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Ten striking facts about agricultural input use in Sub-Saharan Africa
Open accessAbstract
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.
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“The products available through the Agrics programme address pertinent problems in African rural areas, such as post-harvest crop losses (Sheahan & Barrett, 2017), access to electricity (not least for mobile phone charging), and the need for additional on-farm income generation (especially for…”
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“Recent work by Sheahan and Barrett [63] revealed that less than 4% of farm households in Ethiopia use integrated inputs consisting of inorganic fertilizer, irrigation, and improved seed varieties, which implies that there are untapped productivity gains to be made from coordinated modern input use by deploying governa…”
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“This is particularly germane given that in contrast to other regions of the world, farm production systems in SSA are the least mechanized (Sheahan and Barrett 2017), with limited technological progress (Tavneet and Udry 2022).”
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“Additionally, low rates of technology adoption, varying widely across countries due to factors like soil quality and market conditions, contribute to the weak link between agricultural productivity and rural poverty reduction (Takahashi, Muraoka, and Otsuka 2019; Sheahan and Barrett 2017).”
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“These limitations are higher in nations with constrained or non-existent agricultural input subsidy schemes and generally only one-third of Saharan African farmers apply inorganic fertilizers (Sheahan & Barrett, 2017).”
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“It is also observed that these trends vary by region and crop [10,32,33].”
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“4For information on low seed use in sub-Saharan Africa, see World Bank (2007) and Sheahan and Barrett (2017).”
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“Africa shows early signs of “coupled growth”, i.e. agricultural growth and structural transformation (e.g. in Ethiopia, Rwanda) (Abro et al. 2014; Barrett et al. 2017; Sheahan and Barrett 2017).”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Sheahan, M., & Barrett, C. B.
- Affiliations
- Cornell University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Sheahan, Megan
- Venue
- Food Policy
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2017-02
- Volume
- 67
- Pages
- 12-25
- ISSN
- 0306-9192 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5384438
- OpenAlex
- W2534397573
- Semantic Scholar
- 0119de42f830ef1f9a0fb240310e89ecd368143f
- Cited by
- 594
- References
- 87
- Citations by year
- 2026: 74 · 2025: 69 · 2024: 60 · 2023: 76 · 2022: 61 · 2021: 70 · 2020: 75 · 2019: 47 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 19
- FWCI
- 120.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Food Policy (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- International Fine Particle Research Institute
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agricultural Innovations and Practices
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agricultural Economics and Practices
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Agricultural economics and policies
- Keywords
- agricultural input use, modern agricultural inputs, fertilizer use, improved varieties, hybrid seeds, agrochemicals, agricultural machinery, irrigation, agricultural intensification, smallholder farmers, sub-Saharan Africa, food prices, agricultural growth
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