Abstract
Almost half of the Burkinabe population is moderately or severely affected by food insecurity. With climate change, domestic food production may become more under pressure, further jeopardizing food security. In this study, we focus on the production of maize, sorghum and millet as staple cereal crops in Burkina Faso to assess food availability as one component of food security. Based on a statistical weather-driven crop model, we provide a within-season forecast of crop production 1 month before the harvest. Hindcast results from 1984 to 2018 produce an r2 of 0.95 in case of known harvest areas and an r2 of 0.88 when harvest areas are modelled instead. We compare actually supplied calories with those usually consumed from staple crops, allowing us to provide early information on shortages in domestic cereal production on the national level. Despite the—on average—sufficient domestic cereal production from maize, sorghum and millet, a considerable level of food insecurity prevails for large parts of the population. We suggest to consider such forecasts as an early warning signal for shortages in domestic staple crop production and encourage a comprehensive assessment of all dimensions of food security to rapidly develop counteractions for looming food crises.
Highlights
Almost half of the Burkinabe population is moderately or severely affected by food insecurity
In addition to a statistical weather-driven crop yield model tested for the time period from 1984 to 2018, we use information about harvest areas to derive a crop production forecast 1 month before the harvest
Our study aims to contribute to a better understanding of food production as one component of food availability in Burkina Faso
Summary
Almost half of the Burkinabe population is moderately or severely affected by food insecurity. We focus on the production of maize, sorghum and millet as staple cereal crops in Burkina Faso to assess food availability as one component of food security. Due to ongoing armed conflicts and the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, which negatively affected households’ income and access to markets, the number of food insecure people is even expected to increase[6] This underlines the need to study the reasons and devise tools for increasing or stabilizing food supply. Whereas existing yield forecasting studies in Burkina Faso focus on single crops, have a limited geographic coverage or time horizon[11,12,13,14], our study covers the whole country and provides a within-season yield forecast for the most important cereal crops of maize, sorghum and millet. We rigorously validate our forecasts in two levels of outof-sample modelling
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