The world’s current systems of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption are widely recognized as being unsustainable from both ecological and social perspectives. According to projections by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), if the current unsustainable food production systems are maintained it might be difficult to feed the growing human population, which is expected to reach nearly ten billion by 2050.

Agricultural policy and food systems analysts have called for a systematic transformation of food systems to ensure food and nutrition security, equity, poverty elimination, ecological sustainability, and other objectives of sustainable development. The engagement of young people is key to making this transition towards sustainable food systems. Especially in developing countries where the majority of youth live and where agricultural food systems constitute the largest employer.

In many developing countries in Africa, youth are active in many roles and spaces across the food systems. They play vibrant and diverse roles as food producers – contributing to the food and nutritional security of their households and communities; as entrepreneurs and innovators – leveraging technology to revolutionize the agribusiness field; and as agents of change – environmentalists, researchers, activists, journalists, and so on – building their communities’ awareness on ways to become more resilient to climate shocks.

The majority of youth in African countries are based in rural areas, where they are recruited into agriculture from childhood through family subsistence farming and the education curriculum. Many developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing a youth bulge, with those aged between 15 and 34 constituting more than 40% of the population. Thus, youth are an important demographic in African development, and today, most agricultural interventions are targeting this group to increase their participation in agricultural and economic development.

One such initiative is the Byte by Byte Policy Innovation program, a policy strategy that is active in seven African countries: Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Senegal. This strategy seeks to transform African food systems using digital technologies, by examining the role of institutional innovations and policies in enhancing farmers’ access to markets, information, and digital technologies.

In the absence of financial and technical support, the productivity of youth in the rural economy may be constrained due to production barriers such as the lack of access to resources. They tend to farm on smaller pieces of land, preferring shorter seasons and high-value farm enterprises, such as horticultural production, poultry, bee-keeping, and rabbit rearing.

Agricultural finance that is particularly targeted at young people will be key to supporting youth, as evidenced by the Empower Bank in Zimbabwe. In other countries – including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Tanzania – governments have partnered with business people and funding agencies to offer financial and technical support to young people, and help them develop ‘bankable’ agribusiness proposals. Opportunities such as these are making a huge difference in promoting youth in agriculture.

Despite initiatives to promote agricultural production and the engagement of youth in agriculture, agricultural production in the African continent remains low compared with the rest of the world. This is exacerbated by the pressures facing farmers from the climate crisis as well as the poor adoption of modern technologies that can improve their productivity in the face of climate threats.

Today’s world is driven by many new technologies, including blockchains, artificial intelligence, and the internet. Compared with older farmers, young farmers are more innovative and better adopters of modern technologies. Youth can turn this digital revolution into climate action for sustainable food systems in Africa.

Historically, farming was shunned by many young people and perceived as a domain for the poor and less educated. Today, more youth are drawn into farming by modern agricultural technologies which help intensify production and increase incomes. Using social media platforms, some of these young ‘agripreneurs’ publicize their enterprises and inspire their followers to venture into agribusiness.

In addition, young people in Africa often invest in activities that support and influence the food value chain. Value chain supporters include bankers, advisers, brokers, and providers of credit, machinery, and other various services. Others play important roles in transforming their nation’s food systems as value chain influencers: students, researchers, policy-makers, and climate activists.

The need for knowledge-driven production has led to a significant increase in the number of young researchers who are engaged in research and discovering innovative ways to solve the various challenges faced by African agri-food systems. For example, youth are considered important stakeholders in the research programs of organizations such as the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR) and international climate change negotiations.

Private sector-led initiatives, such as the Bayer-supported Youth Ag Summit, are also creating opportunities for young people around the world to discuss the challenges of food security and to share information on the opportunities available in agriculture. All of these activities offer opportunities to build and transform the African food system as a business.

Conclusion

While examining evidence around opportunities, challenges, and policies, this column has discussed the role that youth can play in transforming African food systems. Despite challenges – such as poor access to land, credit, and markets – the economic context within which young people operate offers them a variety of opportunities to transform African food systems and generate income.

Limited economic and employment opportunities in the urban and non-farm sectors in most African countries have increased policy-makers’ and development planners’ interest in ‘youth-inclusive rural transformation’, where agriculture in rural areas should ideally be intensive and commercially oriented. Future interventions should be based on approaches that incorporate youth aspirations and address the challenges associated with access to resources, such as land and credit.

More should be done to inspire young people, especially in the rural sector, to engage in agriculture and to integrate them into agricultural value chains by:

• Transforming rural areas via investments in infrastructure and other services.
• Supporting youth agribusiness projects with competitive grants.
• Demonstrating successful youth-run agribusiness on social and other media.
• Enhancing skills development through learning and information sharing.

Such interventions will contribute towards improving food and nutrition security and will also help address the challenge of Africa’s ageing farming population.

