Contract farming has emerged as a popular mechanism to encourage vertical coordination in developing country agriculture. Yet, there is a lack of consensus on its ability to spur structural transformation in rural economies. We present results from a field experiment on contract farming for rice production in Benin. While all contracts have positive effects on welfare and productivity measures, we find that the simplest contract has impacts nearly as large as contracts with additional attributes. This suggests that once price risk is resolved through the offer of a fixed-price contract, farmers are able to address other constraints on their own.

Semi-Arid Regions (SARs) of West Africa are considered climate change “hotspots” where strong ecological, economic and social impacts converge to make socio-ecological systems particularly vulnerable. While both climatic and non-climatic drivers interact across scales to influence vulnerability, traditionally, this inter-connectedness has received little attention in vulnerability assessments in the region. This study adopted the vulnerability patterns framework, operationalized using the Multidimensional Livelihood Vulnerability approach to include both climatic and non-climatic stressors to analyze differential household vulnerability in SARs of Mali. Findings showed that while drought was the most mentioned climate-related stressor, households were also exposed to a diversity of environmental and socio-economic stressors, including food scarcity, livestock disease, labour unavailability, crop damage, and erratic rainfall patterns. The typology revealed three vulnerability archetypes differentiated by adaptive capacity and sensitivity. Availability of productive household members, household resource endowments, livelihood diversification and social networks were the main discriminant factors of household adaptive capacity, while challenges relating to food and water security make households more sensitive to stressors. The analysis highlighted the heterogeneity in household vulnerability patterns within and across communities. Failing to account for this heterogeneity in adaptation planning might result in a mismatch between adaptation needs and interventions, and potentially in maladaptation.

As part of the climate-smart agriculture approach, the adoption of climate-resilient crop varieties has the potential to build farmers’ climate resilience but could also induce agricultural transformation in developing nations. We investigate the relationship between adoption of climate-resilient groundnut varieties and production, consumption, and smallholder commercialization using panel data from Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria. We find adoption of climate-resilient groundnut varieties to increase smallholder production, consumption, and commercialization. The biggest adoption impact gains are observed under the sustained use of these climate-resilient varieties. We show that adoption benefits all households, but the biggest gains are found among smaller producers, suggesting that adoption is inclusive. Furthermore, we provide suggestive evidence that yield increases could explain commercialization, although household consumption also matters. We conclude that adoption of climate-resilient groundnut varieties can at least partially reduce production constraints and promote smallholder consumption and commercialization, with implications for agricultural transformation.

Despite the adverse effects of pesticides on the environment and human health, they are a key ingredient in boosting agricultural productivity as a way of meeting global food demand. While global levels of pesticides are towering in high-income countries, pesticide use in many parts of Africa remains low, with significant impacts on agricultural productivity and food production. We use a rich longitudinal dataset to examine the relationship between farmer advisory systems and pesticide use in legume-based production systems in Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria. We find that farmers who are advised by private extension systems are approximately 8 % more likely to use pesticides at an extensive level. They also use pesticides more intensively (41 %). On the other hand, farmers advised by public extension systems are about 5 % more likely to extensively use pesticides. These farmers are observed to reduce the intensive use of pesticides by about 14 %. Furthermore, we also show that farmers advised by joint private-public extension systems are about 4 % more likely to use pesticides as well as reduce their intensity of use by approximately 11 %. At the various country levels, there exists significant heterogeneity in the relationship between advisory systems and pesticide use, suggesting that context matters. Of course, the pesticide regulatory systems and the institutional environments in these countries vary greatly. Given these findings, our study offers key entry and leveraging points for increasing pesticide use at levels that limit their environmental and human effects but may ascertain increased agricultural productivity and food production.