Dietmar Stoian | Bioversity International (original) (raw)
Papers by Dietmar Stoian
Journal of Agribusiness in Developing and Emerging Economies
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emeral... more If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
Sustainability
Postharvest losses (PHL) result in direct food and income losses to farmers and consumers globall... more Postharvest losses (PHL) result in direct food and income losses to farmers and consumers globally. PHL reduction strategies offer unique opportunities to contribute to sustainable food systems for increased food security and farm incomes for more than 200 million food insecure people in sub-Saharan Africa. Lack of empirical information remains a major challenge to operationalization of PHL reduction strategies in many countries of the region. This paper utilizes cross-sectional data to determine the extent and factors that are influencing postharvest losses in the cooking-banana value chain in Uganda. We find that 14.9% of all the cooking bananas that are produced in Uganda suffer postharvest deterioration along the value chain (7.2% of the bananas deteriorate completely and have no residual value, while 7.7% deteriorate partially and are sold at discounted prices), mostly affecting retailers. At farm level, female headed households experience more losses than those headed by males. Household headship, household size, proportion of land allocated to banana production, and monthly banana production are the principal determinants of PHL at farm level. At retail level, such losses are mainly determined by sex of the vendor and group membership. The findings call for comprehensive and gender-responsive PHL reduction strategies.
Sustainability
Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW) is an important emerging and non-curable infectious plant pathogen ... more Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW) is an important emerging and non-curable infectious plant pathogen in sub-Saharan Africa that can cause up to 100% yield loss, negatively impacting sustainable access to food and income to more than 100 million banana farmers. This study disentangles adopters into partial and full adopters to investigate the factors that are relevant to sustain the adoption process of BXW control practices and quantifies the impact of adopting the practices. Data from a randomly selected sample of 1200 banana farmers in Uganda where the disease is endemic was used. A multinomial logit model was used to determine the factors affecting adoption of control practices and augmented inverse probability weighting was employed to estimate the impacts of adoption on banana productivity and sales. Results show that training a woman farmer and having diverse sources of information about BXW control practices increased adoption of the control practices and reduced the disease incid...
Development in Practice
This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD)... more This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD). The guides advocate persuasively the integration of gender into VCD programming and raise important issues for designing more inclusive interventions. However, gaps persist in their coverage of gender-based constraints in collective enterprises, the influence of norms on gender relations, and processes to transform inequitable relations through VCD. Guidance for field implementation and links to complementary value chain tools are also limited. The article identifies opportunities for conceptual and methodological innovation to address the varying roles, needs, and aspirations of women and men in VCD.
Experimental Agriculture
SUMMARYInnovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for dev... more SUMMARYInnovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities through a facilitated innovation process. Although much has been written on how to implement and facilitate innovation platforms efficiently, few studies support ex-ante appraisal of when and for what purpose innovation platforms provide an appropriate mechanism for achieving development outcomes, and what kinds of human and financial resource investments and enabling environments are required. Without these insights, innovation platforms run the risk of being promoted as a panacea for all problems in the agricultural sector. This study makes clear that not all constraints will require innovation platforms and, if there is a simpler...
Enterprise Development and Microfinance
Enterprise Development and Microfinance
Value chain development (VCD) is a common term in today's development lexicon 1 , where its use t... more Value chain development (VCD) is a common term in today's development lexicon 1 , where its use tends to conjure passionate ideas about how development programming can support smallholder participation in growing markets in the interest of economic growth, job creation, gender empowerment, and sustainable use of natural resources, among other goals. Since the early 2000s, Enterprise Development and Microfinance (EDM) has featured considerable debate on how to design market-oriented development interventions with smallholders, often based on positive experiences by a given NGO or project in a particular context. Early articles helped to put VCD on the development agenda, while advancing innovation in market-based project design and implementation. However, after more than a decade of it being firmly placed on the agenda, we still know relatively little about VCD. Apart from isolated case studies, the question of whether VCD has lived up to the expectations of smallholders, of the private sector, and of development agencies remains an open one. This double edition of EDM addresses the design, implementation, and impact of VCD support to smallholders and to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as an important, yet under-researched dimension of VCD. The eight articles look into the needs and opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of VCD support services, with discussions on: the role of NGOs or governments in VCD; how large-scale buyers and certification programs shape VCD; and the role of finance and impact bonds in VCD. Advancing ideas on how to get the right mix of services, at the right time, to the right people, taking into account variations in the context in which livelihoods and business activities are embedded, will help stakeholders to effectively deliver on poverty and broader development goals.
