Sustainable Agriculture Involves a Lot of Juggling
Building a resilient and sustainable agriculture in Africa is the subject of one of the High Level Panel discussions of the 11th African Economic Conference (AEC) which entered its second day on Tuesday, 6 December 2016 in Abuja, the Nigerian capital.
Chris Barrett, an agriculture professor at Cornell University in the United States, who led the discussion focused on a number of constraints faced by African smallholder farmers who account for 90% of the continent's agricultural production.
These range from the need to simultaneously address issues related to adaptation to the environment, infrastructure deficiency, natural resources conservation, market access, and the capacity to utilize modern agricultural inputs efficiently.
"Observations of smallholder inefficiency often reflect failure to control variations in natural conditions," noted, which reduces their productivity by half in certain cases.
Nestle