A cultivated planet in 2010 – Part 2: The global gridded agricultural-production maps

Data on global agricultural production are usually available as statistics at administrative units, which does not give any diversity and spatial patterns; thus they are less informative for subsequent spatially explicit agricultural and environmental analyses. In the second part of the two-paper series, we introduce SPAM2010 – the latest global spatially explicit datasets on agricultural production circa 2010 – and elaborate on the improvement of the SPAM (Spatial Production Allocation Model) dataset family since 2000. SPAM2010 adds further methodological and data enhancements to the available crop downscaling modeling, which mainly include the update of base year, the extension of crop list, and the expansion of subnational administrative-unit coverage. Specifically, it not only applies the latest global synergy cropland layer (see Lu et al., submitted to the current journal) and other relevant data but also expands the estimates of crop area, yield, and production from 20 to 42 major crops under four farming systems across a global 5 arcmin grid. All the SPAM maps are freely available at the MapSPAM website (http://mapspam.info/, last access: 11 December 2020), which not only acts as a tool for validating and improving the performance of the SPAM maps by collecting feedback from users but is also a platform providing archived global agricultural-production maps for better targeting the Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, SPAM2010 can be downloaded via an open-data repository (DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PRFF8V; IFPRI, 2019)

Irrigation potential and investment return in Kenya

The potential for irrigation investments in Kenya is highly dependent upon geographical, agronomic and economic factors that need to be taken into account when assessing the long-term viability and sustainability of planned projects. This study analyzed large dam-based and small-scale irrigation potential and investment needs for Kenya based on agronomic, hydrological, and economic factors. The analysis of small-scale irrigation expansion shows that the potential for investment in small-scale projects in Kenya ranges from 54,000 ha to 241,000 hectares, with an internal rate of return from 17% to 32%. For the dam-based investment analysis, under low-cost assumption, 58 dams of 73 are profitable (IRR > 0). At high cost level, the number is 52. If we raise the IRR cutoff value to 12%, 32 dams are economically feasible. We showed that there is considerable scope for the expansion of both dam-based and small-scale irrigation in Kenya, and we also provided a strategic prioritization for investments in irrigation schemes and projects