What model of agricultural transformation can reach the policy goals of just transformation and increased productivity in thediverse African smallholder sector? A response to this question relies on studies that examine outcomes of local agriculturalinvestments. A significant, yet under-studied, example of these investments is small-scale public investments in irrigation. Toaddress this gap, we analyse social differentiation and accumulation patterns arising from donor-supported public investmentsin irrigation in four villages in the Kilombero District, Tanzania. Participatory wealth ranking and interviews reveal that invest-ments in small-scale smallholder irrigation fuelled a process of accumulation from ‘below’. We discuss how these investmentscan be considered more inclusive than ‘from above’ accumulation (from extra-local investments), while nonetheless contributingto some differentiation among smallholders. We conclude that public investments that align with smallholders' initiatives in irri-gation development are more likely to contribute to policy goals of socially inclusive improved agricultural productivity.

Increasing temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns have major consequences for smallholder farmers, especially in the Global South. Our study examined spatial patterns and climatic drivers of farmers' perceptions of climate change, and how these perceptions translated into adaptation actions. We interviewed 56 farmers in southwestern Ethiopia and analyzed ERA5-Land reanalysis climate data from 1971 to 2020. The majority of farmers perceived the recorded temperature increase as well as a decrease and shift in the timing of rainfall. Perceived climate change varied with local climate factors and not with the rate of climate change itself. Farmers' adaptation practices showed associations with local temperature, but not with farmers’ perceptions of climate change. Our findings highlight that even if farmers perceive climate change, perceptions are most common in areas where climate action is already urgent, and perceptions may not translate into adaptation. Thus, targeted and timely information and extension programs are crucial.

Groundwater is increasingly seen as crucial to both agricultural and domestic water supply in sub-Saharan Africa. Citing climate change and growing populations, there is especially a notable shift towards promoting groundwater for irrigation to ensure food security. Increased use of the resource will undoubtedly be accompanied with new questions of governance, with groundwater overexploitation in other parts of the world functioning as a strong cautionary tale. This article provides an overview of the current groundwater governance literature on sub-Saharan Africa. Using a critical water governance lens we analyse how groundwater governance is framed, what terms, categories, and measurements are used to describe and assess groundwater governance, and whose perspectives are considered. We also assess whether groundwater governance research has taken place across sub-Saharan African countries in a balanced way. We find that groundwater governance research in sub-Saharan Africa, even more so than elsewhere, ignores the voices and perspectives of those physically encountering the resource. Instead, it is dominated by the views of formal, technical groundwater experts focusing on the need for more hydrogeological data and formal policies. While the existing contributions to the literature are valuable, the current bias in perspectives calls for others to join the field of groundwater governance and to supplement current conceptualisations and approaches with those of users and others dealing with groundwater management on a daily basis. We argue that groundwater users’ practical governance experiences, locally adapted solutions and knowledges, can add important complementary perspectives and insights towards crafting effective, sustainable and equitable groundwater governance processes across the continent.

Societal Impact Statement

Adapting agriculture to climate change requires an understanding of the long-term relationship between climate, disease dynamics, and yield. While some countries have monitored major crop diseases for decades or centuries, comparable data is scarce or non-existent for many countries that are most vulnerable to climate change. For this, a novel approach was developed to reconstruct climate-mediated changes in disease dynamics and yield. Here, a case study on Arabica coffee in its area of origin demonstrates how to combine local knowledge, climate data, and spatial field surveys to reconstruct disease and yield time series and to postulate and test hypotheses for climate-disease-yield relationships.

Summary

While some countries have monitored crop diseases for several decades or centuries, other countries have very limited historical time series. In such areas, we lack data on long-term patterns and drivers of disease dynamics, which is important for developing climate-resilient disease management strategies.

We adopted a novel approach, combining local knowledge, climate data, and spatial field surveys to understand long-term climate-mediated changes in disease dynamics in coffee agroforestry systems. For this, we worked with 58 smallholder farmers in southwestern Ethiopia, the area of origin of Arabica coffee.

The majority of farmers perceived an increase in coffee leaf rust and a decrease in coffee berry disease, whereas perceptions of changes in coffee wilt disease and Armillaria root rot were highly variable among farmers. Climate data supported farmers' understanding of the climatic drivers (increased temperature, less rainy days) of these changes. Temporal disease-climate relationships were matched by spatial disease-climate relationships, as expected with space-for-time substitution.

Understanding long-term disease dynamics and yield is crucial to adapt disease management to climate change. Our study demonstrates how to combine local knowledge, climate data and spatial field surveys to reconstruct disease time series and postulate hypotheses for disease-climate relationships in areas where few long-term time series exist.