... The theoretical framework draws on general migration and urbanization theory, the concept of ... more ... The theoretical framework draws on general migration and urbanization theory, the concept of the rural ... Tropical forests in Amazonia make up the largest contiguous rain forest area in the world. ... Increasing deforestation in the Amazon thus not only results in a serious threat to the ...
For more than a century, northern Bolivia has had a tradition of commercial forest exploitation. ... more For more than a century, northern Bolivia has had a tradition of commercial forest exploitation. For several decades into the twentieth century, the extraction of rubber and Brazil nuts was combined with subsistence agriculture, resulting in an agro-extractive cycle that fostered a sedentary lifestyle of forest dwellers. The extraction of rubber and Brazil nuts used to be organized in a debt-peonage system, often leaving extractivists in debt to the patron. The decline of the Bolivian rubber market during the 1980s induced the breakdown of the agro-extractive cycle. Most people left the patron-controlled extraction areas (barracas), and either established themselves as farmers in independent communities close to urban areas or migrated to the cities where the processing of forest products had increased job opportunities. About half the Brazil nut collectors are now seasonal migrants, mainly from the cities. Depending on access to land, forest resources, and markets, extraction-based income can contribute to more than 50% of the overall household income, especially in the more remote forest settlements. Some processing plants gain direct access to the Brazil nut resource base through vertical integration, thereby increasing their control of the production process. These large enterprises partly take over the role of the former patrons (e.g. in making advance payments to the Brazil nut collectors). The increasing demand for Brazil nuts and the increased in-country processing in Bolivia has benefited all participants in the production process, including the collectors. Especially the collectors from independent communities manage to get a higher price for the nuts they collect. Even so, an unequal exchange continues to be characteristic of many non-timber-forest-products-based (NTFP-based) production systems. In addition, more recent extractive activities (e.g. logging and palm-heart extraction) are threatened by depletion of the resource base. None of the extractive activities thus fulfills all the criteria of sustainable development.
A g r o f o r e s t e r í a e n l a s A m é r i c a s N º 4 6 2 0 0 8
The forest certification process in Guatemala has largely been confined to the forest concessions... more The forest certification process in Guatemala has largely been confined to the forest concessions in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), representing 95 percent of the country's certified forest area. Forest certification in Guatemala is unique in that certification in accordance with the scheme of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is mandatory in order for both communities and industrial groups to obtain and maintain forest concessions in the MBR. Unlike other countries where forest certification has almost exclusively been advanced in a joint effort between non- governmental organizations, development projects and the private sector, the case of Guatemala shows the important role government agencies can play as agents backing the process. Despite initial resistance, the National Council for Protected Areas (CONAP), as the state agency in charge of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, permitted forest management in the MBR provided that it was ...
This doctoral dissertation (translated into Spanish) was drawn up within the framework of a joint... more This doctoral dissertation (translated into Spanish) was drawn up within the framework of a joint research effort between the Center of International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Institute of Forest Policy, Markets and Marketing Section, at the University of Freiburg, and various partner institutions in the northern Bolivian Amazon, among which the Programa Manejo de Bosques de la Amazonía Boliviana (PROMAB) was the host institution. The study provides a spatially differentiated intertemporal economic analysis of extractive economies in the northern Bolivian Amazon at micro and meso-levels. It includes the unique approach of studying both rural and peri-urban livelihood systems dependent on the commercial extraction of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). The main objectives are 1) to identify temporal and spatial variations as regards income generated from the gathering, processing, and marketing of Brazil nuts, palm hearts, and other NTFPs; 2) to contribute to a better understand...
Over the past decade, many governmental, private or donor-funded programs have adopted value chai... more Over the past decade, many governmental, private or donor-funded programs have adopted value chain development (VCD) to address goals related to poverty reduction and economic development. Underlying the design of these programs is the assumption that smallholders will climb out of poverty when they organize into rural enterprises, when these enterprises link them to business partners committed to win-win relationships, and when the chain actors have access to the right mix of technical, business and financial services. However, despite considerable investments in VCD, we have a poor understanding of whether the underlying assumptions hold true. A major stumbling block to understanding has been the absence of sound metric systems to monitor progress and assess the impact of VCD initiatives. The 5Capitals tool, developed jointly by an alliance of research and development organizations, addresses this shortcoming by proposing an asset-based approach to assess the poverty impacts of VC...
