Hungry for agricultural resilience

Food: we grow it, we eat it, we sell it, and we would not survive without it. But shockingly, one in three people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) suffer from chronic hunger (Schlenker and Lobell 2010).

Agriculture is an integral part of every society, particularly in SSA, where it provides employment to over 60% of the population and makes huge contributions to GDP. For example, 85% of Ethiopia’s population are employed in agriculture, and it comprises more than 40% of GDP and 90% of exports (Di Falco 2014). So it’s no surprise that expansion of agriculture is deemed by development experts as a pathway to the alleviation of poverty (Challinor et al. 2007).

However, farming in SSA is mainly subsistence focused and there is practically no technology used – 89% of cereal crops in SSA are rain-fed, and so crop production is highly reliant on rainfall patterns (Di Falco 2014, Challinor et al. 2007).

This means that climate variability is closely related to the development and food security of many SSA countries (Di Falco 2014), so the effects of climate change will disrupt agricultural development and trigger food shortages – and small-scale farmers are expected to be the hardest hit (IPCC 2008).

These food shortages will extend further than national borders, as seen through the example of South Africa which already has extremely low rainfall of only 450mm per year and high evaporation rates. Climate change is expected to increase temperatures while reducing precipitation by between 2% and 8% by 2100, and South Africa is predicted to be one of the most water scarce countries by 2025. As South Africa supplies more than half of southern Africa’s staple crop maize, the exacerbated stresses on water supply will impact agriculture and food security across the whole southern African region (Benhin 2006).

Luckily, it’s not all bad news. Some regions, such as the Ethiopian highlands, are predicted to experience a lengthened growing season due to the warming temperatures and rainfall changes (Thornton et al. 2006). Plus, frost reduction in the highlands of Mt Kenya and Kilimanjaro will allow for more temperate crops to be grown such as apples, pears, barley and wheat (Parry et al. 2004).

Even where the future of food production in SSA does look bleak, this doesn’t have to be the case. Awareness of the challenge of climate change should act as an incentive for more serious investments to be made to improve agricultural productivity. Adaptation measures can be introduced, and modernisation of agricultural practices can be adopted to give farmers greater control over their yields (Schlenker and Lobell 2010).

Adaptation measures have been used traditionally by subsistence farmers to conserve water during periods of low rainfall, such as water harvesting techniques, water storage, and planting drought-resistant crops (IPCC 2008). Furthermore, farmers in South Africa have responded to the shifts in rainfall that have become shorter but more intense by planting later, and making furrows to collect rainwater near the plants, in order to take full advantage of the rainfall (Benhin 2006). It is possible that when drought becomes widespread and persistent these adaptation measures will become inadequate on the farm-scale (Challinor et al. 2007), but such traditional knowledge should be incorporated into climate change policies as these techniques are sustainable and cost-effective (IPCC 2008).

Rainwater harvesting in South Africa

If traditional adaptation techniques alone are not enough, they should be complemented by the introduction of new technologies to ensure the future of agriculture in Africa. Africa currently lags far behind the rest of the world in respect to technology adoption for agriculture, but governments can play a role in encouraging the uptake of technologies, such as high-yielding crop varieties and the application of fertilisers (Kurukulasuriya et al. 2006, Di Falco 2014). Surely African governments will be eager to explore such modernisation paths if it will prevent a drop in national GDP, and already a number of countries, including Uganda, Zambia and Kenya, have introduced modernisation of agriculture schemes in the hope of reducing poverty and vulnerability to climate change (Challinor et al. 2007).

Additionally, expanding irrigation can vastly improve the productivity of farmland, as well as increasing its resilience to precipitation changes. Non-irrigated farmland is worth $319 per hectare whereas irrigated farmland is worth $1,261 per hectare, which means that if governments invest in infrastructure for water storage, their investments will be repaid in a number of years (Kurukulasuriya et al. 2006). However, in South Africa already 50% of water resources are used to irrigate only 10% of the available farmland, so increasing irrigation in response to climate change will put pressure on the water supply for the rest of the country. Therefore if irrigation is expanded in South Africa – and other SSA countries facing similar water constraints – it is essential that water resources are managed efficiently (Benhin 2006).

Granting farmers access to weather forecasting can also assist them in adapting to climate variability, as improved weather information allows farmers to tactically plan according to the seasons, and to shift planting dates according to when rain is predicted to fall (Cooper et al. 2008, Challinor et al. 2007).

It seems ironic that Africa only contributes 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but its people will suffer the most because of their low levels of resilience to climate change (AMCOW 2012). But we can see that there is so much potential to change this in regard to agriculture, and a strong governance framework is key to ensuring that adaptation measures are effectively implemented.