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The rapid urbanization in Africa profoundly affects local food and ecological systems. According to earlier research, urbanization may cause food production and biodiversity losses as agricultural or natural lands are absorbed by expanding cities. Land-use displacement effects may buffer agricultural production losses or may lead to additional biodiversity losses but are often overlooked. Moreover, impacts of dietary changes associated with urbanization are rarely considered. To address this, we combined spatially explicit projections of African urban area expansion with observed rice consumption shifts to inform a partial equilibrium model (the Global Biosphere Management Model). We demonstrate the importance of displacement effects to identify potential food production or biodiversity issues until 2050 and argue for their integration in land-use planning and policymaking across spatial scales. We identify that because of agricultural displacement, the impact of urban area expansion on food production losses is probably limited (<1%)—at the cost of additional losses of natural lands by 2050 (up to 2 Mt). We also show that considering dietary shifts associated with urbanization increases rice consumption, production (+8.0%), trade (up to +2 Mt of required import) and agricultural methane emissions (up to +12 MtCO2-equivalent yr–1), thereby underscoring the need for a systems approach in future sustainability studies.

As Africa is facing multiple challenges related to food security, frameworks integrating production and availability are urgent for policymaking. Attention should be given not only to gradual socio-economic and climatic changes but also to their temporal variability. Here we present an integrated framework that allows one to assess the impacts of socio-economic development, gradual climate change and climate anomalies. We apply this framework to rice production and consumption in Africa whereby we explicitly account for the continent’s dependency on imported rice. We show that socio-economic development dictates rice availability, whereas climate change has only minor effects in the long term and is predicted not to amplify supply shocks. Still, rainfed-dominated or self-producing regions are sensitive to local climatic anomalies, while trade dominates stability in import-dependent regions. Our study suggests that facilitating agricultural development and limiting trade barriers are key in relieving future challenges to rice availability and stability.

Concurrent with an extensive population growth, the African continent has experienced a vast urbanization trend over the last decades. In 2000, around 35% of the population resided in urban areas. By 2020, this share has increased to around 44% and is projected to increase even further by 2050 following the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios. Besides an important effect on local land use through urban expansion, this also affects food systems by shifting dietary patterns away from traditional diets towards imported or convenient goods. This is particularly the case for rice, which is predominantly imported from Southeast Asia, India, or Pakistan, and is gaining in popularity in African urban diets because of the low effort needed for cooking or storage – giving it a strong advantage over other staple crops. This dietary shift will alter trade dynamics, increase the pressure on local resources such as land, water, and fertilizer use, and subsequently also on biodiversity. In studies investigating the influence of urbanization, either the direct effect of urban expansion on land cover or the effects of dietary changes on demands are investigated, but rarely a combination or comparison of both. Particularly in impact studies or applications that focus on the synergy between water, land, and food-related issues, the dimension of human behavior, such as consumer preferences, is often overlooked. In this study, we provide an initial projection of the expected future effects of both sprawl and shifting preferences for rice caused by urbanization on rice availability, land – and input use, rice-specific emissions, and trade dynamics. By combining micro-level data from household surveys stemming from the Living Standards Measurements Study (LSMS) with the partial equilibrium Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM) at an African scale, we were able to identify the relative contribution of land cover effects stemming directly from urban expansion and indirectly

Developing and integrating agricultural markets may be key to addressing Africa’s sustainability challenges. By modelling trade costs from farm gate to potential import markets across eight African regions, we investigate the impact of individual components of continental free trade and the complementary role of domestic agricultural development through increased market access for farmers and agricultural intensification. We find that free trade would increase intra-African agricultural trade sixfold by 2030 but—since it does not address local supply constraints—outside food imports and undernourishment would reduce only marginally. Agricultural development could almost eliminate undernourishment in Africa by 2050 at only a small cost of increased global greenhouse gas emissions. While continental free trade will be enabled in Africa through the African Continental Free Trade Area, aligning this with local agricultural development policies is crucial to increase intra-African trade gains, promote food security and achieve climate objectives.

Food stability – or the lack thereof has caused several issues on global food security in the past. Prime examples are the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russian war, and the 2008 African food crisis. Meanwhile, the occurrence of extreme meteorological events has been increasing rapidly (droughts, floods, …), resulting in substantial harvest losses putting food security under pressure with strong indications that these will become even more prevalent under climate change. Yet, the amount of studies assessing food stability or potential climate change effects is scarce – hindering purposeful policymaking. This makes a methodological framework to assess food stability urgent.

