Rob Cramb is Professor of Agricultural Development. His research interests centre on rural development, agrarian change, and natural resource management in Southeast Asia, focusing on the evolution of farming systems, land tenure arrangements, and community-based resource management in a variety of agro-ecological zones.
He graduated in agricultural economics from the University of Melbourne, then worked in Sarawak, Malaysia, for 6 years with the Department of Agriculture, first as a volunteer with Australian Volunteers International and subsequently as a consultant for the World Bank funded National Extension Project. He then undertook PhD studies at Monash University in development economics and Southeast Asian studies, returning to Sarawak for fieldwork on the evolution of Iban agriculture and customary land tenure. In 1987 he took up a position at the University of Queensland as lecturer in agricultural development. He has coordinated undergraduate and postgraduate programs in agricultural and resource economics and continued to teach and research issues of agricultural development and natural resource management in Southeast Asia in collaboration with colleagues in soil, crop, and animal science. Most recently he has been involved in assessing the impacts on customary landholders and small-scale farmers of the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia. He is currently involved in research on developing more inclusive models for smallholder engagement in global commodity chains, using cassava as a case study.
Dr Julius Kotir is a Senior Scientist with the Queensland Government Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and also an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability. His academic and research interest is focused on understanding and managing the complex and long-term sustainability of coupled socio-economic-environmental systems. A particular interest is how to use this understanding to design decision support tools in the form of models to evaluate the impact of different options under an uncertain global future. His work takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining participatory co-design and field-based methods with systems thinking tools and system dynamics modelling to develop qualitative and quantitative simulation models that can support decision making. Julius has is currently using these tools and methods to address a wide range of complex agri-environmental problems including international and rural development issues, food security, economics of farming systems, agrifood and digital twin supply chains, climate-smart agriculture, water resources management, farmer adoption of new practices, and agribusiness policy design and analysis.
