It's thesis time for the second year sudents. We've been keeping a bit in touch and the stories all seem to match, a bit of chaos, a bit of nervousness, some frustation and expectations, and oh yeah...even research; maybe we should call it the 'research process', fun. I clarify, we're sort of in the beginning-middle of it, so at the stage between planning and doing fieldwork (the wake up call).
Anyway, we'll share a bit here and there of what we're up to.
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The decision to go to Bangor was because of its Agroforestry programme, and with a bit of luck I landed an opportunity to work with coffee agroforestry systems in Central America. Speaking Spanish helps, for sure!, specially doing local knowledge work and interviewing lots of coffee producers. I'm currently in the north-central high valleys of Nicaragua, focusing in the region around a nature reserve called Peñas Blancas . You can imagine the landscape, a mosaic of agriculture (maize, beans, potatos, coffee, bananas, taro), livestock pastures, abandoned (even shifted) fields, patches of forest, roads and communities. I've yet to see a sloth, maybe soon now that the rains have started and it's a bit cooler. The whole socioeconomic context is intriguing, a conservation agenda working to save and restore the water service provided by the massive stone and forest mountains; the most productive coffee region in the country, the main national export commodity, with farmers vulnerable to global coffee prices and a fungus disease that wiped out entire farms last season; smallholders and huge coffee estates; national organizations and international donors trying their best; failing and succesful farmer cooperatives, a social democratic political party with a strong presidential leadership, numerous evangelical churches, etc...really interesting to say the least, and really welcoming and amazing people basing their livelihoods on the "brown gold". But anyway, I'm working with trees, that is farmer's perceptions of tree attributes and characteristics, how they classify them, what services they provide to them, what species they use, why, an what they know from observation and experience with working with trees on their coffee farms. So if you take a look, it would be hard to miss the guabas (Inga spp.),
bananas and wood tree species that are intercropped with coffee or
placed somewhere else in the farms and landscape. As for methods, I'm mainly doing some semi-structured interviews and a tree-attribute ranking exercise with coffee producers, which will additionally feed into an existing
knowledge base started a few years back. That's what
ICRAF is interested in finding out, and that's where I fit in the whole picture.
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| Coffee with a little help from the mulch of bananas and the shade of guabas. |
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| - "Seen any suspicious logging activity?", - "Ahhh, nope" |
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| Doing the tree ranking exercise under the shade of a malay apple tree. |
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