Social protection for sustainable food systems

Social protection programmes to help farmers become more resilient aren’t just safety nets, but can help them make investments and meaningfully engage in markets, says the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

Over the past 20 years, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has seen 4,3% growth in annual agricultural output, the highest of any region in the world. Most of this growth has come from area expansion, not input intensification or increased productivity. Despite this growth, 73 million people remain acutely food-insecure.

There is an urgent need to support sustainable agricultural intensification across a wide segment of the rural farm population, while at the same time enabling rural dwellers to exit agriculture if it is not a viable livelihood option.

Studies of structural transformations in Asia show how the adoption of new farm practices and technologies helped boost agricultural labour productivity. In turn, this provided farm households with more disposable income, which they tended to spend on local consumables. As a result, new employment opportunities in the non-farm sector were created. This helped to pull marginal farm households out of agriculture and into more remunerative non-farm enterprises.

However, this vision of rural transformation is complicated by the severe resource constraints faced by many people in rural SSA, and the fact that markets for insurance and credit are often absent or unavailable to poor households.

Livelihood and investment decisions are inseparable from concerns over food security for many farm households in SSA. This tends to push them towards production choices that minimise short-term consumption risks but are often low in return and aligned with subsistence.