A Zimbabwean youth into poultry farming

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In periods of crisis such as Covid-19, policy-makers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face a trade-off between reducing consumer prices and providing incentives for production of staple foods. Timely monitoring tools are important for tracking how rapid policy interventions, such as export restrictions, affect prices and whether realignment is needed.

While much of the income of the rural poor comes from agriculture, research shows that the poorest households are often net food consumers. Keeping prices high enough to provide farmers with incentives for production intensification, while at the same time keeping them low enough to ensure that poor consumers have access to staple foods, has been one of the most critical issues during the pandemic. It is important both to reduce food price risks and to raise the productivity of smallholder staple food farms to keep the economy alive in rural areas.

Historically, farmer earnings in developing countries have often been depressed by their own country’s policies, such as heavy taxation of agricultural exports, which had pro-urban, anti-agricultural, and anti-trade biases. That situation has changed dramatically over the last 40 years, giving rise to different patterns of agricultural price incentives worldwide.

But as was previously seen in the world food crisis of 2007–08, out of fear of acute shortages and price volatility during the first wave of Covid-19, LMICs quickly enacted measures to protect poor consumers. Documented polices include reduction of import tariffs, temporary export restrictions, and price controls, all of which can create gaps between domestic and international prices.

To track the effect of trade and market policies on domestic prices in real time, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) developed a new monthly version of the ‘nominal rate of protection’ (NRP) indicator, and estimated it for staple cereals in 27 LMICs. This was based on data primarily from FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning System Food Price Monitoring and Analysis tool and UN Comtrade. We eventually examined 43 country and commodity combinations, or case studies (such as maize in Ecuador).

This monthly NRP ‘express’ (monthly NRPx) provides a sense of current intra-annual trends in price incentives (positive monthly NRPx value) and disincentives (negative value). Ideally, the new indicator can continue to enable rapid policy monitoring and tailored policy recommendations as Covid-19 evolves and when there are future shocks to the global food system.

How did price incentives change during the first wave of Covid-19?

In our research, we analyze year-on-year changes to monthly levels of price incentives during the pandemic’s first wave for the most-consumed staples of the poor and food-insecure: primarily rice, wheat, and maize, along with sorghum, millet, and potatoes. We find a median decline of 12.6 percentage points in incentives for staple food value chains during Covid-19’s first wave (defined here as the period from March 2020 to August 2020, based on case numbers recorded by the World Health Organization).

The low magnitude of change indicates that local markets were only marginally affected by a range of policy adjustments during the first wave. The negative median reflects the fact that many governments implemented policies intended to prevent domestic prices from increasing at the same rate as world prices, which resulted in a decline in price incentives.

The median decline in incentives for rice and wheat drive the overall decrease, as they made up 60% of case studies. As Figure 1 shows, maize had a median increase. This is likely to have been driven by the fact that international prices for maize actually decreased during the first wave, along with the lack of export restrictions compared with rice and wheat, and compounding impacts such as desert locust outbreaks.

Figure 1: Median changes to price incentives by commodity during the first wave of Covid-19

Note: Case study numbers in parentheses.

Source: Authors’ own elaboration.

Price incentives should continue to be monitored regularly

While international prices did not spike for cereals as expected during the pandemic’s first wave, in light of more recent price increases, it is imperative for governments to use updated data to consider potential impacts of policy responses during subsequent waves. It is vital that the potential for abrupt changes in trade policies (especially export restrictions) to contribute collectively to international price increases and volatility is taken into account, with a recognition of how they can result in a reduction in agricultural production and economic wellbeing.

In light of the small median decline in price incentives for staple food value chains during the first wave, Covid-19 provides the opportunity for governments to reconsider how to improve food availability and accessibility, and how to strengthen the resilience of food systems. It also should prompt consideration of how to adapt policy environments to be better equipped to respond to market shocks in a comprehensive way, that takes account of the potentially adverse effects of trade insulation.

Making a priority of collecting farm price data and calculating monthly price incentives for additional commodities will continue to guide policy development to ensure food security and nutrition for the world’s poorest consumers.

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Recent work evaluating scalable land tenure security interventions, as well as exploring the security of farms against theft suggests that the need to guard insecure land and crops distorts the application of agricultural resources.

In what follows, I outline how reducing two aspects of the vulnerability faced by smallholder farmers – insecure land tenure and insecure crops – empowers them to reduce the amount of time and resources that they have to allocate to unproductive activities.

The details of the context – especially farmers’ social relationships, their access to off-farm economic opportunities, and their access to land markets – are crucial for understanding the specific ways that smallholder farmers may respond to interventions that address the challenge of insecurity.

Addressing insecurity of land tenure

An evaluation of land tenure in Ghana shows that registration of informal land claims in a peri-urban setting, with off-farm economic opportunities, does not lead to an increase in agricultural investments or borrowing. Instead, households decrease their landholdings and reallocate labor to non-farm economic activities, especially when tenure is particularly vulnerable. This is consistent with labor being allocated partly to prevent land expropriation.

