One of the key outputs of the Sustainable Farming in Tropical Asian Landscapes (SFITAL) is a roadmap for sustainable cacao development in Davao de Oro. Since sustainable commodity development also covers its impact on the environment, it covers, not only production and marketing, but also land-use planning.
To ensure a holistic approach to roadmap development, World Agroforestry (ICRAF) is using a model called R-FALLOW (Forest, Agroforest, Low-value Land, or Waste?), which is used to assess economic-ecological trade-offs various land-uses. It takes into consideration local stakeholders—from decision makers to smallholder farmers—in terms of labor, allocation of land and finances for future land uses, aboveground carbon storage of the landscape, and possible land use changes in state-owned lands and forestlands.
This open-source digital modelling tool allows researchers, academics, policymakers, and other development actors to craft strategies towards commodity development that can bring optimal economic and ecological benefits.
To run this model, two types of inputs are needed: spatial in the form of maps and non-spatial in parameter values. Spatial inputs include maps that contain the boundary of the simulated area, the initial landcover type, soil fertility, boundary of forest protection area, slope, land suitability, distance to road, distance to river, distance to settlement, and distance to processing industry. As for the non-spatial inputs, the model requires socioeconomic, biophysical, and demographic inputs. The socioeconomic inputs require cost of establishment, labor required for establishment, initial financial capital, fraction for secondary consumption, household consumption, returns to labor, returns to land, product price, and non-labor costs. The biophysical and demographic inputs are aboveground biomass, land cover time bound, yield, harvesting productivity, initial human population, annual population growth rate, fraction of productive farm labors, and annual working days.
As part of the roadmap development process, the SFITAL Project in the Philippines collected these spatial and non-spatial information and ran simulations using R-FALLOW. This helped identify initial scenarios of cacao development. These scenarios will continue to be enhanced throughout the next planning workshops, integrating input from local stakeholders, and will then be run again through R-FALLOW. These simulations are expected to guide local stakeholders in developing and finalizing the strategies and interventions to be included in the roadmap.
Additionally, the SFITAL Project also conducted a training on the use of this assessment tool last October 2023 to capacitate researchers, decision makers, and other decision makers in Davao de Oro on the use of this assessment tool, particularly for research and planning.
For more information on R-FALLOW, its user’s manual is uploaded on Cacaomustahan.com, accessible through this link: https://cacaomustahan.com/r-fallow-users-manual/.