Indicator 2.4.1: Proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture
 

Contemporary discourses on customary land tenure in Africa, and South Africa in particular, have emphasized the socially embedded and flexible nature of customary land rights, recognising these as inherently more ‘pro-poor’ than individual titling. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations in Venda, a former homeland in South Africa, this paper explores how in the context of expanding commodity frontiers, customary land markets have emerged, leading to de facto privatisation of customary land.

Indicator 2.3.1: Volume of production per labour unit by classes of farming/pastoral/forestry enterprise
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Indicator 2.3.2: Average income of small-scale food producers, by sex and indigenous status
 

This working paper aims to provide recommendations and guidelines for climate services good practice. Building on CCAFS work and the broader academic literature, we distil knowledge and experience from interviews with project leaders and collaborators under Flagship 4, Climate Services and Safety Nets. Interviews provided information on designing, implementing and assessing climate services projects across the CCAFS regions; Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Cocoa and oil palm are the major commodity crops produced in Ghana and livelihood options for hundreds of thousands of rural households. However, their production has negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Certification standards have been promoted as a market-led mechanism to ensure their sustainable production. Even though food security does not feature in the theory of change of most certification standards, there are interesting intersections. This paper assesses the food security outcomes of certification adoption among cocoa and oil palm smallholders in Ghana.

The G+ Customer Profile is a tool for identifying and describing target customers (users) of a breeding
product, such as crop varieties and breeds of livestock. The use of this tool highlights gender
differences among customers or users to ensure that they are considered when target customer
segments are defined. This tool helps a breeding program to prioritize its customers (e.g. how many
they are, their geographical distribution and their socio-economic situation, besides their preferences

Digital technologies and services are rapidly expanding in virtually every aspect of the global economy and society, and the agriculture sector is no exception. This expansion creates new opportunities to deploy massive, agile, personalized, cost-effective, and digitally-enabled agricultural services capable of reaching even the poorest and most vulnerable populations , and driving a new digital revolution in agriculture that may prove to be as consequential as the Green Revolution of 1965-1986.

In Tanzania, diets are dominated by starchy staple crops such as maize, levels of malnutrition are high and largely attributed to lack of dietary diversity. We employed fuzzy cognitive mapping to understand the current soybean, maize and chicken value chains, to highlight stakeholder relationships and to identify entry points for value chain integration to support nutritious diets in Tanzania.

Valuable lessons can be learned from smallholder farmers who have successfully protected and regenerated tree cover across agricultural landscapes in Senegal, with minimal reliance on tree nurseries, seedling distribution or tree planting. In the process, they have restored soil fertility to sustainably increase agricultural production.

In the above initiatives, self-motivated populations increased food security and reduced vulnerabilities to climatic shocks by restoring and sustainably managing local forest resources. To regenerate agroforestry parklands, farmers built on traditional systems to increase on-farm tree density and convert degraded lands to densely wooded savannas. These actions increased crop yields and produced new sources of livestock browse. The population of Sambandé restored the local forest and managed it to sustainably produce fuel and fruit.

Unless countries can manage to mobilize millions of land users to invest their scarce resources in protecting regenerating trees, the battle against land degradation cannot be won. These experiences from Niger show that hundreds of thousands of smallholder farm families have substantially increased tree cover on their farm land by investing in the management of on-farm trees. This has improved their production systems and their livelihoods. There is no reason to believe that similar success cannot be achieved in many more countries throughout African drylands and sub-humid area.