Agriculture in the mountainous areas in Thailand and Vietnam has undergone rapid changes driven by general economic growth and development of markets, changes in policies and institutions, the introduction of agricultural innovations and population growth (Schreinemachers et al., Forthcoming). The intensification of agricultural production systems and their integration into markets has generally lead to higher farm household incomes of the rural population (Tipraqsa and Schreinemachers, 2009). However, the intensification of production systems has also stained the carrying capacity of natural resources, such as soil and water resources (Froehlich et al., forthcoming), has lead to higher levels of economic risk (Zeller et al., forthcoming) and external effects such as the exposure to increased levels of agricultural pesticides (Praneetvatakul et al., under review).

The third phase of subproject G1 had the objective to deepen our understanding of the trade-offs between land use intensification and resource depletion / environmental contamination. It focused on two issues in particular, these being soil fertility decline of sloping lands in Vietnam and the misuse and overuse of agricultural pesticides in mountainous areas of Thailand.

The subproject used a combination of statistical models and agent-based farming systems models to accomplish this. A detailed summary of the results was published in Froehlich et al. (Forthcoming), notably in Chapter 4 (Schreinemachers et al., forthcoming), Chapter 6 (Marohn et al., forthcoming) and Chapter 12 (Zeller et al., forthcoming).
https://sfb564.uni-hohenheim.de/83908