Humidtropics contextualizes this multi-prong research within a stage theory of system change and intensification. In the initial phase at very low population densities and high cost of participation in markets (what was termed above the extensive margin), the conditions for farmer investment in any type of intensification process are limited to population increase and settlement by colonists. Humidtropics has chosen not to work in such contexts. This critical point is reached in the humid forest zone at population densities of 15 persons per square kilometer where long-term shifting cultivation no longer suffices and at 30 persons per square kilometer in the moist savannas, where communal grazing systems collapse as population rises, improving the viability of combined tree-crop-livestock enterprises. Above these population densities, particularly where markets are not well developed, land managers continued to focus on subsistence production primarily by exploiting natural soil capital, causing food security to be sought at the expense of natural resource degradation. This need not be the case, however, when integrated approaches toward production, marketing and resource management systems are offered to farming households through reliable agricultural services, policy and infrastructure. There is no longer a single entry point for farm intervention, but rather a suite of complementary livelihood options that empower rural households to reject subsistence strategies while gaining proficiency in crop and livestock production.
Increasing market integration in turn leads to a process of crop diversification and commercialization of marketable surpluses, where farming becomes a business. The farming system may nonetheless continue to devote some resources to the production of preferred staples, as the farm gate difference in selling and buying price is still often large. Improved road networks in the highlands of Southeast Asia and a little over a decade of market liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa are leading to smallholder diversification into higher value activities such as horticulture, dairy, coffee, tea, cocoa, and soybeans. This process is driven by growing urban demand and by the recent trend of global food price increases. Diversification offers the potential to explore complementarities in tree, crop and livestock enterprises that further increase overall system productivity. In this phase, the rising value of land warrants further investment in the natural resource base. Where markets are highly developed and farmers can meet household needs through purchases, farmers’ objectives shift primarily to income generation. Often the tendency is to move to specialization within the production system based on Sub-regional comparative advantage within the country. Few smallholders are at this stage of farm development apart from irrigated and peri-urban areas. However, pressures toward such intensification through specialization are evident in the highlands of Northern Thailand, central Kenya, and parts of the Andes. In such market contexts, the question arises how best can intensification through diversification of production offer equally sustainable and economically viable pathways for development given farmers’ expectations of improved lives?
This interplay of market conditions, farmer choice of production activities, and farmer investment in the natural resource base allows Humidtropics to explore intensification pathways across gradients of market, population density, and agro-ecological conditions. Humidtropics is a new research direction for the CGIAR and at the same time it builds on a number of system-wide programs and a range of potentially integrated sub-systems research. Much of the impetus for more integrated approaches resulted from a series of meetings organized around integrated natural resource management (INRM). Consensus grew that attempted to develop a framework for better integration of productivity research of the CGIAR with the expanding NRM work (Science Council, 2003). This integration of productivity and NRM at farm scale was not made operational within the CGIAR, as much of the NRM research moved to broader scales such as river basins or landscapes, as reflected in the Challenge Program for Water and Food and the Alternatives to Slash and Burn, and East African Highlands system-wide programs. The System-wide Livestock Program also evolved from focused work on livestock feed to broader systems level research, for example on biomass trade-offs in smallholder systems. In response, INRM research tended to focus on sub-systems, such as smallholder dairy, agroforestry, conservation agriculture, integrated soil fertility management, and the development of multi-purpose crop varieties balancing food, feed, and soil management. Such research provides a strong base on which Humidtropics will build but such research still has not been framed within the context of farming systems at very different stages of intensification. This has led to a lack of nuanced approaches to scaling up such technologies, as reflected in the critique of conservation agriculture by Giller et al. (2009). Additionally, different Centers have often taken a different approach to system-level problems compatible with their mandates. A good example is Striga control where different centers each pursue a single, non-integrative line of research to the problem (De Groote et al., 2010; Vanlauwe et al., 2008), or the continuing issue of how to better integrate legumes into smallholder systems. Finally, other critical research areas to system intensification have received little attention, particularly increasing labor productivity in smallholder systems, a critical issue in system intensification. Humidtropics builds on this research base and lessons learned by integrating the ongoing research of the CGIAR at the level of the farming system.
