Poverty eradication and food security through agriculture in Africa: Rethinking objectives and entry points

Abstract

Agriculture in Africa is expected to meet the dual objectives of providing food and helping people to escape poverty. African agriculture is dominated by smallholdings and donors generally target their agricultural support at the smallholder sector. The expectation is that if the gap between actual and potential yields can be closed, smallholders will grow sufficient crops to feed their families, with a surplus to sell, thus meeting food security needs and bringing in an income to move them out of poverty. In practice, this is often not possible. While technologies already exist that can raise smallholder farmers’ yields 3 or 4 times, even under rainfed conditions, the small size of land available to them limits how much can be grown and the per capita income from agriculture is insufficient to allow people to move above the current World Bank-defined poverty line of US$1.90 per day. We link this finding with farmer typologies to further explain that there are large differences between individual farming households themselves in terms of their investment incentives and capability to benefit from field-level technologies that are aimed at increasing farm productivity. We argue for more differentiated policies for agricultural development in Africa and suggest that policymakers should be much more aware of the heterogeneity of farms and target interventions accordingly. It is important to understand where and for whom agriculture will have the main purpose of ensuring food and nutritional security and where and for whom there is the potential for significant increases in incomes and a contribution to wider economic growth. Let us recognize the distinctiveness of these targets and underlying target groups and work towards solutions that address the underlying needs.

A scoping review of the contributions of farmers’ organizations to smallholder agriculture

“…Although the broader literature identifies several characteristics, such as farm size, gender of the household head, education and age, that influence FO membership and the heterogeneity of impacts 40 , our findings reveal that distance of households from markets is also an important variable hindering FO benefits. Gassner et al 41 argue for differentiating among smallholders on the basis of the availability of resources. Households engaged in small-scale farming as a livelihood may have varying income and assets, resources to reinvest in agriculture or access to better-paid non-farm jobs to transition out of farming 38 .…”

“…For marginalized farmers who have limited capacity to benefit from FO membership, food security challenges require different interventions. Instead of improving production systems or market access, these might instead focus on, for example, basic social protections, income support, nutritional supplements or seasonal food security packs 41 .…”

Who Wants to Farm? Answers Depend on How You Ask: A Case Study on Youth Aspirations in Kenya

“…This seems a sensible choice considering the seasonality and riskiness associated with farming, which may be aggravated by climate change. Additionally, for smallholder farmers to escape poverty purely based on farming appears difficult if not impossible (Gassner et al 2019;Harris and Orr 2014). This may explain why most parents envision relatively more secure employment-based livelihood choices for their children when forced to decide between several options.…”

Genetic structure and diversity of upland rice germplasm using diversity array technology (DArT)-based single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers

“…Rice production in the upland ecology holds enormous potentials to meet the dual objectives of providing food and poverty escape in Africa (Gassner et al ., 2019). Agriculture is the traditional mainstay of the African economy with agricultural activities predominantly in the upland ecology, which covers a meaningful proportion of the arable land areas in the region (Allurri et al ., 1979; Diagne et al ., 2013).…”