— Passive microwave L-band remote sensing is well known for its sensitivity to surface soil moisture over land. The signal is also affected by other dynamic variables such as vegetation and soil salinity. In this research, L-band microwave observations of the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission are used to explore soil surface salinity, moisture and vegetation, in the Argentinean Dry Chaco, an area with possible emerging dryland salinity. A Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) with inclusion of a correction to the soil’s dielectric constant for salinity was used in forward and inverse mode, using either in situ data or Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) simulations as RTM input. The forward analysis pointed out shortcomings in the modeled soil moisture and soil surface temperature estimates. The impact of salinity on forward simulations over the Dry Chaco was limited. The RTM inversion using 10 years of SMOS brightness temperature observations resulted in realistic estimates of vegetation and roughness, both with and without optimizing a correction term for the dielectric constant in terms of salinity equivalents. However, the retrieval of the correction term to the dielectric constant was very uncertain and not representative of soil surface salinity, but rather of open water, texture uncertainty or soil moisture bias. © 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.

Trade liberalization in the early 21st century increased the adaptation capacity of global food systems to climate change; further liberalization and trade facilitation could help to avoid dozens of millions being undernourished at mid-century. The global trade agenda should explicitly include climate change adaptation to achieve SDG 2 Zero Hunger.

International trade enables us to exploit regional differences in climate change impacts and is increasingly regarded as a potential adaptation mechanism. Here, we focus on hunger reduction through international trade under alternative trade scenarios for a wide range of climate futures. Under the current level of trade integration, climate change would lead to up to 55 million people who are undernourished in 2050. Without adaptation through trade, the impacts of global climate change would increase to 73 million people who are undernourished (+33%). Reduction in tariffs as well as institutional and infrastructural barriers would decrease the negative impact to 20 million (−64%) people. We assess the adaptation effect of trade and climate-induced specialization patterns. The adaptation effect is strongest for hunger-affected import-dependent regions. However, in hunger-affected export-oriented regions, partial trade integration can lead to increased exports at the expense of domestic food availability. Although trade integration is a key component of adaptation, it needs sensitive implementation to benefit all regions.

While an important share of the rural population in Sub-Saharan Africa owns a non-farm enterprise (NFE), it is unclear how these businesses, especially among female owners, contribute to rural development. This study investigates the missing link between rural NFEs and children's education using nationally representative data for Ghana. After controlling for observed and (partially for) unobserved heterogeneity, using OLS and instrumental variable regressions with instruments that are highly relevant and plausibly exogenous, we find that secondary schooling is significantly higher among children whose mother engages in non-farm entrepreneurship. We find a significant positive correlation with Junior High School enrolment but not with Senior High School enrolment, which relates to lower expenses and a better spread in payment for Junior High School education. The link of mother's non-farm entrepreneurship with child secondary education is equally strong for boys and girls and for high- and low-educated mothers, and stronger for poorer households. While most of NFEs are small-scale and informal, our findings suggest that even these businesses can contribute to development. The results furthermore imply that NFEs entail the potential to stimulate child schooling among children of low-educated and poor mothers and thereby reduce inequality in rural education.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) is a market based policy tool that is increasingly being recommended for effective and sustainable management of watersheds, especially for Sub-Saharan Africa, where soil and watershed degradation are currently very severe. The design of PES projects is challenging and insights in the local context are indispensable. Using a choice experiment, this study investigates the perspective of farmers on the design of a PES program in the Mount Elgon region in Uganda. We use mixed logit and latent class models to reveal and explain preference heterogeneity for PES attributes. We calculate willingness to accept values and perform a cost analysis to identify the most cost-efficient PES programs. Our results point to a strong willingness of farmers to participate in a PES contract. The majority of farmers are willing to adopt different conservation measures, even in absence of a compensation; a minority of farmers are strongly averse to buffer strips along the river and do require a significant compensation. We find that farmers have strong preferences for individual over communal compensation, and that additional in-kind rewards in the form of labour assistance or tools increase the willingness to accept a contract. The findings imply that PES is a promising avenue for improved watershed conservation in the Mount Elgon region; and that individual compensation, differentiation and specific targeting of such programs may benefit their cost effectiveness.

