| We argue that reading the local agricultural landscape is a prerequisite to understanding the plausible local impacts of external drivers for change, such as the introduction of new crops and technologies. Initially driven by a desire to understand the potential for small-scale farmers to produce jatropha biodiesel in a sustainable way, we started to examine how farmers related to trees in different parts of the agricultural landscape. This provided us with insights into small-scale processes of land enclosure and conversion, which indicate that agricultural intensification is taking place. We learned that although the landscape could in theory accommodate a lot of jatropha hedges around existing (maize dominated) arable land, farmers were only creating... |
