Sustainable intensification in drylands: What resilience and vulnerability can tell us (original) (raw)
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Sustainable intensification and the African smallholder farmer
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2014
Sub-Saharan Africa needs to produce more food, feed, and fiber to support its growing population and intensification of smallholder agriculture is a crucial component of any strategy towards this goal. Sustainable Intensification (SI) acknowledges that enhanced productivity needs to go hand in hand with the maintenance of other ecosystem services and enhanced resilience to shocks. A very diverse group of smallholders dominate SSA agriculture, with large heterogeneity in socio-technical conditions, famer typologies, production objectives, and the biophysical environment. This potentially generates a multitude of pathways from the current low productivity based on nutrient mining to SI. The institutional context needs to be right for delivering the necessary goods and services underlying SI, ensuring inclusiveness across household types and facilitating local innovation.
International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, 2020
Sustainable Agricultural Intensification (SAI) was initially defined as increasing agricultural production without adverse environmental impacts and without increasing the area under agriculture. Over time the concept has been broadened to integrate social, economic, and environmental components of sustainability, each of which covers multiple facets or indicators of performance. It is recognized however that it may not be possible to optimize all these aspects of sustainability simultaneously and that trade-offs between them are likely to occur, although synergies are also possible. There has been disagreement over how to achieve SAI, with some proposing that only an ‘agroecological’ intensification pathway delivers sustainability. Others take a broader perspective arguing that all aspects of ecological, genetic, and socio-economic intensification need to be considered, but then assessed in terms of the sustainability of the outcomes. A major concern is that intensification that focuses on agricultural technology can lead to inequitable outcomes for women and poorer households, while agroecological intensification building upon local capitals is generally considered more equitable. Understanding the potential outcomes and inherent trade-offs of different approaches requires interdisciplinary research, evidence and decision-making tools, some examples of which are presented in this Special Issue
Is Sustainable Intensification Possible? Evidence from Ethiopia
Sustainability, 2018
This paper explores the sustainable intensification possibilities facing smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. We examine the internal consistency of jointly achieving "sustainable" "intensification" by exploring the factors that lead to complementarity or tradeoffs in the outcomes. A cross-sectional survey of farms was examined in multiple regions of Ethiopia's Highlands. The results show that some farmers can achieve both sustainability and intensification, while many do not, or cannot achieve both at the same time. We found that some actions have a common impact on both sustainability and intensification, while other factors only affect one outcome. Access to agricultural loans and farm mechanization significantly increases the likelihood of succeeding in sustainable intensification. Access to land will be critical for agricultural sustainability while access to farming information and technical services will drive agricultural intensification. Overall, opportunities to improve both sustainability and intensification are weak, but the opportunity to improve one without sacrificing the other are realistic. The results contribute to the ongoing debate on sustainable intensification and help policy makers explore alternatives for managing different intensification and sustainability scenarios to achieve agricultural development goals.