Policy considerations for African food systems : towards the United Nations 2021 Food Systems Summit

Achieving food and nutrition security and ending hunger is a complex and multi-faceted global challenge, which requires urgent attention, particularly in Africa. To eliminate hunger, the continent needs to transition to new sustainable, inclusive, and resilient food systems that deliver nutritious food and a healthy planet for all. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities highlighted during the “Food Systems Transformation to Address the SDGs” session convened by the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) and partners at the 8th World Sustainability Forum (WSF2020) held in September 2020. The paper reflects on how African food systems need to change to achieve the food systems related and interconnected the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also presents issues for consideration at the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. Key considerations include (i) the realization that nutrition insecurity is not food insecurity, (ii) the need for Africa to actualize its potential, (iii) the need to demystify policy development processes; (iv) the need to invest in better measurements and indicators; and (v) the need to create nature-based climate-smart solutions.The U.K. Research and Innovation the Global Challenges Research Fund.https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainabilityam2022Centre for the Advancement of Scholarshi

Climate Smart Agriculture: More Than Technologies Are Needed to Move Smallholder Farmers Toward Resilient and Sustainable Livelihoods

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is defined as agricultural practices that sustainably increase productivity and system resilience while reducing greenhouse gas emissions1. CSA helps ensure that climate change adaptation and mitigation are directly incorporated into agricultural development planning and investment strategies. Our perspective on CSA is sustainable agriculture, based upon integrated management of water, land and ecosystems at landscape scale. CSA is being widely promoted as the future of African agriculture and as a viable answer to climate change. Because agriculture remains key to development in Africa, CSA has the potential to increase productivity and resilience while reducing the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers. CSA can benefit smallholder farmers directly by increasing efficiency of precious inputs such as labour, seeds and fertilizers, increasing food security, and opportunities for income generation. By protecting ecosystems and landscapes, CSA helps protect natural resources for future generations. Yet, CSA technologies and approaches alone will not increase resilience or improve livelihoods of significant numbers of small holders who survive within complex systems. Decades and hundreds of millions of dollars invested in research, development and technology transfer have not transformed African smallholders. Evidence shows that top down command and control systems for technology diffusion do not generate sustainable change

Irrigating Africa: policy barriers and opportunities for enhanced productivity of smallholder farmers

African governments have ambitious plans to expand irrigated agriculture, though existing smallholder schemes have largely failed to use land and water sustainably or become profitable. Six government-owned irrigation schemes in Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe were assessed to identify common policy barriers and opportunities for higher productivity among smallholder farmers. Issues like insecure land tenure systems, unclear institutional arrangements and poor access to markets have contributed to limited profitability. Reform of currently insecure land tenure, strengthening farmer organizations and reforming policies are recommended so that governments step back from scheme management and foster market linkages to enable more profitable irrigated agriculture.This work was supported by Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research grant number FSC-2013-006

Irrigating Africa: policy barriers and opportunities for enhanced productivity of smallholder farmers

African governments have ambitious plans to expand irrigated agriculture, though existing smallholder schemes have largely failed to use land and water sustainably or become profitable. Six government-owned irrigation schemes in Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe were assessed to identify common policy barriers and opportunities for higher productivity among smallholder farmers. Issues like insecure land tenure systems, unclear institutional arrangements and poor access to markets have contributed to limited profitability. Reform of currently insecure land tenure, strengthening farmer organizations and reforming policies are recommended so that governments step back from scheme management and foster market linkages to enable more profitable irrigated agriculture

Stakeholder-driven transformative adaptation is needed for climate-smart nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa.

Improving nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa under increasing climate risks and population growth requires a strong and contextualized evidence base. Yet, to date, few studies have assessed climate-smart agriculture and nutrition security simultaneously. Here we use an integrated assessment framework (iFEED) to explore stakeholder-driven scenarios of food system transformation towards climate-smart nutrition security in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. iFEED translates climate-food-emissions modelling into policy-relevant information using model output implication statements. Results show that diversifying agricultural production towards more micronutrient-rich foods is necessary to achieve an adequate population-level nutrient supply by mid-century. Agricultural areas must expand unless unprecedented rapid yield improvements are achieved. While these transformations are challenging to accomplish and often associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions, the alternative for a nutrition-secure future is to rely increasingly on imports, which would outsource emissions and be economically and politically challenging given the large import increases required. [Abstract copyright: © 2024. The Author(s).

