Inequality and inequity in agricultural development - From Ken Giller and Eva Thuijsman
Our team at Plant Production Systems, Wageningen University has a focus on understanding how we can reach poorer and disadvantaged rural households to support them to improve their food and nutrition security through farming. Our primary focus is Africa, but we have also conducted a comparative global analysis which is relevant and highlights differences between sub-Saharan Africa and Asia (Giller et al., 2021a).
In sub-Saharan Africa we see huge diversity among locations and within any single location across the continent (Giller et al., 2021b). Small farm size is a critical constraint to farmers achieving food self-sufficiency and food and nutrition security. This is true in annual mixed crop livestock systems (Giller et al., 2021b; Marinus et al., 2022) as well as in cocoa (van Vliet et al. 2021). This leads to what we have termed “The Food Security Conundrum” of sub-Saharan Africa (Giller, 2020). We critically reviewed how farming technology evaluation studies assess differentiated impacts in smallholder farming communities (Thuijsman et al., forthcoming, abstract attached).
Relevant publications are below – and we would be pleased to engage further with the HLPE team.
Giller, K. E. (2020). The Food Security Conundrum of sub-Saharan Africa. Global Food Security, 26, 100431 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100431
Giller, K. E., Delaune, T., Silva, J. V., Descheemaeker, K., van de Ven, G., Schut, A. G. T., van Wijk, M., Hammond, J., Hochman, Z., Taulya, G., Chikowo, R., Narayanan, S., Kishore, A., Bresciani, F., Teixeira, H. M., Andersson, J., & Van Ittersum, M. K. (2021a). The future of farming: Who will produce our food? Food Security 13: 1073–1099. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-021-01184-6
Giller, K. E., Delaune, T., Silva, J. V., Descheemaeker, K., van de Ven, G., Schut, A. G. T., van Wijk, M., Hammond, J., Taulya, G., Chikowo, R., & Andersson, J. (2021b). Small farms and development in sub-Saharan Africa: Farming for food, for income or for lack of better options? Food Security, 13: 1431–1454 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-021-01209-0
van Vliet, J.A., Slingerland, M.A., Waarts, Y.R., Giller, K.E., 2021. A Living Income for cocoa producers in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana? Front. Sust. Food Syst. 5, https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.732831
Marinus, W., Thuijsman, E.S., van Wijk, M.T., Descheemaeker, K., van de Ven, G.W.J., Vanlauwe, B., Giller, K.E., 2022. What farm size sustains a living? Exploring future options to attain a living income from smallholder farming in the East African Highlands. Front. Sust. Food Syst. 5, 759105. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.759105
Thuijsman, E.S., Den Braber, H.J., Andersson, J.A., Descheemaeker, K., Baudron, F., López-Ridaura, S., Vanlauwe, B., Giller, K.E., (forthcoming). Indifferent to difference? Understanding the unequal impacts of farming technologies among smallholders. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00768-6
Abstract
With many of the world’s poor engaged in agriculture, agricultural development programmes often aim to improve livelihoods through improved farming practices. Research on the impacts of agricultural technology interventions is dominated by comparisons of adopters and non-adopters. By contrast, in this literature study we critically review how technology evaluation studies assess differentiated impacts in smallholder farming communities. We searched systematically for studies which present agricultural technology impacts disaggregated for poor and relatively better-off users (adopters). The major findings of our systematic review are as follows: (1) the number of studies that assessed impact differentiation was startlingly small: we were able to identify only 85, among which only 24 presented empirical findings. (2) These studies confirm an expected trend: absolute benefits are larger for the better-off, and large relative benefits among the poor are mostly due to meagre baseline performance. (3) Households are primarily considered as independent entities, rather than as connected with others directly or indirectly, via markets or common resource pools. (4) Explanations for impact differentiation are mainly sought in existing distributions of structural household characteristics. We collated the explanations provided in the selected studies across a nested hierarchy: the field, the farm or household, and households interacting at the farming system level. We also consider impact differentiation over time. With this we provide a structured overview of potential drivers of differentiation, to guide future research for development towards explicitly recognizing the poor among the poor, acknowledging unequal impacts, aiming to avoid negative consequences, and mitigating them where they occur.
Prof. Ken Giller