Journal of Agribusiness in Developing and Emerging Economies
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emeral... more If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
Sustainability
Postharvest losses (PHL) result in direct food and income losses to farmers and consumers globall... more Postharvest losses (PHL) result in direct food and income losses to farmers and consumers globally. PHL reduction strategies offer unique opportunities to contribute to sustainable food systems for increased food security and farm incomes for more than 200 million food insecure people in sub-Saharan Africa. Lack of empirical information remains a major challenge to operationalization of PHL reduction strategies in many countries of the region. This paper utilizes cross-sectional data to determine the extent and factors that are influencing postharvest losses in the cooking-banana value chain in Uganda. We find that 14.9% of all the cooking bananas that are produced in Uganda suffer postharvest deterioration along the value chain (7.2% of the bananas deteriorate completely and have no residual value, while 7.7% deteriorate partially and are sold at discounted prices), mostly affecting retailers. At farm level, female headed households experience more losses than those headed by males. Household headship, household size, proportion of land allocated to banana production, and monthly banana production are the principal determinants of PHL at farm level. At retail level, such losses are mainly determined by sex of the vendor and group membership. The findings call for comprehensive and gender-responsive PHL reduction strategies.
Sustainability
Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW) is an important emerging and non-curable infectious plant pathogen ... more Banana Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW) is an important emerging and non-curable infectious plant pathogen in sub-Saharan Africa that can cause up to 100% yield loss, negatively impacting sustainable access to food and income to more than 100 million banana farmers. This study disentangles adopters into partial and full adopters to investigate the factors that are relevant to sustain the adoption process of BXW control practices and quantifies the impact of adopting the practices. Data from a randomly selected sample of 1200 banana farmers in Uganda where the disease is endemic was used. A multinomial logit model was used to determine the factors affecting adoption of control practices and augmented inverse probability weighting was employed to estimate the impacts of adoption on banana productivity and sales. Results show that training a woman farmer and having diverse sources of information about BXW control practices increased adoption of the control practices and reduced the disease incid...
Development in Practice
This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD)... more This article presents a review of seven guides for gender-equitable value chain development (VCD). The guides advocate persuasively the integration of gender into VCD programming and raise important issues for designing more inclusive interventions. However, gaps persist in their coverage of gender-based constraints in collective enterprises, the influence of norms on gender relations, and processes to transform inequitable relations through VCD. Guidance for field implementation and links to complementary value chain tools are also limited. The article identifies opportunities for conceptual and methodological innovation to address the varying roles, needs, and aspirations of women and men in VCD.
Experimental Agriculture
SUMMARYInnovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for dev... more SUMMARYInnovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities through a facilitated innovation process. Although much has been written on how to implement and facilitate innovation platforms efficiently, few studies support ex-ante appraisal of when and for what purpose innovation platforms provide an appropriate mechanism for achieving development outcomes, and what kinds of human and financial resource investments and enabling environments are required. Without these insights, innovation platforms run the risk of being promoted as a panacea for all problems in the agricultural sector. This study makes clear that not all constraints will require innovation platforms and, if there is a simpler...
Enterprise Development and Microfinance
Enterprise Development and Microfinance
Value chain development (VCD) is a common term in today's development lexicon 1 , where its use t... more Value chain development (VCD) is a common term in today's development lexicon 1 , where its use tends to conjure passionate ideas about how development programming can support smallholder participation in growing markets in the interest of economic growth, job creation, gender empowerment, and sustainable use of natural resources, among other goals. Since the early 2000s, Enterprise Development and Microfinance (EDM) has featured considerable debate on how to design market-oriented development interventions with smallholders, often based on positive experiences by a given NGO or project in a particular context. Early articles helped to put VCD on the development agenda, while advancing innovation in market-based project design and implementation. However, after more than a decade of it being firmly placed on the agenda, we still know relatively little about VCD. Apart from isolated case studies, the question of whether VCD has lived up to the expectations of smallholders, of the private sector, and of development agencies remains an open one. This double edition of EDM addresses the design, implementation, and impact of VCD support to smallholders and to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as an important, yet under-researched dimension of VCD. The eight articles look into the needs and opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of VCD support services, with discussions on: the role of NGOs or governments in VCD; how large-scale buyers and certification programs shape VCD; and the role of finance and impact bonds in VCD. Advancing ideas on how to get the right mix of services, at the right time, to the right people, taking into account variations in the context in which livelihoods and business activities are embedded, will help stakeholders to effectively deliver on poverty and broader development goals.
