Land pressures, the evolution of farming systems, and development strategies in Africa: A synthesis
By T. Jayne, Jordan Chamberlin, Derek Headey. 2014
613 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Evidence assembled in this special issue of Food Policy shows that rising rural population densities in parts of Africa are profoundly affecting farming systems and the region’s economies in ways that are underappreciated in current discourse on African development issues. This study synthesizes how people, markets and governments are responding to rising land pressures in Africa, drawing on key findings from the various contributions in this special issue. The papers herein revisit the issue of Boserupian agricultural intensification as an important response to land constraints, but they also go further than Boserup and her followers to explore broader responses to land constraints, including non-farm diversification, migration, and reduced fertility rates. Agricultural and rural development strategies in the region will need to more fully anticipate the implications of Africa’s rapidly changing land and demographic situation, and the immense challenges that mounting land pressures pose in the context of current evidence of unsustainable agricultural intensification, a rapidly rising labor force associated with the region’s current demographic conditions, and limited nonfarm job creation. These challenges are manageable but will require explicit policy actions to address the unique development challenges in densely populated rural areas.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a8463bd477d2e762a9eb08cd26d530d9ee7cc7b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, neutral): “Below certain farm sizes, diminishing returns for land and capital inputs appear, making it increasingly difficult for small farmers to ensure their food self-sufficiency (Jayne et al. 2014a,b, 2016).”
- Global Food Security, Contributions from Sustainable Potato Agri-Food Systems (2020, background): “This is especially the case in Africa where potential for increasing production through area expansion is diminishing, partly due to high A. Devaux et al. 21 population growth (Headey and Jayne 2014).”
- De-mystifying family farming: Features, diversity and trends across the globe (2015, background): “1, and also in regions of China (Tan et al., 2013) and sub-Saharan Africa (Deininger and Byerlee, 2012).”
- Large Farm Establishment, Smallholder Productivity, Labor Market Participation, and Resilience: Evidence from Ethiopia (2016, background): “Land constraints are a key determinant of poverty (Jayne et al. 2014).”
- Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? (2021, methodology): “…example, land tenure policy, population density and population growth, the availability of arable land and off farm employment opportunities, among others (see, for example, Tan, Robinson, Li, & Xin, 2013; Jayne, Chamberlin, & Headey, 2014; Sitko & Jayne, 2014; Dawe, 2015; Van Vliet et al., 2015).”
- The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide (2016, background): “Jayne, Chamberlin, and Headey (2014) note that though Africa is typically characterized as land abundant (e.g., Deininger, Byerlee, Lindsay, Norton, Selod, & Stickler, 2011), the majority of the region’s uncultivated arable land is concentrated in a few countries.”