Role of Farmers\u27 Organisation in Rice Development: Lessons from Mwea

Symposium mini revie

Willingness to cooperate in shared natural resource management is linked to group identification through perceived efficacy and group norms

Cooperative management of shared natural resources is one of the most urgent challenges the world is facing today. While there have been advances in understanding institutional design features that enable sustainable management, there are few field studies that provide theory-based insights into social psychological predictors of willingness to cooperate around shared resources. Here, we address this issue in the context of shared land management in pastoralist community conservancies in Kenya. In a large survey of individuals from different conservancies, we test a path model that links willingness to cooperate to how strongly respondents identified with their conservancy. This relationship is mediated by how efficient conservancies were perceived to be, and to what extent other people in the community were perceived to share cooperative norms. The results also point towards several parameters that may be conducive to developing stronger conservancy identification: transparency of purpose, motive alignment, sense of ownership, and demonstrating benefit. The findings provide insights into the social psychological processes that impact whether cooperative outcomes can be achieved in real-world shared resource settings, and offer practical implications for strengthening governance within pastoralist conservancies and related shared natural resource management contexts

Farmer-Led Irrigation and Its Impacts on Smallholder Farmers’ Crop Income: Evidence from Southern Tanzania

Irrigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa are mostly unsustainable because of lack of maintenance by their users or government planners. By contrast, evidence shows that the smallholder farmers are developing and expanding the irrigated land, using their initiatives. Farmer-led irrigation, a revolutionary agricultural intensification approach, is already in progress with the magnitude to significantly transform the living standards of smallholder farmers. However, a rigorous assessment of its impact on household welfare to ascertain this is lacking. This paper bridges this gap by assessing factors influencing the adoption of this particular approach as well as its effects on the farmers’ per capita net crop income. Our data set consists of 608 smallholder farmers in Southern Tanzania and used propensity score matching to estimate the effects of adoption on the per capita net crop income. Our results indicate that the uptake of farmer-led irrigation practices is influenced by drought experience, water user group membership, farmer organization membership, and government extension, as well as the sex of the household head. Further, there was a positive and significant effect on the adopters’ per capita net crop income, thus encouraging the need to promote farmer-led irrigation as a complement to externally promoted innovations in achieving sustainable food security. This study, therefore, recommends that the government should support the farmers’ initiative by improving roads, removing market barriers, and helping farmers who have not yet taken up the initiative. Also, the government should enact regulations to make sure farmer-led irrigation initiatives do not harm the eco-environment such as protecting domestic water users. Finally, the government should leverage microservices to the farmers such as promoting affordable and appropriate credit facilities. It is necessary to continue pursuing this vein of research to gain information regarding the definite impact of the farmer-led irrigation on household welfare

Farmer-Led Irrigation and Its Impacts on Smallholder Farmers’ Crop Income: Evidence from Southern Tanzania

Irrigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa are mostly unsustainable because of lack of maintenance by their users or government planners. By contrast, evidence shows that the smallholder farmers are developing and expanding the irrigated land, using their initiatives. Farmer-led irrigation, a revolutionary agricultural intensification approach, is already in progress with the magnitude to significantly transform the living standards of smallholder farmers. However, a rigorous assessment of its impact on household welfare to ascertain this is lacking. This paper bridges this gap by assessing factors influencing the adoption of this particular approach as well as its effects on the farmers’ per capita net crop income. Our data set consists of 608 smallholder farmers in Southern Tanzania and used propensity score matching to estimate the effects of adoption on the per capita net crop income. Our results indicate that the uptake of farmer-led irrigation practices is influenced by drought experience, water user group membership, farmer organization membership, and government extension, as well as the sex of the household head. Further, there was a positive and significant effect on the adopters’ per capita net crop income, thus encouraging the need to promote farmer-led irrigation as a complement to externally promoted innovations in achieving sustainable food security. This study, therefore, recommends that the government should support the farmers’ initiative by improving roads, removing market barriers, and helping farmers who have not yet taken up the initiative. Also, the government should enact regulations to make sure farmer-led irrigation initiatives do not harm the eco-environment such as protecting domestic water users. Finally, the government should leverage microservices to the farmers such as promoting affordable and appropriate credit facilities. It is necessary to continue pursuing this vein of research to gain information regarding the definite impact of the farmer-led irrigation on household welfare.</jats:p

The Impact of Household Wealth on Adoption and Compliance to GLOBAL GAP Production Standards: Evidence from Smallholder farmers in Kenya

