Why agro-ecology risks harming the poor, worsening gender inequality!

The use of agro-ecological practices has enabled African  farmers and Tanzania is no exception, to withstand such changes through growing a variety of adapted traditional saved seeds of small grains, a wide range of pulses, and leafy vegetables as well as tubers.

Agroecology is the study of ecological processes applied to agricultural production systems. Bringing ecological principles to bear can suggest new management approaches in agroecosystems. The term is often used imprecisely. Agroecologists study a variety of agroecosystems. The field of agroecology is not associated with any one particular method of farming, whether it be organic, integrated, or conventional, intensive or extensive, although some use the name specifically for alternative agriculture.

Rather than helping to address food insecurity, the agro-ecological agenda may in fact be trapping African farmers in poverty. That’s the finding of the first continent-wide meta-analysis of conservation agriculture experiments in Africa, and it threatens to completely up-end the dominant paradigm around agro-ecology.

In recent years, agro-ecology has come to be seen as a virtual panacea in sub-Saharan Africa. Aid agencies, churches, development NGOs and United Nations agencies all now tie their support for resource-poor farmers to an explicitly agro-ecological agenda.

NGOs are keen to offer anecdotal evidence for how these approaches can help smallholder farmers in Africa. Yet scientifically rigorous empirical evidence for the benefits of agro-ecology — also termed “conservation agriculture” — has so far been lacking.

Scientists, who analyzed 933 observations across 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa comparing conservation agriculture with conventional cropping, found that agro-ecological approaches do not substantially improve productivity and do not therefore help address the food insecurity of smallholder farmers.

This is not because conventional tillage-based farming is better than conservation agriculture — in fact, as these results show, they are equally bad — but because the advocates for agro-ecology also tend push an ideological agenda that rejects scientific innovations such as biotechnology, hybrid seeds, mechanization, irrigation and other tools that might more reliably increase productivity for smallholder farmers in Africa.

According to a study conservation agriculture did not improve yields in cotton, cowpea, rice, sorghum or soybean. Maize yields did show a 4 per cent increase, but only if glyphosate pre-emergence herbicide treatments were applied, something which is strictly forbidden by agro-ecology advocates.

In practice therefore, agro-ecology is likely to have no benefits at all to most farmers in Africa.

In fact, it could even have negative effects. This is primarily because soil improvements from conservation agriculture require the use of crop residues as mulches. In dry conditions these can help retain moisture in the ground by reducing evaporation. However, crop residues are much more valuable to smallholder farmers as fodder for cattle and other livestock animals, which produce meat, milk and manure and are therefore much more important for safeguarding food security than a slight increase in maize yield. In the arid conditions of much of sub-Saharan Africa, there is simply no spare biomass to use in conservation agriculture.

This is not to say that no-till systems have no benefits anywhere in the world. In fact, reduced or conservation tillage approaches have been widely adopted across North and South America, where they help to reduce soil erosion, conserve moisture and sequester carbon. Indeed, most of the carbon benefits of genetically modified crops arise because herbicide tolerance traits allow farmers to adopt no-till practices.

These benefits, however, arise in capital-intensive mechanized systems, not in the subsistence agriculture that is mainly practiced in Africa. Without the use of herbicides, farmers in Africa adopting no-till have to weed by hand, a physically demanding task often performed in intense heat. Hand-weeding is also often seen as a woman’s task, aggravating gender inequality.