European universities rising, this book will provide graduate students and researchers with background information on the bioeconomy. It will familiarize scientific readers with bioeconomy-related terms and give scientific background for economists, agronomists and natural scientists alike.

Research site and sample characteristics; Multivariate analysis; A fram-level bioeconomic model.

Policymakers and technology development institutions have mostly focused on high-potential farming areas, which have better resource endowments and greater access to markets and infrastructure than less-favored areas. However, in developing nations more than one billion people live in less-favored areas, where, despite disadvantages, appropriate policies and programs can generate high returns and contribute significantly to poverty reduction. IFPRI and its partners' research in the highlands of Ethiopia shows how poverty and land degradation can be reduced in a less-favored area. Using a bioeconomic model to analyze the effects that land degradation, population growth, stagnant technology, market imperfections, and increased risk of drought have on household production, welfare, and food security, the report gauges how alternative policy choices affect poverty and land degradation. According to the study, land quality and household welfare are both in peril in the Ethiopian highlands.The population in the region could suffer devastating effects if proper policies are not put in place. The bioeconomic modeling approach used in this study can be usefully adapted and applied in many other settings and at larger spatial and socioeconomic scales.

Types of economic deforestation models. Household and firm-level models. Regional-level models. National and macro-level models. Priority areas for future research.