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1. Crop Water Technology and Markets

Full Title:

Increased Food Security and Income in the Limpopo Basin through Integrated Crop, Water, and Soil Fertility Options and Public-Private Partnerships

Website:

www.knowledgebank.irri.org/theme1/

Download project proposal [PDF 130Kb]

The biggest challenges facing smallholder farming communities in the Limpopo basin of southern Africa are food insecurity, poverty and ill-health. Many parts of the basin are routinely food-deficient and rely on food aid. Confirmed reports state that, in the past two seasons, people have died of starvation in basin areas of both Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The Limpopo basin’s local economies depend on rain-fed agricultural systems characterized by low productivity, vulnerability to frequent drought (and sometimes devastating floods), poor adoption of improved technologies and diminishing farm labor due to out-migration and HIV/AIDS, exacerbated by poorly developed input and output markets.

This project recognizes that subsistence agriculture alone will neither meet future food needs nor address the growing poverty problem in these drought-stricken environments. There is need to strengthen linkages through a systems approach that integrates improved water and soil management with varietal improvement, markets and other institutional arrangements which facilitate farmer investment in improved production practices.

The project goal is to improve food security, incomes and livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the Limpopo basin. To achieve this goal, the project will build on past and current collaborative research by national programs and the CGIAR on crop-water productivity in drought-prone areas, innovative approaches to participatory technology development and extension, and new institutional arrangements that link the public and private sectors with the smallholder farmer in appropriate market chains.

The potential results, products and services to farming communities of the Limpopo basin from this project will include:

• Farmer access to improved cereal seeds and legume varieties that mature early and thus escape terminal drought.
• The judicious use of mineral fertilizers, in combinations with organic sources of plant nutrients, appropriate soil/water-conservation measures and improved crop varieties.
• New institutional arrangements that link the public and private sectors with farmers’ uptake of technologies; this will also improve the sustainability of project outputs, and prevent agricultural resource degradation from nutrient mining and the exploitation of fragile lands.
• Assessment of coping strategies of poor and HIV/AIDS-affected households, and the distributive impacts of agricultural commercialization on the livelihoods of these households, in order to better target technologies that mitigate pandemic effects.