A new integrated assessment framework for climate-smart nutrition security in sub-Saharan Africa : the integrated Future Estimator for Emissions and Diets (iFEED)

Funding statement This work was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council through UK Research and Innovation as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund, AFRICAP programme, grant number BB/P027784/1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The impact of research partnerships on community development projects : a case study of the Limpopo Basin Development Challenge Programme

The concept of partnership has in the last decade emerged as being fundamental for successful poverty eradication. The importance of partnerships in development efforts is reflected in high level regional and global commitments and initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) of 2001, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005, the Accra Agenda for Action of 2008 and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation of 2011. With the emergence of the partnership approach to development, there has also been a significant change in focus and direction of development approaches with new approaches such as Research for Development becoming prominent. Partnerships in Research for Development projects are viewed as important means for contributing to knowledge generation resulting in better and improved services, and development programmes. Although partnerships are believed to be essential in achieving development outcomes, little is known about their impact on the communities which their research is supposed to improve. This thesis examines the impact of research for development partnerships using the Challenge Programme on Water and Food’s (CPWF) Limpopo Basin Development Challenge Programme (LBDC) as a case study. The LBDC was organized into four interlinked technical research projects and one coordination project (L1-L5). The diverse range of partners in the LBDC evident in the range of disciplines and sectors represented in the partnership presented an excellent case study into how different organizations with undoubtedly different mandates come together to work on research for development programmes. The objectives of the study were: to determine the key steps for establishing successful research partnerships; examine how partnerships are communicated to communities and relevant stakeholders paying particular attention to the different communication approaches used and the challenges experienced; assess the success of the partnership in achieving its objectives and the contribution of the partnership to the development of the community; and identify valuable lessons that can be considered by those wanting to replicate, and apply of the partnership approach to other projects. The findings are based on primary and secondary data collected using in-depth semi-structured interviews with 19 LBDC programme partners, qualitative document analysis and participant observation. Results indicate that largely the LBDC partnership was successful in delivering on its objectives as the programme was able to raise awareness of the most up to date available research evidence on agricultural water management and results were shared with basin authorities. Results further support existing knowledge on partnerships and they confirm many of the observations and claims made by established commentators in this field regarding good practice in partnerships. It is clear that the establishment of partnerships is a process that has to be well thought out, the importance of communication within and outside the partnership and external role and stakeholder engagement at all phases of the partnership and especially in monitoring and evaluating the progress of the partnership’s work is crucial. Lessons and recommendations from the study could be valuable to development professionals who carry out their research and development work in partnership.Dissertation (MSocSc)--University of Pretoria, 2015.Anthropology and ArchaeologyUnrestricte

Biological control interventions reduce pest abundance and crop damage while maintaining natural enemies in sub-Saharan Africa:a meta-analysis

Insect pests are a major challenge to smallholder crop production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where access to synthetic pesticides, which are linked to environmental and health risks, is often limited. Biological control interventions could offer a sustainable solution, yet an understanding of their effectiveness is lacking. We used a meta-analysis approach to investigate the effectiveness of commonly used biocontrol interventions and botanical pesticides on pest abundance (PA), crop damage (CD), crop yield (Y) and natural enemy abundance (NEA) when compared with controls with no biocontrol and with synthetic pesticides. We also evaluated whether the magnitude of biocontrol effectiveness was affected by type of biocontrol intervention, crop type, pest taxon, farm type and landscape configuration. Overall, from 99 studies on 31 crops, we found that compared to no biocontrol, biocontrol interventions reduced PA by 63%, CD by over 50% and increased Y by over 60%. Compared to synthetic pesticides, biocontrol resulted in comparable PA and Y, while NEA was 43% greater. Our results also highlighted that the potential for biocontrol to be modulated by landscape configuration is a critical knowledge gap in SSA. We show that biocontrol represents an effective tool for smallholder farmers, which can maintain yields without associated negative pesticide effects. Furthermore, the evidence presented here advocates strongly for including biocontrol practices in national and regional agricultural policies