Megan Sheahan

Understanding the Agricultural Input Landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa: Recent Plot, Household, and Community-Level Evidence

Conventional wisdom holds that Sub-Saharan African farmers use few modern inputs despite the fact that most growth-inducing and poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of inputs that embody improved technologies, particularly improved seed, fertilizers and other agro-chemicals, machinery, and irrigation. Yet following several years of high food prices, concerted policy efforts to intensify fertilizer and hybrid seed use, and increased public and private investment in agriculture, how low is modern input use in Africa really? This paper revisits Africas agricultural input landscape, exploiting the unique, recently collected, nationally representative, agriculturally intensive, and cross-country comparable Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture covering six countries in the region (Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda). The study uses data from more than 22,000 households and 62,000 plots to investigate a range of commonly held conceptions about modern input use in Africa, distilling the most striking and important findings into 10 key takeaway descriptive results.

Ten striking facts about agricultural input use in Sub-Saharan Africa

Conventional wisdom holds that Sub-Saharan African farmers use few modern inputs despite the fact that most poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of inputs that embody improved technologies, particularly improved seed, fertilizers and other agro-chemicals, machinery, and irrigation. Yet following several years of high food prices, concerted policy efforts to intensify fertilizer and hybrid seed use, and increased public and private investment in agriculture, how low is modern input use in Africa really? This article revisits Africa’s agricultural input landscape, exploiting the unique, recently collected, nationally representative, agriculturally intensive, and cross-country comparable Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) covering six countries in the region (Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda). Using data from over 22,000 households and 62,000 agricultural plots, we offer ten potentially surprising facts about modern input use in Africa today.

Review: Food loss and waste in Sub-Saharan Africa

The research, development practitioner, and donor community has begun to focus on food loss and waste – often referred to as post-harvest losses (PHL) – in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article reviews the current state of the literature on PHL mitigation. First, we identify explicitly the varied objectives underlying efforts to reduce PHL levels. Second, we summarize the estimated magnitudes of losses, evaluate the methodologies used to generate those estimates, and explore the dearth of thoughtful assessment around “optimal” PHL levels. Third, we synthesize and critique the impact evaluation literature around on-farm and off-farm interventions expected to deliver PHL reduction. Fourth, we suggest a suite of other approaches to advancing these same objectives, some of which may prove more cost-effective. Finally, we conclude with a summary of main points.

Modeling the Effects of Input Market Reforms on Fertiliser Demand and Maize Production: A Case Study from Kenya

Kenya is one of the few countries in sub-Saharan Africa experiencing an impressive rise in fertilizer use on food crops grown by smallholder farmers since the liberalization of input markets starting in the early-1990s. The impacts of these reforms and associated private sector investments on national fertilizer use and food production have never been rigorously quantified, though doing so could shed new light on policy makers’ options for raising food crop productivity in the region. This study estimates a double-hurdle model of fertilizer demand that controls for common forms of unobserved heterogeneity then simulates the effect of changes in fertilizer prices and distances from farm to the nearest fertilizer retailer associated with fertilizer market liberalization on the demand for fertilizer and the production of maize, the major staple crop in the country. The study concludes that over the period 1997-2010 the reduction in real fertilizer prices associated with input market liberalization is estimated to have raised maize yields by 15 to 100 kg/ha, depending on the province and year. Low average physical response rates of maize to fertilizer application in high fertilizer consuming areas of Kenya limits the degree to which increased fertilizer use via liberalization policies translates into food production improvements. These increases in maize yield specifically linked to changes in fertilizer prices accounted for between 1 and 11 percent of changes in maize production between survey years.