AGD PhD program

The focus is on developing and applying agricultural green development solutions and management measures to improve the sustainability and resilience of regional agro-ecological systems under emerging drivers: climate change impacts, increasing touristic activities, and socioeconomic developments. The focus is on Hainan Island, its watersheds, and coastal waters (land-sea interactions) as well as its agricultural system. Research innovation efforts should be oriented towards improving our understanding of the past, current, and future sustainable development strategies for high-value and eco-friendly agricultural systems in Hainan. Given the recently introduced Free Trade Policy and ecological revolution policy in Hainan, this theme contributes to understanding how those newly introduced initiatives and economic investment, as well as the tourism dynamics, will shape the future agricultural food systems, while ensuring a clean, sustainable environment and healthy marine systems. The theme strongly proposes incorporating empowering strategies such as the science & technology backyard model for farmers to improve their farm structure and competitiveness in sustainable tropical agricultural systems. Therefore, systems analysis approaches and integrated environmental-economic approaches can be developed to achieve those aims. The integration of social and natural sciences is highly encouraged for an actionable impact.

The agro-ecosystem is a diverse web of life, comprising crops, as well as associated plants and non-crop habitats, containing above- and belowground biota (insects, micro-organisms), some of which cause disease and crop loss while others support plant and crop functioning. This theme explores, in a tropical context, possibilities for conserving biodiversity and utilizing ecosystem services from biodiversity to improve crop health and productivity, and substitute, as far as possible, anthropogenic inputs with natural processes and achieve both high productivity, high product quality, high value, and high environmental quality. Practices like agroforestry (trees with understory cropping and grazing) integrate biodiversity to build resilience while increasing farmers' income. Ultimately, a healthy agro-ecosystem depends on biodiversity for productivity and stability, making them fundamentally interconnected.

Crop nutritional quality generally declines with yield increases as a result of the dilution effect. How to simultaneously improve quality, yield, and nutrient use efficiency of vegetable, fruit, and cereal crops remains a long-standing challenge towards global food security. The primary focus of the "High quality and high value" theme is to investigate the physiological, molecular, and genetic mechanisms of quality crop production in tropical regions. In particular, how to improve the quality of cash crops for higher value-added agricultural production and sustainable food provision? Low pH and nutrient imbalance are two frequent problems of tropical soils. This quality-oriented theme is also designed to better understand quality crop production along a resilient food supply chain via physiological approaches, modeling, and AI techniques when alleviating soil problems in Hainan and other tropical regions.

This theme focuses on tropical green sustainable development in and for the global south, in particular, but not limited to Africa. Projects under this theme will study, assess and design both green agricultural development practices and systems in the global South (also by learning from Chinese and European experiences such as STBs), as well as the sustainable agrifood trade and investment relations between China and the global South. Issues of food security, resource efficiency, and environmental sustainability in plant, animal, fish, and integrated production systems are related to high-value and high-quality outputs that can contribute to sustainable development in the global south.

Ms. Jingmeng Wang, agd-csc@cau.edu.cn