Scarcity amidst abundance? Reassessing the potential for cropland expansion in Africa

By Jordan Chamberlin, T. Jayne, Derek Headey. 2014

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sub-Saharan Africa is typically regarded as land abundant, and previous efforts to estimate the true extent of potentially available cropland (PAC) have largely affirmed this perception. Such efforts, however, have largely focused on production potential and have underemphasized economic profitability and other constraints to expansion. This paper re-estimates PAC for Africa in a more explicit economic framework that emphasizes the returns to agricultural production under a variety of assumptions, using recent geospatial data. Existing PAC estimates for Africa are shown to be highly sensitive to assumptions about land productivity and market access, and are moderately influenced by the use of alternative data sources. The region’s underutilized land resources are concentrated in relatively few countries, many of which are fragile states. Between one-half and two-thirds of the region’s surplus land is currently under forest cover; conversion of forests to cropland would entail major environmental costs. Most of the continent’s unexploited land resources are located far from input and output markets, limiting their economic attractiveness. In the long run, improvements in infrastructure and agricultural productivity and the growth of hinterland towns will enhance the economic returns to cropland expansion. In the short to medium term, however, the potential for profitable smallholder-based cropland expansion in most African countries is likely to be much more limited than it is typically perceived to be.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9cf63ed3acafc04eae488526e0be695ba16d63fb

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Deforestation risk due to commodity crop expansion in sub-Saharan Africa (2017, background): “Most unexploited land in SSA is far from markets, limiting the profitability of its conversion [38].”
Closing maize yield gaps in sub-Saharan Africa will boost soil N2O emissions (2020, background): “expansion can also lead to displacement, conflicts [18] and loss of biodiversity [19,20].”
How does urbanization affect farmland protection? Evidence from China (2019, background): “Urban growth may also enhance the economic returns to farmland expansion, and this stronger economic incentive may potentially increase farmland (Chamberlin et al., 2014).”
The Emerging Soybean Production Frontier in Southern Africa: Conservation Challenges and the Role of South‐South Telecouplings (2016, background): “Socioeconomic and political constraints strongly limit the potential profitability of cultivation (Chamberlin et al. 2014).”
Automated cropland mapping of continental Africa using Google Earth Engine cloud computing (2017, background): “…most of this land is concentrated in just eight countries (Algeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda), while a number of the remaining countries contain large rural populations clustered in remarkably small areas (Chamberlin et al., 2014).”
Africa's changing farm size distribution patterns: the rise of medium-scale farms (2016, background): “While there is great heterogeneity within the region, we know that many countries will soon exhaust their land frontiers (e.g., Uganda, Nigeria) if they have not done so already (e.g., Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi) (Chamberlin et al., 2014).”
Effects of rising rural population density on smallholder agriculture in Kenya (2014, background): “…to agriculture (Powlson et al., 2011), because land expansion in some parts of rural Africa is not economic given current states of infrastructure, prices and production technology (Chamberlin et al., 2014), and in some areas because there is little or no unallocated land for further expansion.”
Can sub-Saharan Africa feed itself? (2016, background): “(C) Cereal area required to achieve a self-sufficiency of 1 by 2050; black bars indicate current cereal area, and blue dashed lines indicate total potentially available cereal area (including today’s cereal area) (34).”
Africa’s Unfolding Economic Transformation (2018, background): “Furthermore, the distribution of access improvements may matter greatly: they may effectively unlock the economic potential of under-utilised land resources (Chamberlin et al., 2014) or they may contribute to increased competition for accessible farmland, which may exacerbate land poverty (Jayne et ”