Green Talents

Rice is an important staple food for food security globally especially in Asia and increasingly in Africa. These two regions are also hubs of high population growth rate and food insecurity. With the importance of rice in both regions, solutions for sustainability in rice agri-food systems need to follow a trans-regional and international approach (1). In this study, we choose South East (SE) Asia and West Africa for comparative analysis. These sub-regions are particularly suitable and comparable, as they have important similarities as well as distinctions that are of global importance for food security. While the export of rice is concentrated in a few countries (in South East Asia), a high volume of imports of rice is made by countries in West Africa, with a high vulnerability to supply shocks (2). We zero in our analysis on Vietnam (in SE Asia) and Nigeria (in West Africa).

The planned research has 2 objectives as listed below, with the overarching aim to develop a spatially explicit template to compare agricultural geographies and their distant connections under different social-economic-ecological conditions.
1) Archetyping rice agri-food systems across scales: By analysing countries/regions with different geographical resources and undergoing different (rice) land use change, we will present archetypes of global importance for global issues such as food security. Such comparisons could be presented as different land system archetypes. Recent research has focused on land system archetypes (8,9,10) ;to synthesize and represent patterns in land use. Studying archetypes has its benefits; providing scientific evidence for decision making and policymaking. The topological similarities between the regions we study allow the selection of comparable transects in both countries along gradients which reflect different land system archetypes (8,11).

2) Investigate telecoupling dynamics: To understand the complex dynamics arising within tele coupled rice systems such as indirect impacts, feedback loops, spillovers, leakage, rebound effects, time lags, legacy effects and non-linearities (12), not only the social, and economic aspects of the rice system but also the environmental effects of the rice system (which are reported to be largely overlooked, (13)) can be analysed.