A similar analysis of tenure formalization – though one in which land tenure is secured but not tradable – finds increased investment in long-term agricultural improvements, such as perennial crops and tree planting. This is particularly true for households headed by women, who generally have weaker tenure security.

When looking at within-farmer reallocation of resources across plots included in the ‘treatment’ area and those just outside, the study finds that households headed by women are more likely to leave plots with improved security fallow and reallocate labor to relatively less secure plots. Men, who have stronger tenure security, are more likely to leave plots outside the treated area fallow.

These studies provide evidence that formalization of land tenure can successfully reduce one type of insecurity facing smallholder farmers. In turn, this affects their productivity by reducing the need to allocate labor to secure plots with informal tenure.

The impact depends on access to land markets: where land titles can be transferred, this reallocation leads to reduced agricultural production and increased off-farm activity, while formalization without transferable rights leads to reallocation of released guard labor from newly secured land to other plots.

Addressing vulnerability to theft and crop-burning

Other recent research shows that agricultural production is further distorted by an aspect of farm security that has received less attention: the vulnerability of smallholder farmers to crop theft. In developing countries, there are significant direct costs of this type of vulnerability, where firms spend a non-negligible amount on unproductive security labor and where farmers give gifts to neighbors to build relationships and deter theft.

The threat of theft may also influence other production decisions. Qualitative work indicates that criminals are believed to target certain crops more than others, and particularly agricultural practices that are high-value or uncommon. In addition, leaving the farm is seen to increase risk of theft, which means that farmers may miss off-farm economic opportunities.

In recent research, I explore the impact of securing farms against theft in Kenya, by matching farmers with trusted farm watchmen. Treated farmers were more likely to have started growing a new crop, or allocated more land to a crop, where improved security was the reason, as well as reporting that they increased their crop sales at off-farm markets.

Improved security increased the value of agricultural production per acre, although intriguingly, it is unlikely that this is driven by reduced theft. The strongest effect comes from crops that are not highly vulnerable to being stolen – such as cassava, which is a root crop with an attached shrub and requires effort to harvest.

Consistent with the studies of land tenure security, this suggests that reducing the vulnerability of high expected theft crops may allow farmers to reallocate their time, no longer spent on guarding work, towards other crops.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this type of insecurity is that it appears to relate to social preferences targeting those who experiment with agricultural practices. A study in Ethiopia shows that ‘money-burning’ behavior in a game with incentives is negatively correlated with real-life agricultural innovation. This suggests that insecurity punishes those who innovate and invest in profitable technology.

This is consistent with the study of watchmen where security primarily affects high-value crops or practices that are different from the norm. Interventions that can reduce this type of insecurity would therefore allow farmers to reduce their guard labor, as well as reducing the risk of investing in agricultural innovation, and improve their productivity.

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Governments around the developing world devote massive national resources to subsidize fertilizer. Just to give an example, in 2016, the Indian government spent about $11 billion – 0.5% of the country’s GDP – on fertilizer subsidies.

Fertilizer subsidies play a critical role in developing countries. Hundreds of thousands of people make their livelihoods in the agricultural sector, and fertilizer use keeps lagging what agricultural experts recommend. Agronomists argue that applying more fertilizer would increase crop yields substantially. This would, in turn, enhance farmers’ standards of living considerably.

So the question arises: if there are tremendous returns to higher fertilizer use, why aren’t farmers using more of it?

A widely accepted explanation is that some factors are restricting farmers from using the recommended amounts of fertilizer. Uncovering what these factors are is crucial for understanding the effects of fertilizer subsidies and how much governments should subsidize fertilizer.

There are many reasons why fertilizer application might be sluggish. Farmers may lack the resources to buy the recommended amounts. There might be shortages of complementary inputs. Available fertilizers may be adulterated. And behavioral biases might push away farmers from the goal of maximizing agricultural yields.

In recent research, I show the importance of risk-sharing arrangements in holding down fertilizer use in rural India. I then analyze how the government can use fertilizer subsidies to fight the inefficiencies that come along with these arrangements, improving farmers’ economic wellbeing.

Farmers in developing countries experience sizeable ups and downs in crop yields, as a result of weather, illnesses, and pests, among other things. They insure themselves against these risks by relying on risk-sharing arrangements: farmers share food and money to make sure that everyone makes it through tough times. These institutions of ‘informal insurance’ are ubiquitous in rural villages, where formal insurance schemes are often absent.

Economists have long recognized and empirically demonstrated that risk-sharing gives rise to the problem of ‘moral hazard’, just like any kind of insurance: being insured against bad outcomes pushes farmers to cut down their effort in agricultural production, inducing them to give away higher yields in exchange for more leisure.

On the other hand, research on technology adoption shows that effort and fertilizer are complementary inputs: besides the labor required to apply it, fertilizer spurs weed growth, which takes additional labor in the form of hand-weeding.

