Improving irrigation management to increase the productivity and livelihoods of smallholder banana growers in the post-conflict region of Magdalena, Colombia

提高农业生产力和改善哥伦比亚马格达莱纳省（地区）香蕉生产者的生计是国家经济的优先事项。通过实施一套创新的远程和地面环境数据收集技术，以提高现有管理方法的效率，同时为小农和生产者组织引入新的管理办法，该项目是一项后期案例研究，旨在展示农业和社会经济效益，使用新的EO观测和气象站采样方法提高哥伦比亚香蕉协会ASBAMA和出口商Tecbaco的财务回报的经济效益。具体而言，该项目将寻求提高Tecbaco公司向香蕉生产者提供的现有灌溉计划咨询的成本效益，以期以低成本改进和推广这一咨询，使之适用于属于ASBAMA网络的小农和女性香蕉生产者。该项目还将为Tecbaco公司提供勘探支持，帮助该公司评估在圣玛尔塔地区建立新生产基地的技术可行性，以增加香蕉和其他高价值农产品的出口收入。这两个项目旨在代表两个范例，说明企业如何更好地、更明智地获取低成本环境数据，以增加低收入国家和因最近冲突而面临不稳定局势的地区农业生产者的利润。该项目专门针对哥伦比亚香蕉出口市场，但是，正在实施的技术将来可以很容易地推广和商业应用到其他地区和作物。

Improving the agricultural productivity and livelihoods for banana producers in the Magdalena Department (region) ofColombia is a national economic priority. Through implementation of a suite of innovative remote and ground basedenvironmental data collection techniques to increase the efficacy of existing management approaches, coupled withintroduction of novel management options for smallholders and producer organisations, this project constitutes a late-stagecase study to demonstrate the agronomic and socio-economic benefits of using novel EO observation and weather stationsampling methodologies to improve the financial returns for the Colombian banana association ASBAMA, and exporterTecbaco. Specifically, this project will seek to improve the cost-benefit of existing irrigation scheduling advice provided toproducers by Tecbaco, with a view to improving and extending this advice at low cost to smallholder and female bananaproducers who belong to the ASBAMA network. The project will also provide prospecting support to Tecbaco to help thebusiness evaluate the technical feasibility for establishing new production sites in the Santa Marta region to increase exportrevenues from bananas and other high-value agricultural produce. These are intended to represent two exemplars of howgreater and smarter access to low-cost environmental data can be beneficially used by businesses to increase profits foragricultural producers in low income nations, and areas exposed to instability through recent conflict. This projectspecifically focuses on the Colombian banana export market, however, the technologies being implemented could bereadily extended and commercially applied to other regions and crops in the future.