... The theoretical framework draws on general migration and urbanization theory, the concept of ... more ... The theoretical framework draws on general migration and urbanization theory, the concept of the rural ... Tropical forests in Amazonia make up the largest contiguous rain forest area in the world. ... Increasing deforestation in the Amazon thus not only results in a serious threat to the ...
For more than a century, northern Bolivia has had a tradition of commercial forest exploitation. ... more For more than a century, northern Bolivia has had a tradition of commercial forest exploitation. For several decades into the twentieth century, the extraction of rubber and Brazil nuts was combined with subsistence agriculture, resulting in an agro-extractive cycle that fostered a sedentary lifestyle of forest dwellers. The extraction of rubber and Brazil nuts used to be organized in a debt-peonage system, often leaving extractivists in debt to the patron. The decline of the Bolivian rubber market during the 1980s induced the breakdown of the agro-extractive cycle. Most people left the patron-controlled extraction areas (barracas), and either established themselves as farmers in independent communities close to urban areas or migrated to the cities where the processing of forest products had increased job opportunities. About half the Brazil nut collectors are now seasonal migrants, mainly from the cities. Depending on access to land, forest resources, and markets, extraction-based income can contribute to more than 50% of the overall household income, especially in the more remote forest settlements. Some processing plants gain direct access to the Brazil nut resource base through vertical integration, thereby increasing their control of the production process. These large enterprises partly take over the role of the former patrons (e.g. in making advance payments to the Brazil nut collectors). The increasing demand for Brazil nuts and the increased in-country processing in Bolivia has benefited all participants in the production process, including the collectors. Especially the collectors from independent communities manage to get a higher price for the nuts they collect. Even so, an unequal exchange continues to be characteristic of many non-timber-forest-products-based (NTFP-based) production systems. In addition, more recent extractive activities (e.g. logging and palm-heart extraction) are threatened by depletion of the resource base. None of the extractive activities thus fulfills all the criteria of sustainable development.
A g r o f o r e s t e r í a e n l a s A m é r i c a s N º 4 6 2 0 0 8
The forest certification process in Guatemala has largely been confined to the forest concessions... more The forest certification process in Guatemala has largely been confined to the forest concessions in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), representing 95 percent of the country's certified forest area. Forest certification in Guatemala is unique in that certification in accordance with the scheme of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is mandatory in order for both communities and industrial groups to obtain and maintain forest concessions in the MBR. Unlike other countries where forest certification has almost exclusively been advanced in a joint effort between non- governmental organizations, development projects and the private sector, the case of Guatemala shows the important role government agencies can play as agents backing the process. Despite initial resistance, the National Council for Protected Areas (CONAP), as the state agency in charge of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, permitted forest management in the MBR provided that it was ...
This doctoral dissertation (translated into Spanish) was drawn up within the framework of a joint... more This doctoral dissertation (translated into Spanish) was drawn up within the framework of a joint research effort between the Center of International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the Institute of Forest Policy, Markets and Marketing Section, at the University of Freiburg, and various partner institutions in the northern Bolivian Amazon, among which the Programa Manejo de Bosques de la Amazonía Boliviana (PROMAB) was the host institution. The study provides a spatially differentiated intertemporal economic analysis of extractive economies in the northern Bolivian Amazon at micro and meso-levels. It includes the unique approach of studying both rural and peri-urban livelihood systems dependent on the commercial extraction of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). The main objectives are 1) to identify temporal and spatial variations as regards income generated from the gathering, processing, and marketing of Brazil nuts, palm hearts, and other NTFPs; 2) to contribute to a better understand...
Over the past decade, many governmental, private or donor-funded programs have adopted value chai... more Over the past decade, many governmental, private or donor-funded programs have adopted value chain development (VCD) to address goals related to poverty reduction and economic development. Underlying the design of these programs is the assumption that smallholders will climb out of poverty when they organize into rural enterprises, when these enterprises link them to business partners committed to win-win relationships, and when the chain actors have access to the right mix of technical, business and financial services. However, despite considerable investments in VCD, we have a poor understanding of whether the underlying assumptions hold true. A major stumbling block to understanding has been the absence of sound metric systems to monitor progress and assess the impact of VCD initiatives. The 5Capitals tool, developed jointly by an alliance of research and development organizations, addresses this shortcoming by proposing an asset-based approach to assess the poverty impacts of VC...