No abstract

No abstract

Since 2016, fall armyworm (FAW) has threatened sub-Saharan ‘Africa’s fragile food systems and economic performance. Yet, there is limited evidence on this transboundary pest’s economic and food security impacts in the region. Additionally, the health and environmental consequences of the insecticides being used to control FAW have not been studied. This paper presents evidence on the impacts of FAW on maize production, food security, and human and environmental health. We use a combination of an agroecology-based community survey and nationally representative data from an agricultural household survey to achieve our objectives. The results indicate that the pest causes an average annual loss of 36% in maize production, reducing 0.67 million tonnes of maize (0.225 million tonnes per year) between 2017 and 2019. The total economic loss is US$ 200 million, or 0.08% of the gross domestic product. The lost production could have met the per capita maize consumption of 4 million people. We also find that insecticides to control FAW have more significant toxic effects on the environment than on humans. This paper highlights governments and development partners need to invest in sustainable FAW control strategies to reduce maize production loss, improve food security, and protect human and environmental health.

Trypanosomiasis is a significant productivity-limiting livestock disease in sub-Saharan Africa, contributing to poverty and food insecurity. In this paper, we estimate the potential economic gains from adopting Waterbuck Repellent Blend (WRB). The WRB is a new technology that pushes trypanosomiasis-transmitting tsetse fly away from animals, improving animals’ health and increasing meat and milk productivity. We estimate the benefits of WRB on the production of meat and milk using the economic surplus approach. We obtained data from an expert elicitation survey, secondary and experimental sources. Our findings show that the adoption of WRB in 5 to 50% of the animal population would generate an economic surplus of US$ 78–869 million per annum for African 18 countries. The estimated benefit-cost ratio (9:1) further justifies an investment in WRB. The technology’s potential benefits are likely to be underestimated since our estimates did not include the indirect benefits of the technology adoption, such as the increase in the quantity and quality of animals’ draught power services and human and environmental health effects. These benefits suggest that investing in WRB can contribute to nutrition security and sustainable development goals.

Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face multifaceted and co-existing risks, such as human and animal diseases and pests. Even though smallholder farmers often experience these challenges simultaneously, interventions to address these challenges are often implemented in a piecemeal fashion. However, managing agricultural production constraints without alleviating human and livestock health burdens might not generate significant and sustained benefits to achieve the desired development outcome (e.g., reducing hunger, malnutrition, and poverty). As such, building farmers' resilience and adaptive capacity to co-existing production constraints and health burdens may require an integrated and holistic approach. Understanding the potential benefits of an integrated approach would provide critical information, for example, for revisiting the extension systems and for designing pro-poor holistically integrated interventions to tackle interrelated challenges facing smallholder farmers. In this paper, we examined the economic benefits of integrated human-plant-animal health interventions aimed at controlling malaria, stemborer infestations of crops, and trypanosomiasis, along with beekeeping as a livelihood diversification option in rural Ethiopia. We developed a whole-farm multiperiod mathematical linear programming model to examine the economic consequences of the interventions. Our results suggest that relaxing livelihoods and the human-plant-animal health constraints that farmers face has the potential to at least double income. The results further show that exploiting the potential synergies among interventions can generate higher economic benefits. The annual income from the combined interventions is 35% higher than the sum of the income gains from each intervention alone. Our results support an integrated approach to achieve holistic outcomes in areas where these development constraints co-exist.Sustainability 2020, 12, 2284 2 of 21 production constraints without alleviating human and animal health burdens might not generate significant and sustained benefits for achieving the desired development outcome (e.g., reducing hunger, malnutrition, and poverty). As such, building farmers' resilience and adaptive capacity to co-existing production constraints and health burdens may require a holistic approach. This, in turn, calls for new and integrated approaches to address multiple constraints [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].In this paper, we examine the impact of introducing integrated health interventions that address the co-existing constraints of farmers in Ethiopia. These interventions include an integrated vector management (IVM) package to control malaria, biconical (Ngu) tsetse fly traps to control trypanosomiasis, and push-pull technology to address stemborer and fodder shortages. All three interventions are eco-friendly, since no pesticides are used. This, in turn, mitigates biodiversity losses and public health problems associated with excessive use and misuse of pesticides. In addition to t...

We analyse the impact of intensity of tillage on wheat productivity and risk exposure using panel household-plot level data from Ethiopia. In order to control for selection bias, we estimate a flexible moment-based production function using an endogenous switching regression treatment effects model. We find that tillage has a complementary impact on productivity and risk exposure. As the intensity of tillage increases, productivity increases and farmers' exposure to risk declines. Our results suggest that smallholder farmers use tillage as an ex-ante risk management strategy. The main policy implication of this study is that the opportunity cost of switching to reduced tillage in wheat production seem rather high unless farmers are supported by appropriate incentive schemes.

Information does not flow freely through social networks.We use an experiment to study knowledge diffusion about an innovation (integrated pest management, IPM) in farmer groups in Ethiopia. Group leaders are incentivized to share knowledge with members through the conditional provision of material or social prestige rewards. We combine incentives with loss-framed messaging to leverage loss aversion. Incentives increase diffusion effort, and combining incentives with loss-framed messaging increases effort further. However, the treatments failed to induce follower farmers to experiment with IPM. We also document that reclaiming material rewards is difficult after a long delay, attenuating the effectiveness of the loss frame.

Breeding crops for disease resistance is a sustainable approach to reduce yield losses. While significant research on the adoption and impacts of improved crop varieties exists, most studies have analyzed yield effects in general, without distinguishing between different varietal traits and characteristics. Here, panel data from wheat farmers in Ethiopia are used to compare improved varieties that are resistant to stripe rust (caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici) with improved susceptible and traditional susceptible varieties. Production function estimates suggest that improved resistant varieties raise effective yields by 8% in comparison to local susceptible varieties. The yield difference between improved resistant and improved susceptible varieties is positive but small, because rust levels were not very high in the years under study. However, under drought and other abiotic stresses, improved varieties-with and without resistance to stripe rust-perform notably worse than local varieties. The worse performance under abiotic stress may also explain why many farmers recently switched back to growing traditional varieties. Sustainable adoption needs a combination of various traits in the same varieties, including high yield potential, grain quality, disease resistance, and tolerance to drought and other production stresses.