Starting very early in the morning of the second day of Tropentag 2017, the poster sessions on Risk and Awareness still attracted many people. It is good news that this year many presented research focused on understanding the farmers’ perception through different approaches. It also made the session more interesting with lots of discussions.

While Akary Min investigated how farmers adapt to climate change in the Central Dry Zone of Myanmar, Amie Heri-Kazi Bisimwa from Eastern of DR Congo was more inclined towards the farmers’ perceptions of land degradation in South Kivu. And Minh Tu Nguyen has been currently working on the subjective measurement of resilience of agricultural systems to increased salinity intrusion in Vietnam. More surprisingly, Emily Mutota tried to apply a new method, ‘’photovoice’’, in which she attempted to understand the perception of the local community about their own habitats by asking them to expressing it through the photos they captured. Even though, personally, I was not able to find many promising results from this research, her attempts with a new approach should be appreciated.

One of the most interesting presentations of poster sessions this morning is when Till Ludwig from the university of Bonn introduced his current work. He tried to find the impact of economic preferences on food and nutrition security in risk-prone rural environment. Even though it is just preliminary result, he was glad with the finding that the more people are altruistic, the less food-insecure they are, which means sharing food with other neighborhood will actually reduce the risk of food insecurity.

Attending this session, I could feel many attempts of experts to approach farmers, to understand them and their lives. Hopefully, these work will keep continuing and bring more benefits for farmers around the world, especially those in the developing countries.