Policy Synthesis

Our analyses highlight the fact that even in countries that have achieved impressive grain production growth in recent years, such as Malawi and Zambia, this growth has been heavily concentrated among a small proportion of farmers. In most of the countries for which nationwide farm survey data is available, about 75% of the marketed maize output comes from 10% of the farms (Jayne et al 2010). The value of these farms’ crop and animal product sales is almost as much as the other 90% of farms. Because most poor smallholder farms have limited land and other productive assets, over half of the smallholder population is bypassed by this production growth and remain staple food buyers. For these and other reasons, rural poverty rates have remained stubbornly high even where aggregate grain production has risen dramatically. A major challenge for CAADP Investment Plans is therefore how to effectively reach the least productive half of the smallholder population. Doing so will require a combination of strategies: (1) investing in agricultural research and farmer skills to transfer technologies that are appropriate for one-hectare farms; (2) reducing the costs of putting food on consumers’ tables so as to raise the disposable incomes of urban and net grainbuying rural households; (3) encourage the adoption of more predictable, rules-based forms of state operations in food markets to promote more rapid private investment in the food systems; and (4) support the development of alternative commodity value chains to provide incentives for smallholders to raise their incomes through the diversification of cropping patterns from low-value staples to higher-return crops. The remainder of this note elaborates upon these points.