African Forest-Fringe Farmers Benefit from Modern Farming Practices despite High Environmental Impacts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agricultural expansion has led to a significant loss of habitat and biodiversity in Ghana and throughout West Africa and the tropics generally. Most farmers adopt both organic and inorganic inputs to boost production, with the potential to slow agricultural expansion, but with relatively little consideration of related environmental impacts. In Ghana, where high-input modern farming is rapidly overtaking traditional organic agricultural practices, we examined five stakeholder groups in regard to their perceptions of the environmental, economic, and social costs and benefits of modern, mixed-input, and traditional farming systems. The stakeholder groups included farmers adopting different agricultural practices, as well as governmental and non-governmental natural resource managers. Our findings indicate that the overall perceived costs of modern farming, attributable to large quantities of inorganic inputs, are higher than the overall perceived benefits. Farmers are, however, still motivated to practice modern farming because of perceived higher returns on investment, regardless of environmental impacts, which they tend to discount. Traditional farmers do not use inorganic inputs and instead rely on swidden ‘slash-and-burn’ practices, resulting in declining productivity and soil fertility over time. Since traditional farmers are ultimately forced to encroach into nearby forests to maintain productivity, the perceived environmental sustainability of such farming systems is also limited. Mixed-input farming is not significantly different from modern farming with respect to its perceived environmental and economic traits, because it incorporates agro-chemicals alongside organic practices. Stakeholders’ perceptions and the apparent environmental outcomes of different farming systems suggest that reducing the use of inorganic inputs and promoting the adoption of organic inputs could minimise the negative impacts of agro-chemicals on the forest environment without necessarily compromising productivity. Campaigns to promote low-input or organic agriculture on environmental grounds in West Africa may falter if they fail to recognise farmers’ relatively favourable perceptions of the environmental implications of modern farming practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".