In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture has the potential of bringing about economic growth, overcoming poverty, and enhancing food security. This is because it employs most of the labor, produces output used as food and raw materials for industries, earns foreign exchange through exports and can generate savings which can be invested in other sectors of the economy. Of the total population of Sub-Saharan Africa, over 60% live in rural areas and more than 90% of rural people in these regions depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Improving the productivity, profitability, and sustainability of smallholder farming is therefore the main pathway out of poverty in using agriculture for development. Poverty is a key characteristic of traditional agriculture which is also the predominant form of agriculture in LDCs. The major causes of poverty include inadequate access to land and capital for the majority of the farmers and technological backwardness.
In order to defeat poverty we need to tackle the two issues above. Agriculture per se is fraught with risks and uncertainties particularly in fragile LDC economies hence the need for policy measures to reduce the risks and uncertainties.
It has been argued that despite their poverty, peasant farmers are allocatively efficient in productive resource management. An opposing view to this is that because of poverty, risk minimization takes precedence over profit maximization. Those who believe in the poor but efficient view believe that technological advance is virtually the sole means of raising output and incomes in peasant agriculture.
However opponents of this view believe that significant increase in output can be achieved through more efficient use of existing technology. The upshot is that progress can be achieved by doing both i.e. improving production incentives as well as by encouraging farmers to make better use of present production techniques.
Gross inequality in the distribution of ownership of production resources particularly land gives rise to the demand of land reforms. Land reform is a precondition for agricultural development. Important to note is that more land redistribution of ownership is necessary but not sufficient to transform agriculture. What is needed is a more comprehensive agrarian reforms that tackle issues of extension, credit and marketing services.
Case example: West Pokot County in Kenya
Pastoralists face many shocks, which increase their vulnerability to food insecurity and poverty. In West Pokot county of Kenya, such shocks include prolonged seasons of drought that leads to acute shortage of forage resulting to fluctuations in milk and meat production and ultimately loss of livestock. In recent years the county government of West Pokot together with other development partners put in place interventionist programmes aimed at building pastoralists’ livelihood resilience to climate and other related shocks. In order to understand the extent to which these efforts contribute to resilience this study was done. Primary survey data was collected through a combination of methods comprising a focus group discussion, key informant interviews and a household survey on 191 households.
Results showed that local indigenous practices in herd management and ethno-veterinary practice as well as external interventions programmes such as enclosing land, bee keeping, stocking improved breeds and institutional support in form of credit and extension services had a positive and significant effect on building household resilience to shocks. These results suggest the need to incorporate the indigenous practices in the external interventions together with more institutional support to help pastoralists overcome shocks.
Ms. Deborah Muricho