Abstract
Conventional wisdom holds that Sub-Saharan African farmers use few modern inputs despite the fact that most poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of inputs that embody improved technologies, particularly improved seed, fertilizers and other agro-chemicals, machinery, and irrigation. Yet following several years of high food prices, concerted policy efforts to intensify fertilizer and hybrid seed use, and increased public and private investment in agriculture, how low is modern input use in Africa really? This article revisits Africa’s agricultural input landscape, exploiting the unique, recently collected, nationally representative, agriculturally intensive, and cross-country comparable Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) covering six countries in the region (Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda). Using data from over 22,000 households and 62,000 agricultural plots, we offer ten potentially surprising facts about modern input use in Africa today.
Highlights
Much of the sustained agricultural growth necessary for economic transformation comes from expanded input use, especially of modern inputs—like improved seed, fertilizers and other agrochemicals, machinery, and irrigation—that embody improved technologies
It is wellacknowledged that Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) did not participate to the same degree in the Green Revolution of the 1970–80s and has, not been able to reap the economy-wide rewards associated with input use expansion
Countrylevel variables account for 43% of the variation, farm operation variables account for 20%, biophysical variables account for 15%, market and accessibility variables account for 15%, and socio-economic variables account for 7%
Summary
Much of the sustained agricultural growth necessary for economic transformation comes from expanded input use, especially of modern inputs—like improved seed, fertilizers and other agrochemicals, machinery, and irrigation—that embody improved technologies. In Sheahan and Barrett (2014) we utilized one cross section of LSMS-ISA data collected between 2010 and 2012 in each of six countries (Niger, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda), including over 22,000 cultivating households and 62,000 agricultural plots, to produce a large number of descriptive statistics related to a set of inputs often cited as ‘‘under-used” in SSA: fertilizer, improved seed varieties, agro-chemicals (pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides), irrigation, and animal power and mechanized farm equipment In this synthesis article, we focus on ten key facts we found most striking and important to pushing forward today’s research and policy frontier related to agricultural input use. Apart from all of the aforementioned cleaning and weighting considerations, most of what follows relies on simple analysis of statistical associations
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