Innovative agronomic practices for sustainable intensification in sub-Saharan Africa. A review

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Abstract

Africa’s need to double food production and feed the burgeoning human population, without compromising its natural resource base, has raised the momentum for sustainable agricultural intensification on the continent. Many studies describe agronomic practices that can increase productivity on existing agricultural land without damaging the environment and without increasing the agricultural carbon footprint. However, there is limited information on specific practices with the greatest potential to contribute to sustainable intensification on smallholder farms in sub-Saharan Africa, while simultaneously keeping the carbon footprint low. The objectives of this review were to (1) identify good agronomic practices with potential for contributing to sustainable intensification across sub-Saharan Africa, (2) synthesize available information on benefits and synergies from these technologies, and (3) discuss bottlenecks in their adoption in order to obtain insights that inform the formulation of supportive policies. Agroforestry, cereal-legume intercropping, conservation agriculture, doubled-up legume cropping, fertilizer micro-dosing, planting basins, and push-pull technology were identified as key agronomic innovations widely promoted in sub-Saharan Africa. We show that these innovations can build synergies and increase resource use efficiency while reducing agricultural carbon footprint. We outline the benefits, trade-offs, and limitations of these practices and discuss their potential role in strengthening food sovereignty and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

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Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050

Deepak Ray, Nathaniel D. Mueller, Paul C West … (2013)

Several studies have shown that global crop production needs to double by 2050 to meet the projected demands from rising population, diet shifts, and increasing biofuels consumption. Boosting crop yields to meet these rising demands, rather than clearing more land for agriculture has been highlighted as a preferred solution to meet this goal. However, we first need to understand how crop yields are changing globally, and whether we are on track to double production by 2050. Using ∼2.5 million agricultural statistics, collected for ∼13,500 political units across the world, we track four key global crops—maize, rice, wheat, and soybean—that currently produce nearly two-thirds of global agricultural calories. We find that yields in these top four crops are increasing at 1.6%, 1.0%, 0.9%, and 1.3% per year, non-compounding rates, respectively, which is less than the 2.4% per year rate required to double global production by 2050. At these rates global production in these crops would increase by ∼67%, ∼42%, ∼38%, and ∼55%, respectively, which is far below what is needed to meet projected demands in 2050. We present detailed maps to identify where rates must be increased to boost crop production and meet rising demands.

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Productivity limits and potentials of the principles of conservation agriculture.

Cameron Pittelkow, Xinqiang Liang, Bruce A. Linquist … (2015)

One of the primary challenges of our time is to feed a growing and more demanding world population with reduced external inputs and minimal environmental impacts, all under more variable and extreme climate conditions in the future. Conservation agriculture represents a set of three crop management principles that has received strong international support to help address this challenge, with recent conservation agriculture efforts focusing on smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, conservation agriculture is highly debated, with respect to both its effects on crop yields and its applicability in different farming contexts. Here we conduct a global meta-analysis using 5,463 paired yield observations from 610 studies to compare no-till, the original and central concept of conservation agriculture, with conventional tillage practices across 48 crops and 63 countries. Overall, our results show that no-till reduces yields, yet this response is variable and under certain conditions no-till can produce equivalent or greater yields than conventional tillage. Importantly, when no-till is combined with the other two conservation agriculture principles of residue retention and crop rotation, its negative impacts are minimized. Moreover, no-till in combination with the other two principles significantly increases rainfed crop productivity in dry climates, suggesting that it may become an important climate-change adaptation strategy for ever-drier regions of the world. However, any expansion of conservation agriculture should be done with caution in these areas, as implementation of the other two principles is often challenging in resource-poor and vulnerable smallholder farming systems, thereby increasing the likelihood of yield losses rather than gains. Although farming systems are multifunctional, and environmental and socio-economic factors need to be considered, our analysis indicates that the potential contribution of no-till to the sustainable intensification of agriculture is more limited than often assumed.