1. The "Possible Trinity" of Agricultural Investment Policies: Enhancing Employment Creation, Productivity and Sustainability of Agricultural Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Author
-
Galli, Rossana
- Subjects
AGRICULTURAL productivity ,JOB creation ,AGRICULTURAL policy ,INVESTMENT policy ,AGRICULTURAL technology - Abstract
This paper aims at providing empirical information about agricultural labour intensities of large commercial farms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our hope is that this information can be used by Sub-Saharan African governments to design policies and incentives to attract private investors in agriculture conditional on the quantity and quality of employment created, the adoption of productivity enhancing technologies, and the environmental sustainability of the investment. More specifically, we argue in this paper that the evaluation of prospective agricultural investment projects should be based not on the absolute number of jobs potentially obtainable with a project, but on the quantity and quality (in terms of temporary vs. permanent, and income and wages earned) of jobs obtainable per hectare of land, or, in other words, the agricultural employment intensity. This varies according to various factors, including the type, seasonality and number of cultivated crops, the cultivation methods and technology adopted, and the farm's size. In particular, the promotion of sustainable, productivity enhancing technologies and cultivation methods, and of medium size farms, can lead to simultaneous increases in both agricultural employment intensity and agricultural productivity. As a result, the use of limited land resources would be optimized. The paper presents a dataset on wage employment and size of cultivated land from 87 farming companies operating across 18 Sub-Saharan African countries, involved in different farming activities and adopting different agricultural technologies and cultivation methods. On the basis of these empirical observations we derive our discussion of policy implications and conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019