Innovative Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Practices in the Smallholder Farming System of South Africa

Ajuruchukwu Obi,Okuhle Maya

doi:10.3390/su13126848

Abstract

Climate change is easily the most serious human and environmental crisis of the present generation. While awareness of the existence and consequences of climate change is becoming widespread, the specific effects on agriculture and the extent to which innovative climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices are being adopted remain unclear. This study was conducted in three local municipalities of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa to determine the patterns of smallholder choice of alternative climate-smart agricultural practices and the factors affecting such choices. It was particularly crucial to investigate why adaptation of CSA practices continues to be lower than expectation despite awareness of their benefits, thus highlighting the social and cultural limits to adaptation to climate change. A total of 210 households were enumerated on the basis of their involvement in crop and livestock farming. The data were analyzed by means of multinomial logistic model, which was applied separately to individual local municipality data sets and a combined provincial data set, and it was revealed that most farmers were not being sufficiently motivated to move from established practices to adopt new CSA practices. The most influential factors in the decision process as to what CSA practice to adopt were primary occupation, farming system type, household size, age and membership of farmer groups. It seemed that asset fixity constrained farmers to continue with existing practices rather than shift to new, more profitable practices, a situation that can be resolved by external intervention by government agencies and/or other entities. Awareness creation targeting remote rural areas as well as institutions to ease farmers’ access to credit and information will contribute to higher adoption rates, which are likely to lead to enhanced food security and standard of living for rural dwellers as their agricultural production and productivity improve.

Highlights

The findings support the notion of agriculture being an activity for women, due to the fact that women pursue duties of being custodians for their families while men often migrate to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities
The distribution of roles between men and women in the rural economies is evident in such activities as poultry keeping, small stock husbandry and in staple food production [44,45], and it is noted that women in the area work tirelessly toward increasing productivity through their participation in food production [45]
The results show that the farmers had a higher likelihood of choosing this particular climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practice in relation to the base category when occupational category improved from a previous status

Summary

Introduction

Numerous studies have investigated the negative effects of climate change on agricultural production and food security in sub-Saharan Africa [1]. The high vulnerability of sub-Saharan African agricultural production to climate change arises largely from the fact that the farming system is mostly rain-fed [2]. Regardless of whether one looks at the picture based on mid-2019 estimates that about 820 million persons were undernourished and 1 billion malnourished worldwide [3], or the recent downward revision of the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) by the World Bank to 690 million undernourished persons [4], the situation is still desperate. The World Bank’s revised estimates were published in mid-2020 when the impacts of COVID-19 were still unfolding [4] and have since

Methods

Results

Conclusion