Toward sustainable intensification of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Across the African continent efforts to intensify agriculture have been limited to specific commodities, locations or particular production schemes. The causes for the widespread failure to overcome low land and labor productivity while maintaining ecosystem services have often be analyzed but remain poorly understood. A social-ecological system approach may help to better understand the complex nature of ecological disadvantages, postcolonial structures, limited connect between producers and consumer markets, low off-farm livelihood opportunities, partial underpopulation and lacking experience with the concept of sustainable production as a major impediment for sustainable intensification of the agricultural sector. Nevertheless, recent success stories in agro-pastoral systems as well as urban vegetable and animal production and associated value chains in West Africa, and in intensive mixed-cropping systems of the Great Lakes Region show the potential of stakeholder-driven agricultural intensification. Proper interpretation of these cases may provide lessons for a more widespread eco-intensification of smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa.

Keywords

colonial heritage / land use / marketing / property rights / subsistence agriculture / urbanization / value chains

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Regina Birner (University of Hohenheim) for helpful discussions on global agricultural factor productivity. This article was stimulated by insights in rural-urban transformation processes obtained through the UrbanFood^Plus project (FKZ: 031A242A) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation (BMZ) under the GlobE initiative “Research for the Global Food Supply”. Similarly contributed have collaborative studies in the Indo-German Research Unit FOR2432/1&2 “Social-ecological Systems in the Indian Rural-Urban Interface: Functions, Scales, and Dynamics of Transitions” jointly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India (BU1308/13-1&2, SCHL587/6-1&2).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Andreas Buerkert and Eva Schlecht declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2020. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)