Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is increasingly promoted as a means to enhance food security and adapt agriculture to climate change. However, lack of access to land, labor, and financial capital may pose a significant barrier to adoption of resource-intensive CSA practices. To spur the wider uptake of CSA the international community has committed billions of dollars to support various practices. Despite this effort, however, CSA adoption remains low in many developing countries. Resource constraints are a major reason for limited adoption rates.
A recent journal article, published in World Development, develops a typology of farm-level CSA practices to facilitate analyses of CSA adoption. The typology consists of six categories, organized from least to most resource intensive. These are: (1) residue addition, (2) non-woody plant cultivation, (3) assisted regeneration, (4) woody plant cultivation, (5) physical infrastructure, and (6) mixed measures. The authors use the typology to generate and test hypotheses about CSA adoption using primary household survey data from 808 households sampled from a large USAID funded CSA intervention area in eight districts in southern Malawi.
The authors then estimated the effect of program participation on adoption across the six CSA categories. The study finds positive and statistically significant effects of program participation on adoption of CSA practices generally with the strongest effects on resource-intensive CSA categories. The findings suggest that external support may be especially important for their adoption of resource intensive CSA practices by rural households and communities in Malawi. Such external support can lower the transaction costs of CSA adoption for smallholder farmers, thereby making adoption of CSA practices more attractive in contexts where the bulk of the farming population is constrained by critical land, labor, and financial resources. Results further demonstrate the potential for wider application of the typology to build knowledge of the effectiveness of CSA promotion efforts across different social and environmental contexts.
Authors: Festus O. Amadu1, 2, Paul E. Mc Namara1, Daniel C. Miller2
1 Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mumford Hall, 1301 W. Gregory Dr. Urbana, IL 61801, USA
2 Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, S-406 Turner Hall, 1102 S. Goodwin Ave. Urbana, IL 61801, USA
Click here to download the article.
Festus O. Amadu was a Borlaug LEAP Fellow in 2015/16. During this time he undertook an internship with IFPRI supervised by Kristin Davis and working closely with the Wellness and Agriculture for Life’s Advancement (WALA) project in Southern Malawi. During an IFPRI brownbag seminar in Lilongwe in September 2016 he presented on Agricultural Extension, Climate Smart Agriculture, and Food Security in Southern Malawi.
