RESUMO
Background: Severe food and nutrition insecurity persists in Madagascar. The Atsimo Atsinanana region is among the most affected areas due to elevated poverty rates and low levels of resilience to frequent shocks. Implementing food and nutrition security (FNS) interventions could help to improve this situation, but to be effective and sustainable, intervention packages must fit the local context. Objectives: To identify locally suitable options, this study assessed the perceptions of local communities in rural Atsimo Atsinanana toward a range of FNS intervention options. Methods: We held 12 gender-disaggregated workshops with 80 prospective beneficiaries of an FNS project, from inland and coastal parts of the region. Preferences were elicited for 14 potential FNS interventions. Next, through participatory ex ante impact assessment, participants ranked 8 impact criteria and individually estimated expected impacts of all intervention options on these criteria. Results: Overall, participants preferred interventions targeting on-farm crop, vegetable, and livestock production. Income and food self-sufficiency were ranked as the highest intervention priorities. However, intervention preferences differed by gender and geographic location. Whereas preferences for interventions targeting dietary habits were weak across genders, women had relatively stronger preferences for these interventions than men. This shows that collecting gender-disaggregated preferences can enable more gender-sensitive choice of interventions. Preferences also reflected local livelihoods, as more market-oriented coastal sites showed stronger interest in income generation than more subsistence-oriented inland sites. The ex ante impact assessments highlight positive and negative expectations for most interventions, with increased labor burden being the most prominent negative impact overall. Conclusions: The findings suggest that participatory, multidimensional impact assessments before project implementation can support development stakeholders in tailoring intervention packages, considering 1) local and gendered preferences and 2) trade-offs among development objectives.
RESUMO
This study investigates the impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on smallholder farmers and their coping strategies in three contrasting Low- and Middle-Income Countries. The case studies include Brazil (South region), Madagascar (Atsimo Atsinanana region), and Tanzania (Morogoro/Eastern Tanzania). These countries were chosen because i) the economies are strongly influenced by the agricultural sector; ii) their national food security is strongly affected by smallholder production, and, iii) they represent a set of contrasting government responses to COVID-19 including the denial of the pandemic. Data were collected through semi-structured household interviews in all three countries in rural areas. COVID-19 induced effects were found in all three countries, including in Brazil and Tanzania where both national governments initially neglected the existence of COVID-19 and introduced few containment measures only. Here, mobility and trade restrictions of other countries impact also on agricultural trade and production in countries in which governments took less action to COVID-19 and also people remained home and practiced social distancing even if no official government policy was issued. The findings in all three countries suggest that the COVID-19 crisis had negatively affected smallholders' agricultural production, leading to a vicious cycle of low production, low incomes, and higher food insecurity. Results of this study raise the thorny issue of how best to balance containment of pandemic and future shocks against the well-being of the vulnerable rural population in lower- and middle-income countries; especially considering also the degree of global interconnected and the potential of polices to effect people beyond the national scale.