I combine this evidence from research on technology adoption with the idea of moral hazard and argue that risk-sharing (which induces farmers to curtail their effort) decreases the productivity (and hence the profitability) of fertilizer, ultimately leading to fertilizer being under-demanded.

I undertake the analysis in the context of 18 villages in the Indian semi-arid tropics. The data come from survey interviews conducted at a monthly frequency from 2009 to 2014 and covering more than 700 households.

The effect of risk-sharing on fertilizer used and hours worked by Indian farmers is large: relative to a scenario in which there is no insurance, a fully insured farmer would on average decrease fertilizer use by four times and reduce hours worked by more than six times.

How would a fertilizer subsidy affect the harmful effects of risk-sharing over fertilizer adoption rates and hours of work? What would be its consequences for farmers’ economic wellbeing?

Besides cutting production costs, a fertilizer subsidy can increase wellbeing for all because, by inducing farmers to buy more fertilizer, it pushes them to exert more effort, thereby weakening the bite of the moral hazard problem. More effort and more fertilizer result in higher yields – and hence more consumption for everyone.

A subsidy that would cut the observed prices of fertilizer in half would result in much higher consumption to increase the average farmer’s wellbeing by 51%.

My results are important in two respects. First, they show that risk-sharing arrangements, which are widespread village institutions, have a sizeable negative effect on fertilizer application and working hours.

Second, my results demonstrate a new channel through which fertilizer subsidies can increase farmers’ economic wellbeing: by lessening the productive inefficiency of the moral hazard problem that comes along with informal insurance.

When discussing fertilizer subsidies, not everyone is on the same side, as research suggests that fertilizer use at excessive rates can have negative effects, ranging from soil degradation to damages to human and animal health. But far from being a perfect solution to rural poverty, fertilizer subsidies can prove extremely useful in countering the productive hindrances brought about by village insurance institutions.

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Tenure security has long seemed the perfect marriage between economic theory and an actionable economic policy. Farmers are less willing to invest in their land, goes the theory, when they fear it may be stolen. By certifying their tenure through a legal title or official recognition, a government can reassure them that the fruits of their labor will be theirs to enjoy. Once secure in their rights, farmers will make the investments—building irrigation, applying fertilizer, planting nitrogen-fixing trees and so on—that will lift them out of poverty.

In line with economic theory, a small but prominent set of observational studies—in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Rwanda—links enhanced security of land tenure to greater investment. These studies leverage situations where certain farmers or certain parcels of land have been allocated land rights while others have not. All of the well-published observational studies find higher investment wherever land rights are more secure.

Motivated by this apparent consensus, international development organizations have spent vast sums on tenure reform initiatives across sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank has put $1.5 billion towards titling and registry programs everywhere from Ghana to Nicaragua. USAID (the US Agency for International Development) has likewise put millions towards titling and certification programs in sub-Saharan Africa.

A few of these new programs have been rolled out as ‘randomized controlled trials. Much as doctors test drugs, economists use such trials to test social programs by comparing groups that are on average identical except, in this case, that the ‘treated’ group has been given land tenure.

To our knowledge, only two such randomized trials are complete, and neither finds effects as large as in the observational studies. Analysis of a program run by the government of Benin to regularize tenure in anticipation of distributing land titles finds statistically significant but small average effects on some measures of investment (tree-planting, perennial crops) and no effect on others (land fallowing, labor).

Meanwhile, the most recent trial of which we know—our own study in Zambia—finds that a USAID-funded tenure security intervention has had no statistically significant impact on any outcome highlighted by the prior body of research. By comparison, a more traditional extension program in the same context has had large effects on investment, suggesting that the barriers to investment are a lack of finance and technical knowledge rather than tenure insecurity.

The randomized interventions may show smaller impacts than the earlier non-randomized work for any of several reasons. Since governments often grant land titles to those with wealth and power, a non-randomized study would have to find a similarly privileged group that arbitrarily was not given a title for comparison—a difficult proposition.

Alternatively, governments and traditional authorities may be most likely to allow a tenure intervention only where informal rights are already strong and thus least valuable. It is also possible that there are observational studies that found no effect but were never published because editors were skeptical of results cutting against the apparent scientific consensus.

Why don’t farmers react to land tenure as economic theory predicts? One possibility is that formal recognition of tenure just replaces informal recognition. Chiefs and fellow villagers may accept a household’s tenure even though the government does not. Households may have never faced a serious risk of expropriation to begin with.

But our study finds that before the intervention, around 40% of households feared that their rights might be infringed in the coming years, and that this fear declined among households given tenure. Nevertheless, these same households were no more likely to invest.

It is also possible that standard economic theory does not capture accurately how farmers think about tenure insecurity and investment. In focus groups, households confirmed that they felt more secure in their rights, but that perception had no bearing on their decision to invest. Indeed, despite widespread perceptions of insecurity, 90% of households in our sample reported that a lack of formal documentation did not deter them from investing in their land.