Horticultural production for the export market has been credited for rural community growth and employment in Sub-Saharan Africa. To make the agri-enterprises competitive and profitable, smallholder farmers are now required to invest in food safety and production standards such as GLOBAL Good Agricultural Practices (GLOBAL GAP). Most often, the inability to afford capital has affected compliance with food safety production standards. However, farmers can use household assets to finance the agri enterprise ventures. The purpose of the study is to explore the impact of household wealth on the adoption of food safety certification standards. The study used cross-sectional data collected from 479 smallholder farmers in Kenya. The findings reveal that 49% of the households are categorized as wealthy and 51% as poorly endowed. The empirical findings on the willingness to adopt GLOBAL GAP certification reveal that membership to GLOBAL GAP affiliated farmers groups significantly influence on wealthier farmers to attain GLOBAL GAP certification status. Farmers groups facilitate joint investments that reduce the cost of investing in GLOBAL GAP assets such as grading shed, protective gear, shower rooms, disposal pits, incinerators, hessian coolers, packaging crates, soil testing kits and establishing food traceability systems. In comparison to poor endowed farming households, the well-endowed farmers have a relatively significantly better wealth index, an indication that they can easily raise capital investments to finance GAP certification. Finally, we observe that selling beans to GAP certified buyers significantly enables farmers to comply with the expected certified production standards

The Impact of Household Wealth on Adoption and Compliance to GLOBAL GAP Production Standards: Evidence from Smallholder farmers in Kenya

Horticultural production for the export market has been credited for rural community growth and employment in Sub-Saharan Africa. To make the agri-enterprises competitive and profitable, smallholder farmers are now required to invest in food safety and production standards such as GLOBAL Good Agricultural Practices (GLOBAL GAP). Most often, the inability to afford capital has affected compliance with food safety production standards. However, farmers can use household assets to finance the agri enterprise ventures. The purpose of the study is to explore the impact of household wealth on the adoption of food safety certification standards. The study used cross-sectional data collected from 479 smallholder farmers in Kenya. The findings reveal that 49% of the households are categorized as wealthy and 51% as poorly endowed. The empirical findings on the willingness to adopt GLOBAL GAP certification reveal that membership to GLOBAL GAP affiliated farmers groups significantly influence on wealthier farmers to attain GLOBAL GAP certification status. Farmers groups facilitate joint investments that reduce the cost of investing in GLOBAL GAP assets such as grading shed, protective gear, shower rooms, disposal pits, incinerators, hessian coolers, packaging crates, soil testing kits and establishing food traceability systems. In comparison to poor endowed farming households, the well-endowed farmers have a relatively significantly better wealth index, an indication that they can easily raise capital investments to finance GAP certification. Finally, we observe that selling beans to GAP certified buyers significantly enables farmers to comply with the expected certified production standards.</jats:p

Factors Affecting Adaptation to Climate Change through Agroforestry in Kenya

The environmental effects of climate change have significantly decreased agricultural productivity. Agroforestry technologies have been applied as a solution to promote sustainable agricultural systems. This study evaluates the factors influencing the adoption of agroforestry technology in Kenya. A multistage sampling technique was employed to collect data from 239 households in West Pokot County, Kenya. A Probit model and K-means algorithm were used to analyze the factors affecting farmers’ agroforestry technology adoption decisions based on the sampled households’ socio-economic, demographic, and farm characteristics. The study found that the total yield for maize crop, farm size, extension frequency, off-farm income, access to training, access to credit, access to transport facilities, group membership, access to market, gender, distance to nearest trading center, and household education level had significant effects on the adoption of agroforestry technologies. The findings of this study are important in informing policy formulation and implementation that promotes agroforestry technologies adoption.</jats:p

Land tenure and the sustainability of pastoral production systems: a comparative analysis of the Andean Altiplano and the East African savannah

Pastoral communities are facing mounting pressure on their livelihoods due to misconceptions about pastoralism and global trends including population growth and climate change. In this context, this article seeks to establish a correlation between pastoral land tenure systems and the sustainability of pastoralism as a production system. Using a comparative approach, we develop a taxonomy to first categorise the tenure regimes - collective and individual - of pastoralist societies of the Andean altiplano and the Kenyan savannah, and then we explore how these different regimes enable or hinder the performance of productive strategies that are key to the sustainability of pastoralism. We find that collective land tenure is positively correlated with the sustainability of pastoral production systems.</jats:p