Chinese agricultural technology transfer to African typical dry areas: practice and experience

Abstract

Africa has experienced increasing aridity and higher frequency of droughts due to climate change during the half past century with possible adverse effects on agricultural production, especially in dry areas with low rainfall. Under the auspices of the Africa Water Action Program between the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the Institute of Agricultural Environment and Resources, Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences (SAAS-IAER) worked closely with domestic and overseas partners on technology transfer in Morocco, Zambia, Egypt, Niger and Ethiopia from 2008 to 2013. A drought early warning system has been established and validated, and drought adaptation technologies have been trialed, modified, demonstrated and extended in African countries, and this shows great potential to increase crop production, water and fertilizer use efficiency and desert control in rainfed areas of Africa. The project has continued for six years and is a successful case of technology transfer and capacity building in Africa. The knowledge and experience gained will be useful to researchers, technicians, aid agencies and policy makers who work on agricultural technology transfer for in dry areas of Africa.

Keywords

drought / early warning / adaptation technology / China / United Nations Environment Program / Africa

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Technological Assistance Program of MOST to Developing Countries (KY201904003), the International Cooperation Program of Shanxi Key R&D Program (201903D421001), International Cooperation Program “Africa Water Action” between MOST and UNEP (2010DFA92860), Shanxi Key R&D Program (201803D221011-1) and the S&T Innovation Program of Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences (YCX2018DZYX16).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Qiuxia Meng, Jianjie Zhang, Wenyan Xie, Huaiping Zhou, and Qiang Zhang 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)