Such a disconnect is difficult to explain with conventional theories of decision-making. It might be explained by insights from behavioral economics, but these theories have not yet been tested in connection with land tenure security, leaving many open questions. These open questions suggest that policy-makers should be cautious about tenure security interventions. Their impact is less well understood than it may at first appear.

One solution is to run randomized pilot studies of any intervention before scaling up and requiring researchers to pre-register the trial and its key outcomes to minimize the risk of publication bias. While tenure regularization may have great value in giving farmers peace of mind, its potential to drive investment is far from certain.

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The ecosystems and communities of mountain regions are increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards arising from climate change and adaptations of land systems. One example is in the Koshi River Basin in Nepal.

Such vulnerability exists at the intersections of environmental vagaries and human agency. This implies that there is a possibility of change if we can link different communities of knowledge, policy, and action, and allow them to work together to resolve complex problems and pursue agreed objectives.

Resilience is an objective that embraces an adaptive and transformative thinking in response to non-linear dynamics of complex social-ecological systems. Such resilience thinking corresponds to a sense of human agency to make a change.

Is there an effective mechanism of change for strengthening community resilience – the ability of a community and its members to adapt and thrive in changing social and ecological environments? I believe that citizen-powered ‘knowledge hybridization’ is one such mechanism.

Recent advances in remote sensing and engineering geology have improved efforts to monitor, predict, prevent, and mitigate the natural hazards of mountains, such as landslides. But numerous researchers have also acknowledged the merits of traditional local knowledge and its contribution to social and ecological resilience.

In many cases, development interventions that bring externally derived scientific knowledge and technical solutions do not engage local communities in remote mountain regions such as the Nepalese Himalayas. When engagement does happen, interventions can alienate communities if external experts and policy-makers ignore local cultural knowledge, and try to ‘fix’ problems in places that are depicted as underdeveloped.

Addressing this disjuncture between local knowledge and scientific knowledge requires a broader understanding of the conditions in which the two kinds of knowledge are produced and exercised. It also requires understanding when they are compatible, and how they can be integrated through collaborative approaches to develop resilience to local, regional, and global environmental change.

Knowledge hybridization might be one such mechanism towards resilience, ‘where traditional knowledge, practices, and beliefs are merged with novel forms of knowledge and technologies to create new knowledge systems’.

Although hybridization implies that certain pieces of traditional knowledge – such as facts, practices, beliefs, experiences, and memories – are either replaced or endorsed by science, it is from the interplay of replacement and endorsement that the capacity of a community to regenerate and apply hybrid knowledge evolves.

The interplay functions to create learning conditions in which multiple knowledge, practices, and beliefs are up for inspection and application to allow decision-making and problem-solving, new knowledge gaining, and adaptive capacity-building in response to specific social and ecological changes. The adaptive capacity built by such a process contributes to the resilience of the community.

Research shows that knowledge engagement – for example, on environmental issues – can be alienating for local knowledge-holders due to a feeling of ambivalence.

People have a strong need to impose consistency, coherence, and continuity on their behavior. When they are confronted with new information that doesn’t comply with their existing knowledge system, a defense mechanism will be activated by such cognitive dissonance to deny, repress, or even fabricate imaginary experiences to preserve the status quo.

In this case, if strong status quo preservation is observed among the intended beneficiaries of attempted interventions, it may illustrate their ineffectiveness. This may create and require varied conditions for knowledge engagement and hybridization to help address implementation challenges associated with information asymmetry, knowledge disjuncture, and community mobilization.

In this sense, social science plays a role in understanding such varied conditions and facilitating the process of knowledge hybridization. For example, ethnographic methods in anthropology and sociology have been used to investigate public engagement on environmental concerns. They have produced valuable qualitative data that illustrate what has prevented lay people from engaging on such issues.

Citizen science also helps put the notion of knowledge hybridization into practice. For example, collaborative digital mapping and ‘participatory GIS’ (geographic information systems) have been suggested as effective forms of citizen science to make knowledge hybridization a reality.

In these practices, professional scientists and local community members ‘co-generate’ digital and interactive maps as a result of knowledge interaction and co-production. Mainstream scientific understanding of human vulnerability can thus be paired with contextualized local knowledge that ‘integrates human adaptability with vulnerability to provide a more holistic picture’ of community resilience-building.

To foster the resilience of mountain farming communities more effectively, citizen-powered knowledge hybridization, through immersive engagement and empathy with local knowledge-holders, will help to develop a fuller understanding of local agricultural decision-making processes. Such research will produce an engaging story that explores the meaning behind interactions between farmers, policy-makers, and researchers.

Social scientists pay attention to the subjectivity of their research topic: the construction of meaning; what constitutes hybridization, knowledge, and ‘good and preferred’ agricultural practices; and how this may have informed the way that the researchers approach issues of environmental change, development interventions, and science engagement.

When social scientists are actively involved in knowledge co-production and science engagement activities, their reflective interpretations of how their own knowledge is being informed by and merged with local knowledge are critical in evincing the process of knowledge hybridization going both ways.

