Curated Content

Food production is key to achieving food security in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa. Since agricultural productivity is limited, however, due to inherent agro-ecological constraints and land degradation, sustainable agricultural intensification has been widely discussed as an opportunity for improving food security and reducing vulnerability. Yet vulnerability determinants are distributed heterogeneously in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa and sustainable intensification cannot be achieved everywhere in cost-effective and efficient ways. To better understand the heterogeneity of farming systems’ vulnerability in order to support decision making at regional scales, we present archetypes, i.e. socio-ecological patterns, of farming systems’ vulnerability in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa and reveal their nestedness. We quantitatively indicated the most relevant farming systems’ properties at a sub-national resolution. These factors included water availability, agro-ecological potential, erosion sensitivity, population pressure, urbanisation, remoteness, governance, income and undernourishment. Cluster analysis revealed eight broad archetypes of vulnerability across all drylands of sub-Saharan Africa. The broad archetype representing better governance and highest remoteness in extremely dry and resource-constrained regions encompassed the largest area share (19%), mainly indicated in western Africa. Moreover, six nested archetypes were identified within those regions with better agropotential and prevalent agricultural livelihoods. Among these patterns, the nested archetype depicting regions with highest erosion sensitivity, severe undernourishment and lower agropotential represented the largest population (30%) and area (28%) share, mainly found in the Sahel region. The nested archetype indicating medium undernourishment, better governance and lowest erosion sensitivity showed particular potential for sustainable agricultural intensification, mainly in western and some parts of southeastern and eastern Africa. Insights into the nestedness of archetypes allowed a more differentiated discussion of vulnerability and sustainable intensification opportunities, enhancing the evaluation of key interlinkages between land management and food security. The archetypes may support the transfer of successful intensification strategies based on similarities among the drylands in sub-Saharan Africa.

Future-proofing water, agriculture, and food security in an era of climate uncertainty in India.

Southern African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing eight of the countries that make up southern Africa — Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe — and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. Southern Africa’s population is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. Southern Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer.

The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and partners developed a website presenting the climate-smart agriculture (CSA) approach to food security and sustainable development. The website aims to help practitioners, researchers and decision-makers working with or interested in CSA. The site helps you get started and guide you on the ground, connecting you with all the resources you need to dig deeper. For countries following up on their commitments under the Paris Agreement, CSA Guide is a useful tool to set up mitigation and adaptation initiatives in agriculture.

The website is divided into six parts:

The basics - The basics section provides users with crucial information about what climate-smart agriculture is, how it helps address important challenges, how it is different from other sustainable agriculture approaches, and suggests introductory reading materials and videos.

Entry points - The next section gives an introduction into the numerous entry points for initiating CSA programmes. To help users navigate among them, they are presented under three thematic areas: Practices, Systems approaches and Enabling environments.

Develop a CSA plan - The website presents a specific approach to develop a CSA plan. This section was developed to provide a guide for operationalizing CSA planning, implementation and monitoring at scale. It consists of four subsections: Situation analysis, Targeting and prioritization, Programme support, and Monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Finance - The finance section offers an overview of potential sources of funding for CSA activities as national, regional and international levels. It also includes options to search among a range of funding opportunities according to CSA focus area, sector and financing instrument.

Resource library - In the resource library, users have access to all the references, key resources, key terms and frequently asked questions to get a quick overview that can be used as part of or independently of the other sections.

Case studies - And finally, the case studies section shows all the specific projects that are detailed in the basics and entry point sections. The interactive map allows users to view all case studies at once or filter the search by entry points. An extensive portfolio of content, a highly visual design, and user friendly interface will allow users to find specific points of interest or follow the flow of information from the basics section, over entry points to CSA, CSA plan, CSA finance, a resource library and case studies. 

Cassava is the second-most important staple food crop after maize in Malawi. The availability of different varieties of cassava allow for both commercial use and household consumption of cassava to hedge against food insecurity. Malawi is prone to drought due to climate change vulnerability, poor agricultural practices and high population growth making cassava, a drought-resistant crop, an attrac- tive option.

This study sets out to answer the question of whether cassava is, indeed, the 21st century crop for smallholders. The focus lies on smallholder production sys- tems in Nkhotakota District on the shores of Lake Malawi and in the rural vicinity of Lilongwe, the capital city. A nexus between the household asset endowments of smallholder farmers and their participation in the value chain was examined to identify root causes of the supply-demand mismatch and to formulate recom- mendations for effective value chain development. A partial value chain analysis has been conducted to account for the participation of smallholders in the value chain. We chose a structural analysis over an economic analysis, as prices are high- ly volatile in the informal markets of Malawi and notoriously difficult to solicit from actors. Since the responsibility for the production of food and cash crops falls broadly along gender lines within a household, gender aspects take a central role in our research. All our instruments included gender differentiated elements.

Agriculture is a risky business and farmers face a host of market and production risks that make their incomes volatile from year to year. These risks include yield losses due to bad weather, pests and diseases; post-harvest losses during storage and transport; and unexpectedly low market prices. In many cases, farmers are also confronted by the risk of catastrophic losses, for example, when crops or livestock are destroyed by drought, re or new pest outbreaks, or when lives and assets are lost due to extreme weather events like hurricanes and oods. These risks can pose challenging nancial problems even for large commercial farms in developed countries, but the consequences for vast numbers of smallholders around the developing world are much more severe. Major shocks to household incomes, food consumption and assets worsen poverty and lead to episodic humanitarian crises that require large- scale relief interventions.

Improving agricultural water productivity, under rainfed or irrigated conditions, holds significant scope for addressing climate change vulnerability. It also offers adaptation capacity needs as well as water and food security in the southern African region. In this study, evidence for climate change impacts and adaptation strategies in rainfed agricultural systems is explored through modeling predictions of crop yield, soil moisture and excess water for potential harvesting. The study specifically presents the results of climate change impacts under rainfed conditions for ma- ize, sorghum and sunflower using soil-water-crop model simulations, integrated based on daily inputs of rainfall and evapotranspiration disaggregated from GCM scenarios. The research targets a vast farming region dominated by heavy clay soils where rainfed agriculture is a dominant prac- tice. The potential for improving soil water productivity and improved water harvesting have been explored as ways of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. This can be utilized to explore and design appropriate conservation agriculture and adaptation practices in similar agro-ecological environments, and create opportunities for outscaling for much wider areas. The results of this study can suggest the need for possible policy refinements towards reducing vulne- rability and adaptation to climate change in rainfed farming systems.