| Excutive
summary: |
The biggest challenges facing smallholder
farming communities in the Limpopo Basin of southern Africa
are food insecurity, poverty and ill-health. Many parts of
the basin are routinely food-deficient and rely on food aid.
In the past two seasons there have been confirmed reports
of starvation deaths in basin areas in both Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
The basin's local economies depend on rainfed agricultural
systems characterized by low productivity, vulnerability to
frequent drought (and sometimes devastating floods), poor
adoption of improved technologies, diminishing farm labor
due to out-migration and HIV/AIDS, exacerbated by poorly developed
input and output markets.
This project recognizes that subsistence agriculture
alone will neither meet future food needs nor address the
growing poverty problem in these drought-stricken environments.
There is need to strengthen linkages through a systems approach
that integrates improved water and soil management with varietal
improvement, markets and other institutional arrangements
which facilitate farmer investment in improved production
practices.
The project goal is to improve food security,
incomes and livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the Limpopo
Basin. To achieve this goal, the project will build on past
and current collaborative research by national programs and
the CGIAR on crop-water productivity in drought-prone areas,
innovative approaches to participatory technology development
and extension, and new institutional arrangements that link
the public and private sector with the smallholder farmer
in appropriate market chains.
The potential results, products and services
to farming communities of the Limpopo basin from this project
will include:
- Farmer access to seed of improved cereal
and legume varieties that mature early and thus escape terminal
drought
- The judicious use of mineral fertilizers,
in combinations with organic sources of plant nutrients,
appropriate soil/water conservation measures and improved
crop varieties
- New institutional arrangements that link
the public and private sector with farmers' uptake of technologies;
this will also improve the sustainability of project outputs,
and prevent agricultural resource degradation from nutrient
mining and the exploitation of fragile lands
- Assessment of coping strategies of poor
and HIV/AIDS-affected households, and the distributive impacts
of agricultural commercialization on the livelihoods of
these households, in order to better target technologies
that mitigate effects of the pandemic.
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