A learning process allows both researchers and farmers to make sense of local/scientific practices through observation and daily interactions. As more knowledge is being co-produced, the boundary between scientific and local knowledge is increasingly blurred and diluted, cradling a lived fluidity of ‘farmer-researcher/researcher-farmer’ identity.

That their communication skills evolve during the process in expressing both local and scientific knowledge can therefore be regarded as an expression of knowledge hybridization where ontological dissonance is reconciled and shared meaning is co-constructed.

This engaged knowledge hybridization may enable knowledge, policy, and action communities to move beyond dichotomies of ‘Western’ versus ‘Third World’, traditional versus modern, and local versus scientific, while also cultivating resilience for mountain communities.

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Communities whose livelihoods are dependent on climatic conditions are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. Dry zone farmers in Sri Lanka, for example, have experienced significant deviations in the rainfall pattern in recent years, and increased occurrences of climate-induced disasters. Their livelihoods are under threat from the floods and droughts that have alternated over the last five years.

Uncertainties are inherent in agricultural livelihoods, but the new climate trends are adding to them, threatening the traditional way of farming in Sri Lanka. This calls for effective risk management strategies for farmers – and one tool that is commonly proposed is index-based climate insurance. In a recent study, its potential and practicalities were examined.

Hurdles

Climate insurance in the form of crop insurance has been in existence for decades in Sri Lanka, primarily because it is a prerequisite for obtaining agricultural loans from formal financial institutions. The Agriculture and Agrarian Development Board is the agency that handles crop insurance offered by the government. Two private insurance companies also offer crop insurance products in combination with the agricultural loans provided by its partner bank.

Traditional crop insurance products in Sri Lanka take the indemnity-based approach, according to which insurance payments are calculated based on field-level assessments of losses due to identified disasters. Field-level loss assessment involves high costs in terms of both time and money. There are also many transparency-related issues for farmers, which lead to loss of trust.

Almost all the problems with indemnity-based insurance are seen in the Sri Lankan context, including adverse selection and moral hazard. These issues might have led to low coverage levels of crop insurance over the years.

The alternative is to move towards index-based climate insurance, which makes use of an objective parameter such as rainfall that has a close correlation with crop yield. It is thus able to get past an array of problems with indemnity-based insurance.

The technical feasibility of index insurance

We conducted a series of field-level discussions with farmers about the climatic challenges that they have experienced over the past two to three decades. It was striking that they could recall bad years as far back as the 1980s and the specific difficulties that they went through then, primarily due to climate-induced events. The frequency of bad years showed an increasing trend when it came to their memories of the past ten years.

We then matched the farmers’ experiences with data from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS). CHIRPS is a quasi-global rainfall dataset covering the period from 1981 until present.

The Sri Lankan farmers’ experiences with heavy rains, floods and droughts in a given month of the bad years are directly comparable with the rainfall anomalies shown in the CHIRPS maps. This suggests that implementing rainfall index-based climate insurance in Sri Lanka is technically feasible.

It is also encouraging that a private insurance provider pilot tested index-based insurance for farmers in Sri Lanka. In addition, government crop insurance providers are considering the index-based insurance option.

A way forward

The availability of timely and accurate data is a crucial factor in the practical implementation of index-based insurance. Time series data are essential for designing the insurance product. In this sense, both data generation and efficient data-sharing are equally important.

Rainfall in Sri Lanka is primarily measured by the Department of Meteorology. In addition, there are several institutions that gauge rainfall, including the Irrigation Department and the Department of Agriculture. But the number of existing rainfall stations is inadequate to implement successful index-based insurance.

There have been attempts to establish automated rain gauges in selected areas, which should be developed further. It is also essential to establish an efficient data-sharing system among the data-generating agencies and the data users, including the climate insurance providers.

The shift from indemnity-based insurance to index-based insurance calls for effective ground-level interventions. The government and private sector insurance providers have to conduct an effective education program for farmers on climate insurance in general, and more specifically, index-based insurance. It is also vital to have meaningful community participation in the design and implementation of insurance.

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Estimating the costs of climate change is challenging because it is hard to predict how people will react to it. Researchers often estimate models based on historical weather patterns and agricultural data to arrive at predictions of future crop yields, assuming everything else will remain constant. But it can be difficult to account for adaptation.

Some studies suggest that a reallocation of economic activity such as migration, changes in trade patterns, or sectoral employment should be expected. Other studies, based on farmers’ self-stated adaptive strategies, emphasise changes in consumption and savings as potential temporary responses.

Typically, it is assumed that these models estimate an upper bound of the economic costs of climate change. Future adaptation, it is assumed, will reduce those costs. But adaptation could already be at play, and understanding farmers’ reactions to weather shocks may shed light on possible mitigation strategies.

In our research, we explore how Peruvian farmers adapt and change their agricultural practices in response to high temperatures. The study is one of the first to examine adaptation to climate shocks in the developing world by considering farmers as both producers and consumers.

