Konserveringslandbruk, levebrød og avskoging i Zambia

Conservation agriculture (CA) practices such as minimum tillage have been promoted for about two decades as a way to conserve soils and increase agricultural productivity and farm incomes in sub-Saharan Africa, including Zambia. As an integral component of Climate Smart Agriculture, which aims to enhance agricultural productivity and climate change adaptation and mitigation, CA is central to poverty reduction efforts since the majority of rural households in sub-Saharan Africa depend on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods. However, such multiple objectives associated with CA makes objective assessments of its uptake and impacts difficult. This thesis focuses on minimum tillage, the main component of CA, and addresses four questions on uptake, and impacts on maize yields, livelihoods and deforestation.Konserveringslandbruk (KL), inkludert redusert jordbearbeiding, har vært fremmet i omlag to tiår som et virkemiddel for å bevare jordsmonn og øke produktiviteten i landbruket og bønders inntekter i Afrika sør for Sahara, inkludert Zambia. KL er endel av klimasmart landbruk, som har som mål økt produktivitet, tilpasning til klimaendringer og reduksjon i klimagassutslipp. KL er sentralt i fattigdomsreduksjon siden de fleste rurale husholdninger i Afrika sør for Sahara har landbruk som sitt viktigste levebrød. Ulike målsettinger knyttet til KL gjør objektive vurderinger av opptak og effekter vanskelige. Denne avhandlingen fokuserer på redusert jordbearbeiding, den viktigste komponenten i KL, og svarer på fire spørsmål om opptak og effekter på maisavlinger, levekår og avskoging.Nora

Gendered impacts of agricultural subsidies in Zambia

Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa have been implementing agricultural subsidy programs aimed to raise productivity and promote household food security, among other things. Despite positing some gains in raising productivity, subsidies through the conventional or traditional Farmer Input Support Program (FISP) have been found to crowd out demand for commercial fertilizer. This paper asks if subsidies can reduce the gendered productivity gaps in agriculture. Applying panel data methods to the two-wave Rural Agricultural Livelihoods Surveys data collected in 2012 and 2015, the study found that male-managed plots had an average 34 kg/ha yield advantage over female-managed plots, suggesting gendered productivity gaps. The main empirical results suggest that access to FISP does not disproportionately raise crop productivity for female-managed plots. Thus, FISP is insufficient to address the male-female productivity gaps. While improving access to productive inputs for women is important to address gender productivity gaps, this will need to be complemented with deliberate measures to address the social-cultural norms that tip the balance of power dynamics, rights and entitlements towards men

Sustainable intensification and household dietary diversity in maize-based farming systems of Zambia and Zimbabwe

With only four years before the end date for the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition, the need to identify nutrition-sensitive and sustainable agricultural interventions that can address hunger and malnutrition cannot be more urgent. This paper assesses associations between sustainable intensification practices and dietary diversity in maize-based farming systems of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Using survey data from 1124 households, we apply an instrumental variable approach that allows to control for the fact that farmers self-select themselves into adopting sustainable intensification practices, making adoption endogenous. We also explore pathways from intensification to dietary diversity. We find significant positive associations between the adoption intensity of sustainable intensification practices (SIPs) such as minimum tillage, minimum tillage and crop rotation, and minimum tillage and intercrops and improved production and crop diversity and in turn, dietary diversity on average. These findings hinge on there being widespread adoption of SIPs. There is need for concerted efforts to address current bottlenecks that hinder widespread adoption and promote broader food group diversification to realize the nutrition related co-benefits associated with sustainable intensification

Understanding Adoption and Impacts of Conservation Agriculture in Eastern and Southern Africa: A Review

Conservation Agriculture (CA) aims to concurrently promote agricultural productivity, local livelihoods, climate resilience and other environmental objectives. We review the emerging evidence base in Eastern and Southern Africa to address whether CA is climate smart and why adoption rates by smallholders remain generally very low. We first develop an adoption framework that can be used to assess when and where the different components of CA are expected to be adopted under different conditioning factors and consider options to make CA climate smart. Our results suggest that CA can contribute positively to productivity and adaptation/resilience objectives, although the degree of success varies considerably by farm, household and regional characteristics. Overall, we find that capital-intensive (mechanized) CA is more likely to be adopted in areas of economic dynamism where capital is cheap relative to labor. Labor-intensive CA practices are more likely to be adopted in regions of economic stagnation where capital is expensive, and labor is abundant and cheap. A subnational focus is needed to identify economic conditions of different regions and agro-ecological zones and to test hypotheses derived from the framework in this paper and to propose the most appropriate CA packages for promotion. Our findings suggest that labor using variants of CA such as planting basins are more likely to be adopted than are capital using mechanized options in densely populated parts of Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe where labor is abundant, and presumably cheap, but capital is expensive. However, rising land scarcity (prices) and wages in the region present an opportunity for capital intensive, mechanized CA operations to be adopted if the cost of capital can be kept low and if there is a supportive environment for mechanization. We conclude that CA is climate smart and if adopted widely, it has the potential to help build resilience in smallholder farming systems. CA can be more climate smart, and its uptake can be enhanced by reframing, better targeting, adapting CA to location-specific economic and biophysical, and through greater and more effective public spending on agricultural research and development

