Sustainable intensification of rainfed lowland rice systems: A case study in Xieng Khouang Province in Lao PDR

With the growing concern about food security in the northern uplands of Laos, it is critical to address the issue of sustainable intensification of food production. The objective of the study was to characterize the variability in rice cropping practices and to evaluate their performance and sustainability in Lao PDR. One, name d Sustainable Rice System (SRS), was promoted by a national NGO as an adaptation of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) to the local agro-ecological conditions. This innovation was compared to traditional rice growing practices in the study area in Kham Di strict, Xieng Khouang Province. The study has enabled actors to better understand the real diversity of practices. We found a distinct ion between single seedling and multiple seedling transplanting practices. Then, focusing on single seedling transplanting (referred as SRS), the study demonstrated that despite no signify cant yield increase, farmers are interested in adopting it because it provides other benefits. These are notably the increase in the return on labor (57.8%) and savings on the global labor requirement (28.4%). As labor scarcity is and will remain the main concern for Lao farmers, our study shows the importance of considering performance indicators beyond crop yields. Regarding the environmental aspect of SRS, our results highlight that the common use of chemical fertilizer does not really fit with agroecological principles. Nevertheless, the significant increase in the use of manure in comparison with other practices can anticipate a positive trend in term of environmental conservation. (Résumé d'auteur

Towards an agroecological transition in Southeast Asia: Cultivating diversity and developing synergies.

Starting from the early 1990s, a multitude of national and regional initiatives have emerged in the Great Mekong Sub-Region for supporting ecological intensification of agriculture or agroecology. The French Agency for Development (AFD) has been a very active supporter of these initiatives, especially in relation to the promotion of Conservation Agriculture and the establishment of the Conservation Agriculture Network for South East Asia (CANSEA). In addition to its initial focus on Conservation Agriculture and with the objective of widening the scope of agroecology by including all other “schools” such as Organic Agriculture, Agroforestry, Integrated Pest Management, System of Rice Intensification…, the AFD commissioned a study to better understand regional and national agroecology dynamics and initiatives, their strengths and weaknesses as well as the main issues at stake for their large scale dissemination. The authors conducted this study in 2013 in the six countries of the GMS, through a review of the literature combined with country based consultation workshops in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam and expert surveys in Thailand and Yunnan-China. This publication aims at sharing some of the study's key findings, and at providing a broad, yet non-exhaustive, overview of the current situation of agroecology in the Great Mekong Region. (Résumé d'auteur

Optimization of a Geman-McClure like criterion for sparse signal deconvolution

International audienceThis paper deals with the problem of recovering a sparse unknown signal from a set of observations. The latter are obtained by convolution of the original signal and corruption with additive noise. We tackle the problem by minimizing a least-squares fit criterion penalized by a Geman-McClure like potential. The resulting criterion is a rational function, which makes it possible to formulate its minimization as a generalized problem of moments for which a hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations can be proposed. These convex relaxations yield a monotone sequence of values which converges to the global optimum. To overcome the computational limitations due to the large number of involved variables, a stochastic block-coordinate descent method is proposed. The algorithm has been implemented and shows promising result

La production cotonnière en Thaïlande. Histoire et leçons d'une crise

Les dégâts d'insectes ravageurs ont été identifiés comme le principal facteur responsable de l'abandon progressif de la culture cotonnière en Thaïlande. La surconsommation d'insecticides a entraîné des transformations profondes des écosystèmes, notamment par l'évolution du faciès de l'entomofaune et l'apparition de résistance des insectes ravageurs, ainsi que des systèmes de production : forte utilisation d'intrants, relation de dépendance avec l'amont et l'aval de la filière. Aujourd'hui, la capacité des agriculteurs à contrôler le parasitisme, de manière écologiquement et économiquement durable, est devenue la condition nécessaire à une relance éventuelle de la production cotonnière nationale. Pour demeurer efficace dans la durée, toute innovation technologique devra être compatible avec les stratégies des producteurs. (Résumé d'auteur

Вдо­с­ко­на­лен­ня кон­тро­лю та на­гля­ду за жінка­ми, звільне­ни­ми з місць поз­бав­лен­ня волі

Розглядаються питання здійснення контролю й нагляду за особами, звільненими від відбування покарання, за якими встановлено адміністративний нагляд.Рассматриваются основные положения по осуществлению контроля и надзора за лицами, отбывающими наказание в учреждениях по отбытию наказания.In the article substantive provisions are examined on realization of control and supervision after persons exempt from serving of punishment which an administrative supervision is set after