It demonstrates how adaptation can significantly affect forecasts of climate change impacts, and while mitigating shocks in the short-run, create additional medium- and long-run costs. Standard estimates of the costs of climate change may be mismeasuring the true impact of higher temperatures in developing countries on agricultural yields, defined by output and land used.

Farmers in our sample generally hold fewer than three hectares (7.4 acres) of land, and use basic technologies such as hand-held or animal-drawn ploughs. Their small-scale production of maize, potatoes, fruits and grains is enough to keep their families afloat in good times. But when faced with a significant number of high temperature days (above 36 degrees Celsius) during the growing season, their yields fall and they must adapt.

We find that the main response of these households is to increase the amount of land and domestic labour they use, including child labour. Households that own livestock sell their animals. They also reduce the number of different crops they grow, and increase their reliance on tubers.

This has important implications for the estimation of climate change impacts on agricultural production. We show that the observed fall in agricultural output after a hot season is an underestimation of the true effect of high temperatures on productivity, attenuated by farmers’ efforts to keep output above subsistence levels. This means that higher average temperatures may have a more detrimental effect on agricultural productivity than what could be inferred from just observing fluctuations in output.

The adaptations we document might also have serious ramifications for the farmers themselves. Farmers traditionally keep a significant portion of their land fallow in order to break disease cycles, to replenish soil nutrients, and to reduce erosion. Putting fallow land prematurely into production pays immediate expenses and puts food on the table.

In the long-term, however, it leads to diminishing returns and is an example of adaptive behaviour that intensifies the costs of climate change. The same is true for the reliance on fewer crops and the reduction of livestock: it makes farmers’ incomes less diversified and exposes them to large losses in the future.

Increasing their reliance on child labour will also have serious implications for the future of the children involved, as it could interfere with their education.

While our data do not allow us to estimate the longer-term implications of these adaptations, further work in this area would provide a clearer picture of the importance of this indirect channel of climate change impacts.

These patterns suggest a need for long-term planning and government intervention, possibly including crop insurance, to ensure future wellbeing and food security in rural areas.

That would be the case not only in Peru. It would also hold true in other Andean regions of Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador, as well as other parts of the developing world, where small producers will be faced with the growing challenges of climate change and adaptation.

The post When adapting to climate change makes things worse: Peru’s experience appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

While India’s economy is growing steadily, the nature of its structural transformation reveals a disturbing pattern. According to the India Labour and Employment Report 2014, despite a continuing structural shift of labour out of agriculture (the primary sector), most of the employment expansion in the non-agricultural sector is unorganised and informal, characterized by low incomes and poor work conditions.

Sectoral analysis suggests declining employment growth in agriculture and a significant increase in low-level services. In the case of manufacturing, employment growth is low. Furthermore, the majority of employment expansion in the secondary sector is confined to low-paid construction work. Thus, informality persists, and it is even expanding despite the growth of the formal sector.

Push and pull

So is India experiencing a progressive transformation within itself as an effective escape from agriculture? Or is informality persisting and even spreading as another site of misery (along with small-scale agriculture)? And finally, can growth of the formal sector and the overall economy resolve the problems of the informal sector or do these phenomena actually aggravate the problem?

Contrary to dominant claims and popular perceptions, we have shown through our continuing research over more than a decade that the growth of India’s economy (driven by its formal sectors) is the prime cause of the expansion of the informal sector.

Economic growth pushes the distressed agrarian and traditional non-agrarian population towards the burgeoning informal sector. But only a part of this population is able to reap the benefits of growth through its linkages with the formal sector.

The larger part of the non-agricultural informal population remains dissociated from the dynamic modern segments of the economy; its members are engaged in low-level production depending on mostly local small-scale resources and producing for local markets. Furthermore, this vast majority of dispossessed people roams from one profession to another as ‘neo-nomads’.

Thus, we find a peculiar phenomenon of “deepening dualism” (instead of its much expected withering away). Not only is there a formal-informal divide, but informality is further fractured.

More fundamentally, we show that this duality is, in fact, aggravated by the expansion of capitalist formality. Instead of driving inclusive growth, increased formality produces a fractured and distorted economic structure. It ensures the persistence of a fissured informality.

The (heterogeneous) informal sectors expand in tandem with the formal sector through the operations of push and pull factors: as formality grows, small-scale farmers as well as traditional indigenous non-agricultural producers are suffocated because of a resource drain. The distressed small-scale producers are pushed out of agriculture and non-agriculture.

Economic growth based on an expansion of the formal capitalist sectors requires enormous resources. This induces a resource drain from the non-capitalist sectors, especially low-level agriculture and allied activities. Thus, ‘Jal-Jangal-Jameen’ (water-forest-land) are either converted to suit the demands of the capitalist growth process through economic means or expropriated with the use of political power.

