Food security impacts of industrial crop expansion in Sub-Sahara Africa (FICESSA)

There is an increasing trend recently to allocate land in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) for the production of crops that are ultimately used for non-food purposes such as bioenergy, fibre and other industrial processes. Such land conversions are often financed through direct foreign investment and are justified as an engine of economic growth. However this often happens in countries that are barely food self-sufficient raising concerns about impacts on food security.

While it is well accepted that industrial crops (ICs) compete directly and indirectly for land with food production, it is not always straightforward to assess the overall impacts of this competition on food security. Superficially food security should decrease as agricultural land is converted to ICs. Yet a number of less obvious mechanisms may lead to improvements in food security, e.g. higher household incomes can improve access to food, while access to fertilizers/pesticides/irrigation/knowledge can improve agricultural yields. In fact there are many complex feedbacks between land use change due to IC production and local/national food security in SSA. However, we have a fragmented and incomplete knowledge of these interrelations in African contexts, with few comprehensive studies conducted so far.

This interdisciplinary project aims to provide clear empirical evidence of how ICs compete for land with food crops in SSA, and the mechanisms through which this competition can affect food security, whether in a positive or a negative manner. We will undertake a combination of studies at multiple spatial scales using a variety of analytical tools to study past dynamics and explore future scenarios. Case countries include Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Swaziland.

Our consortium consists of partners with complementary strengths in academic (UT), applied (RBGK, CSIR) and policy-driven research (UNU, ODI). This will allow the effective communication of our findings to different end-users involved in (or affected by) IC expansion including policy-makers, local communities, NGOs and the private sector.

Our vision is to provide knowledge that can inform the development of evidence-based policies and practical solutions that can catalyze positive food security outcomes from industrial crops (ICs) expansion in Africa. We will contribute to this vision through empirical research that will address knowledge gaps surrounding the links between the land use change effects food-ICs competition and food security. This vision fits closely with Belmont Forum's objective of producing interdisciplinary policy-relevant research, on "the dynamic interactions between food security and land use in the context of global change".

We aim to provide robust, generalisable and transferable results that will be useful to a variety of end-users (see below). We focus our research in low-income and low-middle-income economies of Africa (Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Swaziland). Furthermore most of our local case studies are situated in areas that are highly food-insecure. As a result our results have the potential to produce advice that can be of high importance in the impacted areas.

Policy-makers: ICs, including biofuel feedstocks, are a topical issue in Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA). Currently several related policies are being developed, particularly in on biofuels (e.g. in South Africa). This means that ICs are a sector in which sound empirical evidence can be rapidly assimilated into the policy development process. The partners have worked/are working with policy-makers interested in the nexus of agriculture, food security and environmental change in SSA.

Private sector: We will work closely with the companies that operate in our case areas, i.e. Addax (Sierra Leone), Wienco Cotton (Ghana), BERL (Malawi), Dwangwa Sugarcane (Malawi), Niqel (Mozambique) and SWADE (Swaziland). These private ventures welcome the prospect of collaborating during this project, as they believe that obtaining a better understanding of the performance of their operations will be beneficial to their stakeholders. We will transfer to each of these private ventures the results of our research, and we expect that our findings will trickle down and benefit their IC suppliers (smallholders), workers and adjacent communities.

Certification bodies: We have partnered with two international initiatives for industrial crop certification, The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) and Bonsucro (BSI). AG, GvM and KW work closely with both organisations for their ESPA research. Both organisations have developed certification schemes that aim to enhance the sustainability of IC production. Our results will be key to provide them much needed information about IC impacts in the African context, and will be of direct interest to their affiliated practitioners, private companies, academics and policy-makers.

Civil society: We have partnered with Solidaridad Southern Africa that has a long and proven track record of influencing sustainable development at the IC project level throughout the developing world. Through this partnership we will aim not only to improve the support package Solidaridad Southern Africa offers to farmers and companies in Malawi, Mozambique and Swaziland, but also to disseminate through their global network our results to stakeholders beyond our case countries, reaching thus a much wider audience. We will assess the feasibility of partnering with Solidaridad West Africa, for our work in Ghana and Sierra Leone. We will also contact Namati to establish whether they will be interested in the focus of our project. Namati works with communities affected by Addax in Sierra Leone, and helps them renegotiate the terms of the land lease.

We will explore possibilities to disseminate our research to international organizations (e.g. FAO) and science-policy interface (IPBES) to maximise the impact of this research.