Assessing Farmers' Diverse Preferences and Expectations for Tailoring Food and Nutrition Security Interventions in Southeastern Madagascar.

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.

Land-use trajectories for sustainable land system transformations: Identifying leverage points in a global biodiversity hotspot.

Sustainable land-system transformations are necessary to avert biodiversity and climate collapse. However, it remains unclear where entry points for transformations exist in complex land systems. Here, we conceptualize land systems along land-use trajectories, which allows us to identify and evaluate leverage points, i.e., entry points on the trajectory where targeted interventions have particular leverage to influence land-use decisions. We apply this framework in the biodiversity hotspot Madagascar. In the northeast, smallholder agriculture results in a land-use trajectory originating in old-growth forests and spanning from forest fragments to shifting hill rice cultivation and vanilla agroforests. Integrating interdisciplinary empirical data on seven taxa, five ecosystem services, and three measures of agricultural productivity, we assess trade-offs and cobenefits of land-use decisions at three leverage points along the trajectory. These trade-offs and cobenefits differ between leverage points: Two leverage points are situated at the conversion of old-growth forests and forest fragments to shifting cultivation and agroforestry, resulting in considerable trade-offs, especially between endemic biodiversity and agricultural productivity. Here, interventions enabling smallholders to conserve forests are necessary. This is urgent since ongoing forest loss threatens to eliminate these leverage points due to path dependency. The third leverage point allows for the restoration of land under shifting cultivation through vanilla agroforests and offers cobenefits between restoration goals and agricultural productivity. The co-occurring leverage points highlight that conservation and restoration are simultaneously necessary to avert collapse of multifunctional mosaic landscapes. Methodologically, the framework highlights the importance of considering path dependency along trajectories to achieve sustainable land-system transformations.

Antioxidant, Anti-Inflammatory, and Antidiabetic Activities of Leaves and Stems of Uapaca bojeri Bail. (EUPHORBIACEAE), an Endemic Plant of Madagascar.

Uapaca bojeri is an endemic Malagasy plant used by the local population. This work aimed to evaluate antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antidiabetic activities of the methanol extracts of U. bojeri leaves and stems and to report their total phenolic content and the bioactive compound content by HPLC methods. Antioxidant capacity was determined by DPPH and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) assays. An in vivo carrageenan-induced paw oedema and acetic acid-induced writhing test in mice were used for anti-inflammatory activity evaluation. An oral glucose tolerance test was performed in mice to evaluate antidiabetic activity. The total bioactive compound content of leaves was higher than that of stems. Stem methanol extract inhibited the free radical DPPH more than the leaf methanol extract. Leaf methanol extract inhibited, in a dose-dependent manner, the carrageenan-induced paw oedema more than the stem extract, but their inhibition of the pain symptoms caused an acetic acid-induced decrease similar to the number of writhes in the dose-dependent case. The leaf and stem methanol extracts significantly reduced blood glucose levels after 30 min of glucose loading in mice compared to the control group blood glucose reduction. The presence of several bioactive compounds in U. bojeri contributed to the different biological activities, but isolation and identification of these bioactive molecules are necessary to confirm these pharmacological properties.

Traditional and Unconventional Dried Fruit Snacks as a Source of Health-Promoting Compounds.

Dried fruits are important, healthy and popular snacks, despite the limited information on their nutritional profiles and phytochemical composition. The present work was aimed to study the chemical composition of freeze-dried fruits from four fruit species: two common commercial snacks (apple and goji) and two innovative products (kaki and kiwi). Sugar and organic acid levels, total phenolics (TPC), and main health-promoting phytochemicals were studied by HPLC fingerprinting analysis. Furthermore, in vitro antioxidant capacity (AOC) was preliminarily observed in these products. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was carried out as a multivariate approach as well. The TPC ranged from 210.9 mg GAE/100g DW (kiwi) to 872.6 mg GAE/100g DW (kaki), while dried fruit antioxidant capacity ranged from 23.09 mmol Fe2+/kg DW (goji) to 137.5 mmol Fe2+/kg DW (kaki). The most important phytochemical class in apple (two cultivars), kiwi, and kaki dried fruits was phenolics (from 74.6% to 93.3%), while monoterpenes were the first class in goji (67.5%). No anthocyanins have been identified in dried fruits because these compounds are most likely converted to phenolic acids during the drying process. This research intended to stimulate large-scale exploitation of commercial dried fruits as functional foods as well.