The ‘sustainable intensification’ agricultural revolution in Africa: the ongoing success of participatory rural development programmes

Excerpted from Zareen Bharucha:

“It is now understood that a sole focus on increasing yields can be counter-productive in the long-run, causing or exacerbating environmental and social problems. Yet, it is also clear that demand for agricultural goods (especially food) is increasing, due to the demands for food and raw materials for growing and industrialising populations increasingly connected to the global economy. At the same time, resources available for farming are being constrained as a result of environmental change and competing uses such as industrial activity.

The production of more output from the same land, while maintaining or improving environmental conditions, is called ‘sustainable intensification’. African farmers are already using dozens of tools, technologies and processes which might be classed as such to grow more, earn more and care more for their land. These creative solutions and their remarkable results attest to the fact that a promising transformation is already underway.

In many respects, the new practices and the ways in which they are developed and spread are quite different to those of the past Green Revolution. There is no singular model, no overarching blueprint crafted in distant laboratories or offices and transferred via test-plots and development agencies to farmers fields. Instead, many new techniques, practices, processes and partnerships, and novel combinations of these, are arising either organically or through participatory rural development programmes. The key point of departure from past models is the central role played by farmers. Farmers are developing what works, improving yields and growing businesses, caring for their land and reaping the benefits. External agencies such as NGOs, research firms or government bodies are lending a helping hand, but farmers themselves are the heart and spine of innovation.

This article describes the key lessons learnt from some 40 cases of such ‘sustainable intensification’ from across Africa. The case studies were commissioned by the UK Government Office of Science Foresight project on Global Food and Farming and were produced as academic papers within a special issue of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability (IJAS) (Pretty et al. 2011b). 40 projects and programmes from 20 countries were studied. These provide a body of evidence on the successes which are possible, and discuss the potential for scaling up. They highlight the transformative power of ‘care-full’ agriculture to increase yields, benefit the environment, bring communities together and grow incomes. Taken together, the 40 cases have documented benefits for 10.39 million farmers and their families and improvements on approximately 12.75 million hectares of land across the African continent (Pretty et al. 2011a). Yields have increased on average by a factor of 2.13 over a 3-10 year period.”

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