This process fuels economic growth, but dispossess millions of small-scale traditional agricultural and non-agricultural producers. This marginalised mass finds its shelter mostly in the informal sectors. But only the fortunate few can get a refuge in the advanced segments of this informality (being pulled by the formality itself). A very large part of this migrant population is pushed into underpaid and small-scale informal activities. Thus, informality expands along with the deepening of its intra-sectoral inequality or duality.

The way forward

If informality (especially the larger portion that remains outside the extended circuit of capital and formality) has to survive and thrive, it has to negotiate with the power of capital and formality. It cannot avoid the aggressive dynamics of the formal sector.

The challenge of informality can be relevant only if it can act as a cohesive collective; and a “cluster” form of development of the informality could offer a respite. The prospects of clustering the small-scale informal firms and the organization of socio-economic and political power, as well as the abilities of the cluster of informal firms vis-a-vis the formal structures, could provide material for important research.

The dynamic advanced part of the informal sector could prosper along with the formal sector because of its linkages with the latter. Hence, policymakers could focus on these linkage effects for the uplift of this segment of the informal sector. But for the other and more troubled portion of the informal sector, a deliberate promotion of cluster industrialization (pitted against formal sector expansion) could be essential. Thus, an expansion of dualist informality calls for dualist policy design.

The post India’s transition from agriculture and the growing informal sector appeared first on Globaldev Blog.

Sub-Saharan Africa stands at the threshold of a transformative agriculture opportunity, thanks to its patrimony of plentiful land and water resources, as well as its large and growing labor force. What is the key to crossing that threshold?

Africa now earns an average of 24% of its annual growth from its farmers and their crops. Agriculture and agribusiness together account for nearly half of Africa’s GDP. The continent has nearly half of the world’s fertile land that is yet to be brought under cultivation – around 202 million hectares of arable land that is non-protected, non-forested and with low population density.

While some areas of the continent are hyper-arid, arid or semi-arid, Africa’s bountiful water resources are underused on average. Sub-Saharan Africa currently uses only 2-3% of renewable water resources, compared with 5% worldwide.

Too much of the food consumed in Africa is imported, denying opportunities for local producers and causing a drain on scarce foreign exchange. This presents a huge opportunity to grow more food through sustainable agriculture and feed Africans with better quality, more nutritious food. It also presents an opportunity to create wealth for farmers through expanding markets and trade, and to benefit consumers through less expensive, more diverse food products.

Africa’s agriculture and agribusiness sectors should be transformed. This is potentially one of the most important growth opportunities for entrepreneurs in emerging Africa. Thailand has less than 10% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population but exports more food products than all African countries combined. Brazil’s food exports are 150% higher than Africa although they were similar in the 1980s. African farmers have the lowest farm productivity; their grain yields are only half of those achieved by Asian or Latin American farmers.

The transformation of agribusiness won’t happen unless all stakeholders get involved. Governments need to work with farmers and agribusiness, making it easier to raise capital from banks, increasing investment in infrastructure that connects farms to markets, bringing irrigation to more drylands, rethinking policies that restrict growth and competition, boosting regional trade, and fostering good policies that unleash creativity and innovation.

So what is holding Africa back?

Attention needs to be focused on binding constraints that hold a particular sector from achieving its full potential. Irrigation is critical to increase and stabilize production, reduce risks, and provide the basis for higher value agriculture. Underinvestment in irrigation is one of the reasons why the Green Revolution that transformed agriculture in the tropics of Asia and Latin America bypassed Africa.

Other factors also had a role to play – more heterogeneous production environments, inadequate research capacity, lack of technology, poor policies, and weak institutions – but the inability of farmers to irrigate their crops stands out. Nothing grows without water.

The opportunity is huge for achieving transformational impact by bringing more irrigation to parched lands. But along with the opportunity come a number of challenges.

Water resources are available, but they are not limitless. Agriculture is the largest user of the world’s freshwater resources: 80-90% of fresh water withdrawals are used to irrigate crops and grow food.

Agriculture is also a notoriously inefficient user of water. By employing modern irrigation techniques, including drip irrigation and micro irrigation, it will be possible to reduce water use sustainably for growing food crops, meet the threats posed by climate change, and reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint through “climate-smart” agriculture.

Looking ahead

Providing the transformational impact to help sub-Saharan Africa achieve its own Green Revolution will require delivering simultaneously on productivity growth and market connections, while enhancing resilience to climate change. Several parallel actions would be needed:

• Significantly increase agricultural productivity growth.
• Ensure deployment of more climate-smart agriculture practices.
• Improve gender equality and increase the productivity of women farmers.
• Link farmers to markets and strengthen value chains.
• Give access to means for entrepreneurship.
• Enhance the resilience of people and incomes.
• Reduce food loss and waste.
• Enhance environmental sustainability.

African governments, the private sector and the international community should take the opportunity in the next few years to forge the next generation of public-private partnerships needed to bring about transformational change in agriculture and agribusiness. Africa should take the lead in forging a newGreen Revolution.

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