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Political economy challenges for climate smart agriculture in Africa

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Abstract

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has gained prominence in global agriculture and climate agendas for its perceived “triple win” contributions to food productivity, adaptation, and mitigation to climate change. This paper highlights three important challenges for CSA activities in Africa which provide insights into contested debates surrounding CSA’s ability to respond holistically to the complex realities facing resource-constrained farmers in the global South. These are (1) prevailing neoliberal market policies that emphasize private-sector driven agricultural development in the face of rising input costs and falling commodity prices; (2) an expansion in diversified livelihood strategies amongst smallholder households as a response to the highly unpredictable biophysical environment and economic climate under which they live; and (3) a growing competition for land and other productive resources. A deeper dive into political economy processes surrounding these three issues aims to bring critical attention to factors relevant to African agricultural development that highly impact farm-level practices and carry important implications for rural livelihood outcomes.

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Notes

  1. Empirical evidence on smallholder farmers’ sustained adoption of CSA practices remain subject to ongoing debate and the data on adoption success is at times complicated by the provision of free or subsidized inputs (e.g., improved seeds, fertilizers and herbicides) and/or access to finance by agricultural development projects or national governments, as is the case in studies assessing farmers’ uptake of conservation agriculture in southern Africa (see Andersson and D’Souza 2014; Giller et al. 2015).

  2. The CSA Prioritization Framework has been pilot-tested in several countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia since 2014 (CIAT 2014).

  3. These were cotton, groundnuts, maize, millet, rice and sorghum.

Abbreviations

AUDA-NEPAD:

African Union Development Agency

CSA:

Climate Smart Agriculture

ERA:

Evidence for Resilient Agriculture

GACSA:

Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor for very helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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    Helena Shilomboleni

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Shilomboleni, H. Political economy challenges for climate smart agriculture in Africa. Agric Hum Values 37, 1195–1206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10126-5

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