Analysis of adoption of conservation agriculture practices in southern Africa: mixed-methods approach

In southern Africa, conservation agriculture (CA) has been promoted to address low agricultural productivity, food insecurity, and land degradation. However, despite significant experimental evidence on the agronomic and economic benefits of CA and large scale investments by the donor community and national governments, adoption rates among smallholders remain below expectation. The main objective of this research project was thus to investigate why previous efforts and investments to scale CA technologies and practices in southern Africa have not led to widespread adoption. The paper applies a multivariate probit model and other methods to survey data from 4,373 households and 278 focus groups to identify the drivers and barriers of CA adoption in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The results show that declining soil fertility is a major constraint to maize production in Zambia and Malawi, and drought/heat is more pronounced in Zimbabwe. We also find gaps between (a) awareness and adoption, (b) training and adoption, and (c) demonstration and adoption rates of CA practices in all three countries. The gaps are much bigger between awareness and adoption and much smaller between hosting demonstration and adoption, suggesting that much of the awareness of CA practices has not translated to greater adoption. Training and demonstrations are better conduits to enhance adoption than mere awareness creation. Therefore, demonstrating the applications and benefits of CA practices is critical for promoting CA practices in all countries. Besides, greater adoption of CA practices requires enhancing farmers’ access to inputs, addressing drudgery associated with CA implementation, enhancing farmers’ technical know-how, and enacting and enforcing community bylaws regarding livestock grazing and wildfires. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for policy and investments in CA promotion

Willingness to pay for agricultural mechanization services by smallholder farmers in Malawi

One of the main barriers to adopting smallholder agricultural mechanization in developing countries is the mismatch between the economies of scale of machines and farm size. Private sector-led mechanization services hold a promise to address this challenge, but there is a lack of evidence on demand for smallholder mechanization services. This study estimates the farmers' willingness to pay for mechanization services using the double-bounded contingent valuation method and data from 1512 households. Results show that, on average, farmers are willing to pay 11%, 33%, and 5% more than prevailing market rates for land preparation, maize shelling, and transportation services, respectively. The amounts farmers are willing to pay for the mechanization services vary by sex, age group, size of cultivated land, the value of farmer assets, market access, and agroecology. Men are willing to pay 26%, 25%, and 11% more than women for land preparation, maize shelling, and transportation services. Moreover, 40% of female and 90% of male farmers are willing to pay more than or equal to the prevailing market rate for land preparation services. The high demand for mechanization services among smallholder farmers points to the need for making the machinery available to rural communities through mechanization service providers or machinery hiring centers run by the private sector. The paper concludes by discussing the contextual factors and policy options for promoting smallholder mechanization in Malawi. [EconLit Citations: O33, Q11, Q13, Q16]

Smallholder farmers' willingness to pay for two-wheel tractor-based mechanisation services in Zambia and Zimbabwe

Mechanisation is back among top development policy priorities for transforming African smallholder agriculture. Yet previous and ongoing efforts ubiquitously suffer from lack of scientific information on end-user effective demand for different types of mechanical innovations to inform public investment or business development programmes. We assess smallholder farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for two-wheel tractor (2WT)-based ripping, direct seeding and transportation using a random sample of 2800 smallholder households in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Applying the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak Mechanism (BDM) experimental auctions, we find that at least 50% of sample households in Zambia and Zimbabwe were willing to pay more than the prevailing market prices for ripping. In nominal terms, sample households in Zimbabwe were willing to pay more than those in Zambia for the different services. Empirical results suggest that wealth is the strongest driver of WTP for tillage and seeding 2WT services while labour availability and using animal draft power reduce it. These findings imply a need to (i) raise awareness and create demand for 2WT-based services in an inclusive business manner that does not create perverse incentives and (ii) better target mechanisation to operations with comparative advantage, using approaches that bundle 2WT-based and other mechanisation services with asset-agnostic credit schemes or other interventions meant to overcome asset-mediated barriers

Conceptualising farming systems for agricultural development research: cases from Eastern and Southern Africa

In the context of broad scale system changes (e.g. climate change) and the prioritisation of impact-at-scale development, there is a particular need for farming systems research (FSR) to improve our understanding of the links between systems at multiple scales. Drawing on three empirical case studies of large-scale agricultural interventions in eastern and southern Africa, we highlight problems that arise from conceiving and justifying interventions on the basis of the simple aggregation of farms into large collective systems. We review changes in the approach and concepts of FSR and point to the value of farming systems concepts that go beyond these aggregations, and find ways to capture the multi-level system dynamics that link on-farm decision making to broader political, social, and environmental changes. Recent attempts at more accurately conceptualising the domain of FSR, and drawing distinctions between ‘farms’, ‘systems’, and ‘systems of farming’, represent a useful contribution to such work

Does minimum tillage improve the livelihood outcomes of smallholder farmers in Zambia?

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