Liquid biofuel production has been widely promoted as a rural development strategy in the South. Yet, the development of biofuel value chains faces many context-specific challenges. In this empirical study we use a labelled choice experiment to assess smallholder farmer preferences for alternative production systems, value chain organisations and market developments for a biofuel program using oilseed trees (neem (Azadirachta indica), pongamia (Millettia pinnata), mahua (Madhuca longifolia)) in Karnataka state, India. Our results demonstrate that biofuel programs can benefit from ex ante analyses to improve their design. We find that most farmers (71%) are likely to adopt biofuel trees in most scenarios, especially species with relatively high yields, low labour requirements and high oilseed prices. Nevertheless, value chain reorganization through contracting and labour provision proves to be the key lever to stimulate adoption. This calls for further research on effective contract design and implementation, and for developing alternative business models. Our results imply that next to high opportunity costs of land, also high opportunity costs of labour can be a barrier to biofuel tree adoption. If biofuel programs are to succeed, they have to move beyond the idea of smallholder biofuel production on marginal lands with surplus labour.

Due to an increase in international demand, quinoa production has boomed tremendously in the Andes since the early 2010s. This has led to significant investments into developing improved varieties for large-scale agribusinesses, but breeding programs are not tailored to the needs of smallholders. In this paper, we study farmers’ preferences and willingness to pay for improved quinoa varieties in the Junín region in Peru. We use data from a choice experiment among 458 smallholders and estimate generalized multinomial logit models to control for preference and scale heterogeneity. We find that farmers generally prefer improved varieties over traditional varieties, with mildew-resistance as the most important crop trait. In general, farmers prefer varieties that are characterized by larger grain sizes, higher yield levels, lower levels of saponin, and a reduced maturation period. Yet, food-insecure farmers are found to be indifferent to early maturity and a larger grain size, which can be explained by a lower degree of commercialization among these farmers. Our results imply that developing mildew-tolerant and higher-yielding varieties with a medium to low saponin content is a priority if investments in quinoa technologies are to benefit small-scale and food insecure farmers in the Andean highlands of Peru.

Horticultural exports from developing countries are expanding. While concerns are rising about the consequences of this growth for local food security, there is no empirical evidence that directly measures this impact. We provide such evidence for Senegal, one of the African countries with a sharp growth in horticultural exports. Using secondary data and panel survey data, we analyse the link between horticultural exports and the availability, access, utilization and stability components of food security. Results suggest that horticultural exports contribute to the capacity to import food, and do not jeopardize availability of food at the macro-economic level. At the micro-economic level, we find that female wage employment in the horticultural export sector reduces the probability of self-reported food insecurity, improves the quality of food consumption, and shortens the hunger season.

This paper presents panel data evidence on the impact of expansion of global value chains and large-scale export-oriented farms in developing countries over almost a decade. We estimate the income effects of wage employment on large-scale farms in the horticultural export sector in Senegal, using data from two survey rounds covering a seven-years period of rapid expansion of the sector. We estimate average income effects as well as heterogeneous income effects, using fixed effects and quantile fixed effects regressions. We find that poverty and inequality reduced much faster in the research area than elsewhere in Senegal. Employment in the horticultural export sector is associated with higher household income and the income effect is strongest for the poorest households. Expansion of the horticultural export sector in Senegal has been particularly pro-poor through creating employment that is accessible and creates substantial income gains for the poorest half of the rural population. These pro-poor employment effects contrast with insights in the literature on increased inequality from rural wage employment.

While worldwide progress in poverty reduction has been impressive, Sub-Saharan Africa is lagging behind with slow growth and a high-poverty headcount ratio. There are fierce debates on how Sub-Saharan Africa can foster pro-poor growth and the role of agriculture and small- versus large-scale farming in poverty reduction. We contribute to this debate with micro-economic empirical evidence from the Senegal River Delta, an area that recently experienced rapid rural development. We use household survey data from two panel rounds in 2006 and 2013 and a cluster analysis to investigate livelihood, income, and poverty dynamics in the region. We find that with 4.3% annual growth in average household income, 29.5 percentage points’ poverty reduction, and 4.2 percentage points’ inequality reduction over the period 2006–13, development in the Senegal River Delta region has been remarkably pro-poor. Income growth and poverty reduction have been most impressive among households moving into wage employment on large-scale horticultural export farms and in an emerging service sector. Income growth in small-scale agriculture and non-farm businesses has been more modest but has affected the largest number of households. Transformation in both farm and non-farm sectors has driven rural development in the Senegal River Delta region, and investments in both large- and small-scale agriculture have contributed importantly to household income growth and poverty reduction. Our findings imply that (foreign) investments in large-scale commercial and export-oriented farming can trigger pro-poor growth—directly through employment effects and indirectly through investment and consumption linkages with the small-scale farm and non-farm sector.