This article focuses on migrant labour in Nordic agriculture, wild berry picking and food processing. The starting point is the fear of a food crisis at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic (2020) because of the absence of migrant workers. The question was raised early in the pandemic if food systems in the Global North are vulnerable due to dependence on precarious migrant workers. In the light of this question, we assess the reactions of farmers and different actors in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to what looked like an unfolding food crisis. In many ways, the reactions in the Nordic countries were similar to each other, and to broader reactions in the Global North, and we follow these reactions as they relate to migrant workers from an initial panic to a return to business as usual despite the continuation of the pandemic. In the end, 2020 proved to be an excellent year for Nordic food production in part because migrant workers were able to come. We discuss reasons why the Nordic countries did not face disruptions during the pandemic, map out patterns of labour precarity and segmentation for migrant labour in agriculture and food production in the Nordic countries and propose questions for further research.

This paper is concerned with how water prospectors, well diggers, and irrigation farmers come to know groundwater. Drawing on cases from Tanzania and Zimbabwe, the paper shows that much knowledge is derived from the close encounters with groundwater that occur through hard physical work, mediated by the use of lowcost tools and technologies. In this paper we show how this knowledge is embedded in everyday livelihoods, landscapes, and moral ecological rationalities. Through empirical material of such close encounters with groundwater, we make two interrelated points. Firstly, we draw attention to the importance of embodied forms of knowledge in shaping engagements with groundwater. Frequent close physical interactions with groundwater generate rich and intimate understandings of the changing quality and quantity of water flows. These understandings become primary ways in which people in communities know water, which is lively and sometimes invisible. Secondly, we argue that, though apparently mundane, reliant on low-cost technology, and highly localised, these encounters significantly shape broader socio-natural relationships in emerging groundwater economies. Amongst other examples, our data show groundwater prospectors monitoring the depth of borehole drilling in a shared aquifer in an attempt to ensure equitable access for different users. In concluding the paper, we reflect on the extent to which the knowledge and relationships formed through close physical encounters with groundwater have the potential to shape trajectories of groundwater management.

This study analyses SAGCOT’s public-private partnership policy, which anticipated attracting external investors in large-scale nucleus farms to commercialise smallholder farmers. Data were collected from a review of SAGCOT policy documents, a compilation of SAGCOT registered partners and qualitative interview data collected from private companies, government officials, farmers and outgrower associations. The majority of SAGCOT registered commercial partners are small- to medium-scale and most of them were already operating in the area before SAGCOT was established. We conclude that the SAGCOT investment strategy, in practice, has been linked to small- to medium-scale operations and also mainly to already existing enterprises, which stand in contrast to the initially envisioned model of attracting new large-scale farming enterprises to the region. We argue that there is a need for SAGCOT and policy makers to learn from this dissonance between initial policy ambition and actual outcomes of SAGCOT public-private partnerships.

In biodiversity rich agriculture–forest moasic landscapes in south-western Ethiopia, the production of coffee and food crops, including guarding them from forest-dwelling mammals, requires a high input of labour, which is supplied partly by children. Through field observations and interviews with smallholders, we studied the extent of children’s participation in coffee production and food crop guarding, its impact on school attendance and implications for sustainable development. The findings revealed that the extent of children’s participation in such work is correlated with the level of household’s income and residential location, i.e. near versus far from forests or in coffee versus non-coffee areas. Child labour and school absenteeism linked to coffee production and crop guarding are widespread problems. Some of the measures taken to mitigate the problem of school absenteeism were coercive and posed threats to poor households. The paper concludes that child work in coffee production and crop protection is at the cost of school attendance for many children, which represents a critical social justice issue and a trade-off with the economic and environmental values of the forest. Reducing poverty would likely mitigate the problem of child labour and school absenteeism and promote synergistic development in the region.

Burkina Faso and the wider Sahel region have experienced substantial changes in rainfall, population, and landscape use. These changes have altered ecosystem services, the benefits that people receive from ecosystems, and rural livelihoods. However, it is difficult to assess the magnitude of these changes because of missing and fragmented social, agricultural, and ecological data. We estimated changes in 10 key provisioning ecosystem services in rural Burkina Faso between 1952 and 2016. We used a simple model of plausible social-ecological changes to make a historical extrapolation that bridges these data gaps, and assessed historical changes. Our approach combined the interpretation of historic aerial photographs and satellite images, with field observations and interviews. We applied the approach for six villages in two administrative regions for six points in time. We modeled the use of historic ecosystems by analyzing a range of estimates of changes in the generation of each service and its value to people. We found that cultivated ecosystem services have increased 1.5–23 times over the study period, while the non-cultivated ecosystem services firewood, construction material, and medicine have decreased to 66–20% of their previous values. Per capita production of cultivated ecosystem services has remained relatively stable, while the per capita production of all other ecosystem services has decreased, to 54–11% of their 1952 values. