Contributions

Africa RISING¹¹²: The Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation program is supported by USAID and comprises three projects led by IITA in West, East and Southern Africa and ILRI in the Ethiopian Highlands. The objectives are to identify and evaluate demand-driven options for sustainable intensification and to evaluate, document and share experiences with approaches for delivering and integrating innovation for sustainable intensification and align perfectly with the FP1 agenda. Development objectives include (i) creating opportunities for smallholder farm households within Africa RISING action sites (Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Ethiopia) to move out of poverty and improve their nutritional status and (ii) facilitate partner-led wider dissemination of integrated innovations for sustainable intensification.

FP1.5 Lessons learned and unintended consequences

An ex-ante impact study conducted in Nigeria¹¹³ measured the overall economic gains as well as the equity effects of alternative commodity research programs and showed that grain legumes and dryland cereals programs, e.g. cowpea, sorghum, millet, soybean and groundnut, generate greater economic benefits to poor households compared to a number of other commodities, e.g. fish and livestock. With a rate of return of 81%, each dollar invested in cowpea research, for example, generates US$53 worth of benefits for the poor, relative to US$99 for all households. With a rate of return of 72%, each dollar invested in soybean research generates US$46 worth of benefits for the poor, relative to US$70 for all households. Poor households in Nigeria thus capture 66% of the benefits from soybean research.

Adoption studies have shown that the availability of information, which has long been recognized as the main barrier to adoption, cannot replace the need for farmers to test new technologies in their own fields before full adoption. This implies that the content of the information provided should be further fine-tuned and adjusted to the farmers’ requirements. While awareness and seed supply are critical constraints to adoption, low adoption of improved varieties may also indicate that improved varieties lack the attributes valued by farmers and end users. There remains a knowledge gap in understanding constraints to adoption for specific crops in specific countries. Adoption studies repeatedly highlight that one key driver of adoption is access to output markets. Regions with high demand, good market access and attractive output prices have witnessed soaring adoption rates, such as chickpea in Ethiopia¹¹⁴ and in Andhra Pradesh, India¹¹⁵ . These trends can be heavily influenced by policies either hindering or supporting the process, e.g., sorghum beer in Kenya¹¹⁶ or groundnut exports from Malawi¹¹⁷. The case of groundnut in Malawi points to the need to respond to the demands of all parts of the value chain. After a drastic drop in exports due to newly introduced quality standards in foreign export markets, Malawi was able to restore its strong export market based on quality intervention along the whole value chain from farmer to export companies.

Given the critical importance of output markets, the analysis of consumer demand highlighted the huge potential in some countries/regions¹¹⁸. For instance, demand for sorghum outstrips supply in Ethiopia and Uganda while in Kenya and Tanzania the consumer market is extremely small and alternative uses such as sorghum for feed and fodder offer better potential. In South Asia, postrainy season (rabi) sorghum is increasingly valuable for fodder and half of rainy season (kharif) sorghum grain goes for non-food uses. Furthermore, while processors are willing to pay a quality premium, focusing purely on economic ‘competitiveness’ is not appropriate in the dry areas with underperforming agri-food systems where farmers spread risk by growing a range of cereals and legumes combined with livestock rearing. Commercialization or less labor intensive processing tools aiming at increased competitiveness and profitability of the production may disempower women if men take control over income from these crops which are mostly considered ‘women’s crops’. At the same time, research has shown¹¹⁹ that this is not necessarily the case and even after commercialization, women still feel in control of the crop and associated incomes even though men show increased interest in the production. Finally, the increase in fodder demands due to rising consumption of animal source food in many parts of the world leads to increasing use of crops for fodder (especially sorghum). If not carefully considered in the research process, this competition for nutritious food grains could have adverse effects on the nutrition of the human target population who often cannot afford meat.

FP1.6 Clusters of Activities (CoA)