This paper investigates the impact of wage employment on women’s well-being in the Senegalese horticultural export industry. It uses a subjective well-being approach, based on self-reported happiness, to capture income and non-income aspects of employment. The study uses original survey data from 2013 for the Saint-Louis region in Senegal and an instrumental variable approach, supported by information from focus group discussions. It finds that women’s employment improves subjective well-being for the poorest women, but not for women whose household income is above the poverty threshold. Women’s employment improves women’s happiness through an income effect, as it leads to higher income levels and improved living standards, but the non-income effects reduce women’s happiness. This negative effect is related to a higher workload and low job satisfaction due to unfulfilled expectations. The positive income effect outweighs these negative non-income effects for poor women but not for relatively wealthier women

Private standards such as Fairtrade have emerged as a response to consumer, civil society and corporate concerns about the production conditions of imported food. Many studies have investigated the welfare implications of smallholder participation in Fairtrade schemes and consumers' willingness to pay for Fairtrade and other labelled products. On the other hand, no study has yet investigated farmers' preferences for Fairtrade and other private standards. Such insights would be valuable to improve the efficiency of certification schemes and ensure that they are tailored to farmers’ needs. Using a choice experiment, this study investigates the preferences of smallholder rice farmers in Benin for Fairtrade and Organic standards and compares the value of three types of contracts (domestic, Fairtrade, and Fairtrade-Organic). The results indicate that farmers positively value contracts, but prefer domestic over Fairtrade contracts because the former involve fewer requirements. At current market prices, farmers are willing to accept a Fairtrade contract that includes fertiliser and child labour restrictions and a social premium, but they are not willing to accept a Fairtrade-Organic contract that completely prohibits chemical input use. The results imply that adding organic requirements to Fairtrade contracts may undermine the adoption and spread of Fairtrade certification in the Beninese rice sector.

This article reviews the channels through which horticultural exports affect food security in developing countries. We describe the trends in horticultural export chains and investigate the macro- and micro-level effects on the different components of food security, including availability, access, utilization and stability. The available evidence suggests that horticultural exports contribute to food security in developing countries, particularly through the development of rural labor markets and female wage employment in companies. Important challenges remain; most notably the provision of secure employment at remunerative conditions and the sustainable use of water resources. Overcoming these challenges requires tighter national legislation but also private food standards may contribute. Empirical evidence that directly measures the impact of horticultural exports on food security and the underlying impact pathways is still completely missing and highly needed.

The rapid transformation of the agri-food sector in developing countries has created rural off-farm employment opportunities, especially for women. There is growing concern about worker welfare and employment conditions in agri-food and export sectors, but empirical evidence on this issue is scant. We analyse contractual preferences of female workers in the horticultural export sector in Senegal. We use a discrete choice experiment to assess women's preferences for a labour contract and employ a latent class model to capture preference heterogeneity. We find that women have a high willingness to accept a labour contract in the horticultural export industry, and that differences in preferences for contract attributes can be explained by women's empowerment status.

Economic growth and modernization of society are generally associated with fertility rate decreases but which forces trigger this is unclear. In this paper we assess how fertility changes with increased labor market participation of women in rural Senegal. Evidence from high-income countries suggests that higher female employment rates lead to reduced fertility rates but evidence from developing countries at an early stage of demographic transition is largely absent. We concentrate on a rural area in northern Senegal where a recent boom in horticultural exports has been associated with a sudden increase in female off-farm employment. Using survey data we show that employed women have a significantly higher age at marriage and at first childbirth, and significantly fewer children. As causal identification strategy we use instrumental variable and difference-in-differences estimations, combined with propensity score matching. We find that female employment reduces the number of children per woman by 25%, and that this fertility-reducing effect is as large for poor as for non-poor women and larger for illiterate than for literate women. Results imply that female employment is a strong instrument for empowering rural women, reducing fertility rates and accelerating the demographic transition in poor countries. The effectiveness of family planning programs can increase if targeted to areas where female employment is increasing or to female employees directly because of a higher likelihood to reach women with low-fertility preferences. Our results show that changes in fertility preferences not necessarily result from a cultural evolution but can also be driven by sudden and individual changes in economic opportunities.