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# 3 A Micro‐Economic Update on African Agriculture

## 3.1 Backward technology

The prevailing view about African agriculture is that technology is backward, and changing only slowly. Africa is decades behind Asia from this perspective. Farmers are slow to respond to modern methods of farming such as the use of modern inputs and mechanization, land improvement and irrigation. Official estimates put c <mark>ereal yields in SSA still only at about 1.5 ton/ha on average (2012‐2014), about half those in South Asia (3.1 ton/ha) and a quarter those in China (5.9 ton/ha) (W</mark> orld Bank, 2017).

This is a major concern as boosting agricultural productivity is key for poverty reduction (Christiaensen, Demery, Kuhl, 2011). It is also somewhat surprising as the Boserup‐Ruthenberg (BR) theory of agricultural intensification (Boserup, 1965; Ruthenberg, 1980) would have predicted higher uptake and the technologies are generally believed to be profitable (Byerlee et al., 2007). Substantial <mark>gender gaps in agricultural productivity (O’Sullivan et al., 2014), combined with the notion that African women perform most of the work in agriculture further suggests that shifting attention to female farmers to close this gap could be an important avenue to boost agricultural output.</mark> <mark>The first four papers of the special issue</mark> confront these conventional wisdoms with the data. They begin with an update of the extent of input use (Sheahan and Barrett, 2017). Binswanger‐Mkhize and Savastano (2017) then assess the current input application rates within the macro‐context of Africa’s current population density and market access. This is followed by a case study of the actual profitability of fertilizer use in Nigeria (Liverpool‐Tassie et al., 2017), drawing attention to a core micro‐economic principle driving input adoption, namely profitability. The fourth paper then explores the potential for increasing crop output from closing the gender productivity gap (Palacios‐Lopez, Christiaensen, Kilic, 2017).

_African farmers do in fact use modern inputs, even though not always efficiently_ . According to common wisdom, farmers in Africa hardly use modern inputs such as inorganic fertilizer and other agro chemicals, or mechanization and water control. Using data from over 22,000 households and 62,000 agricultural plots from the six LSMS‐ISA countries, Sheahan and Barrett (2017) revisit this record, offering a number of “potentially surprising” facts. They find that fertilizer and agro‐chemical use is more widespread than is often acknowledged. One‐third of the cultivating households in the LSMS‐ISA countries apply inorganic fertilizer and the average unconditional nutrient application rate is 26 kg/ha (corresponding to 57 kg of total fertilizer/ha). This is twice the SSA average of 13 kg of nutrients/ha during the same period, even though still only one‐fifth of the OECD average.<sup>8</sup> But rates vary considerably across countries (and also across regions within countries). Use is highest in Malawi, Ethiopia and Nigeria, where more than 40 percent of cultivating households apply inorganic fertilizer, but much lower in Niger and Tanzania (17%) and Uganda, where inorganic fertilizer use is virtually nonexistent (Figure 1).

8 The latest official numbers for SSA (2013) put the average at 17.5 kg/ha (World Bank, 2017).