Systems approaches for agricultural development

The symposium In the next decades, agriculture will have to cope with an ever-increasing demand for food and raw basic materials on the one hand, and with the necessity to use resources without further degrading or exhausting the environment on the other hand, and all this within a dynamic framework of social and economic conditions. Intensification, sustainability, optimizing scarce resources, and climate change are among the key issues. Organized thinking about future farming requires forecasting of consequences of alternative ways to farm and to develop agriculture. The complexity of the problems calls for a systematic approach in which many disciplines are integrated. Systems thinking and systems simulation are therefore indispensable tools for such endeavours. About 150 scientists and senior research leaders participated in the symposium 'Systems Approaches for Agricultural Development' (SAAD) at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1991. The symposium had the following objectives: - to review the status of systems research and modeling in agriculture, with special reference to evaluating their efficacy and efficiency in achieving research goals, and to their application in developing countries; - to promote international cooperation in modeling, and increase awareness of systems research and simulation. The symposium consisted of plenary sessions with reviews of major areas in systems approaches in agriculture, plus presentations in two concurrent sessions on technical topics of systems research. Subjects of studies were from tropical and temperate countries.

Contenu

Session 1. Crop Production: Genotypic Constraints.- Designing improved plant types: a breeder's viewpoint.- Improvement of rice plant type concepts: systems research enables interaction of physiology and breeding.- Designing improved plant types for the semiarid tropics: agronomists' viewpoints.- Simulation in pre-testing of rice genotypes in Tamil Nadu.- Genetic specific data for crop modeling.- Session 2. Crop Production: Weather Constraints.- Agro-ecological zoning using crop growth simulation models: characterization of wheat environments of India.- An agroclimatic approach to agricultural development in India.- Optimising harvest operations against weather risk.- The impacts of climate change on rice yield: evaluation of the efficacity of different modeling approaches.- Rice production and climate change.- Session 3. Crop Production: Soil Constraints.- A systems approach to the assessment and improvement of water use efficiency in the North China Plain.- Soil data for crop-soil models.- Root ventilation, rhizosphere modification, and nutrient uptake by rice.- Adjustment of nitrogen inputs in response to a seasonal forecast in a region of high climatic risk.- Maize modeling in Malawi: a tool for soil fertility research and development.- Session 4. Crop Production: Biological Constraints.- Pest damage relations at the field level.- Quantification of components contributing to rate-reducing resistance in a plant virus pathosystem.- The rice leaf blast simulation model 'Epiblast'.- Session 5. Farming Systems.- Potential for systems simulation in farming systems research?.- Making farming systems a more objective and quantitative research tool.- Options for agricultural development: a new quantitative approach.- Options for agricultural development: a case study for Mali's fifth Region.- Multicriteria optimization for a sustainable agriculture.- Simulation of multiple cropping systems with CropSys.- Optimization of cropping patterns in tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, India.- Agricultural development in Thailand.- A methodological framework to explore long-term options for land use.- Session 6. Education, Training and Technology Transfer.- Decision support systems for agricultural development.- Constraints in technology transfer: a user's perspective with a focus on IPM, Philippines.- Postgraduate education in agricultural systems: the AIT experience.- The IBSNAT project.- Building capacity for systems research at national agricultural research centres: SARP's experience.