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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 use of the formal seed system in Malawi, particularly for maize seed, has developed much faster in the recent past than in Ethiopia (Jayne and Rashid 2013; Kassie et al. 2013; Sheahan and Barrett 2017), which could explain the slight contrast in our findings.”
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“Application of agricultural inputs (such as fungicides, fertilizers, lime, etc.), also constitutes means of Hg introduction into the soils and water bodies as most of these inputs Hg, and can easily be released to cultivated soils (Anderson 1979, Sheahan and Barrett 2017).”
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Phytosanitary Challenges and Solutions for Roots and Tubers in the Tropics
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“…agriculture in Zambia, with predominantly rainfed agriculture, a well-defined rainy season, high yearly climate variability, and high variance in management practices (Wald-man et al., 2017) is representative of smallholder agricultural conditions in other parts of SSA (Sheahan and Barrett, 2017).”
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“Moreover, there is a range of evidence that gender affects farming practices because male and female heads make different management decisions (Croppenstedt et al., 2013; Sheahan and Barrett, 2017; Daadi and Latacz-Lohmann, 2021).”
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“These systems face many barriers to increasing yields, such as low nutrient input or lack of investment opportunities (Sheahan & 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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