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COVID-19 (2022 Deadline)
Resilient food systems and biodiversity under future crises in Madagascar
PI: O. Sarobidy Rakotonarivo (sarobidy.rakotonarivo@gmail.com), University of Antananarivo
U.S. Partners: Randall Kramer, Andrew Bell, and James Herrera, Duke University
Project Dates: October 2022 - March 2024
Project Overview
 | | Project PI Sarobidy Rakotonarivo pretesting the interactive games on tablets with farmers in Mandena. |
The COVID-19 crisis led to severe increases in global food insecurity. In Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, the pandemic aggravated food insecurity by causing lost revenue from exports and tourism, disruption in agricultural markets, volatility in crop prices due to travel restrictions, and increases in the prices of basic commodities. In addition, COVID-19 reportedly undermined Madagascar’s unique biodiversity, as people increasingly turned to wildlife trafficking, charcoal production, logging, and forest clearing for agriculture to make up for lost income. The increased urban out-migration caused by the pandemic also put extra pressure on natural resources and increased local demand for food and other needs.
This PEER project aimed to inform the prevention and resolution of future crises by providing better understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 on rural livelihoods and food security and its knock-on impacts on biodiversity in northeastern Madagascar. The project carried out key informant interviews, choice experiment surveys, experimental games, and focus groups to identify the various mechanisms by which COVID-19 altered food security and livelihoods and explore farmer livelihood coping strategies during COVID-19.
The researchers sought to provide key policy recommendations to decision makers and a wider audience, alongside co-production of recommendations with decision makers and affected communities. Beyond the lifetime of the project, the Duke University Lemur Center and the project PI have ongoing related commitments in the Sava region of Madagascar and will be in a position to continue to engage with communities and various stakeholders on these issues.
Final Summary of Project Activities
The researchers undertook this study to investigate the individual and compounding impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Enawo cyclone, and the vanilla price collapse on vanilla farmers in rural Madagascar. Using 60 semi-structured and scenario-based interviews, they examined the various mechanisms through which the pandemic and these cascading crises influenced livelihoods, food security, and natural resource use across two villages in northeastern Madagascar. They found that the impact of the pandemic, combined with the cyclone event and the vanilla price collapse, disrupted livelihoods, resulting in significant income losses and food security challenges that exacerbated farmer vulnerabilities. Importantly, the declining vanilla prices had important spillover impacts, affecting both farmers and residents reliant on alternative income sources. Local communities reported using the forest resources more frequently as a safety net during crises in the village with more lenient regulations.
The field team also implemented a choice experiment survey and experimental games with 200 farmers in the villages of Mandena and Andrapengy to examine farmers’ preferences for regenerative agriculture as an alternative to practices that are reliant on input markets (such as monoculture forest-derived vanilla crops) or the need to engage in forest clearing in the event of crises such as COVID19. The experimental games aimed to examine the impact of policy interventions (price shocks and individual payments) on farmer willingness to diversify crops, (and hence increase resilience) and to support forest conservation. They were developed on Netlogo and played on tablet computers in a group of six farmers. Participants in the game could choose to farm vanilla, plant other crops, or leave the forest or fallow land as-is.
Preliminary results indicated farmers highly valued vanilla monocrops and had lower preferences for diversified vanilla agroforestry. Respondents who owned larger vanilla lands were more likely to place greater value on earnings from diversified agroforestry vanilla. In the games, the presence of shocks such as a drop in vanilla price significantly led farmers to diversify their crops (less monocrop vanilla and more non-vanilla crops). Shocks also incentivized more diversified land uses (defined as a mix of vanilla crops, forests, and other crops) at the landscape level. Favorable perceptions of diversified vanilla agroforestry and total landholdings were also positively associated with more forest / fallow lands in the game landscape. Payments resulted in improved environmental outcomes through increased vegetation on private lands but decreased land use diversity within households. This study also demonstrates how games can provide a low-risk, low-cost tool to predict the impacts of policy interventions, and study how these impacts might differ between various groups of households.
As part of the PEER project, research assistant Rakoto Harison Henintsoa traveled to Boston University to analyze the datasets with the U.S. partner, Dr Andrew Bell, and discuss the preliminary results with his lab group. She also used the opportunity to learn more about various methods of data analysis applicable across various fields through a few one-to-one meetings with members of Dr Bell’s lab.
The PEER team also convened community meetings in the last week of March 2024 to share results with their participants in Mandena and Andrapengy villages. A total of 150 participants attended these events, where researchers presented their findings and asked the community their thoughts about the extent to which the results reflect their views and decisions. They also used the opportunity to ask participants about the effect of the ongoing vanilla price decline on their livelihoods. The PI and team have also presented their findings at IASC2023 and the International Food Policy Research Institute. The team has received two additional grants totaling $510,000 for related work from the Swiss National Foundation and the Belmont Forum.
Publications
O.S. Rakotonarivo and O.R. Andriamihaja. Global North–Global South Research Partnerships Are Still Inequitable. Nature Human Behaviour 7: 2042–2043. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01728-0
O.S. Rakotonarivo, M. Rakotoarisoa, H.M. Rajaonarivelo, S. Raharijaona, J.P.G. Jones, and N. Hockley. 2023. Resolving land tenure security is essential to deliver forest restoration. Communications Earth and Environment 4: 179. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00847-w
A.R. Bell, O.S. Rakotonarivo, A. Bhargava, A.B. Duthrie, W. Zhang, R. Sargent, A.R. Lewis, and A. Kipchumba. 2023. Financial incentives often fail to reconcile agricultural productivity and pro-conservation behavior. Communications Earth and Environment 4: 27. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00689-6
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