Abstract
Conservation Agriculture (CA) is advocated as an agricultural innovation that will improve smallholder famer resilience to future climate change. Under the conditions presented by the El Niño event of 2015/16, the implementation of CA was examined in southern Malawi at household, district and national institutional levels. Agricultural system constraints experienced by farming households are identified, and in response the technologies, structures and agency associated with CA are evaluated. The most significant constraints were linked to household health, with associated labour and monetary impacts, in addition to the availability of external inputs of fertiliser and improved seed varieties. Our findings show that such constraints are not adequately addressed through current agricultural system support structures, with the institutions surrounding CA (in both Government extension services and NGO agricultural projects) focusing attention predominantly at field level practice, rather than on broader system constraints such as education and health support systems. Limited capacity within local institutions undermines long term efforts to implement new technologies such as CA. It is vitally important that the flexibility of farmers to adapt new technologies in a locally-appropriate manner is not closed down through national and institutional aims to build consensus around narrow technical definitions of a climate-smart technology such as CA. To enable farmers to fully utilise CA programmes, interventions must take a more holistic, cross-sectoral approach, understanding and adapting to address locally experienced constraints. Building capacity within households to adopt new agricultural practices is critical, and integrating healthcare support into agricultural policy is a vital step towards increasing smallholder resilience to future climate change.
Highlights
Climate change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is contributing to increasingly erratic rainfall and prolonged dry spells (Niang et al, 2014), disrupted growing seasons and crop failures (Schlenker and Lobell, 2010)
Emphasis is placed differently on these constraints from different perspectives, they rarely exist in isolation, and it is this combination of constraints that explains why transformation in small scale African agriculture is so challenging
Given this range of constraints that influence the adoption of Conservation Agriculture (CA), we explored the scope to identify constraints that may affect agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers beyond those directly related to the practicalities of cultivation. This enabled the identification of constraints that operate within the farming system as a whole, such as health and education. These constraints, and the ability of CA to alleviate them, are considered through the rest of this paper as follows: (1) We present the findings of a combination of household surveys and focus groups conducted in three districts of southern Malawi, immediately following the 2015/16 El Niño event by outlining agricultural system constraints as experienced and described by those households
Summary
Climate change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is contributing to increasingly erratic rainfall and prolonged dry spells (Niang et al, 2014), disrupted growing seasons and crop failures (Schlenker and Lobell, 2010). Investments in the intensification of African agriculture have focused on field-scale innovations and inputs: the application of inorganic fertilisers and herbicides, hybrid and genetically modified crops, irrigation, mechanisation and alternatives to cereal crops These efforts have largely failed to deliver the wide-scale transformation of agricultural systems and increases in productivity that are associated with the Asian green revolution (George, 2014). Small-scale production in Africa often integrates crops and livestock; cereals are commonly produced for both markets and consumption; and systems are subject to multiple constraints These all affect the appropriateness of agronomic interventions and counter the conventional logic of ‘yields’ as an absolute metric of agricultural performance (Berre et al, 2014). Emphasis is placed differently on these constraints from different perspectives, they rarely exist in isolation, and it is this combination of constraints that explains why transformation in small scale African agriculture is so challenging
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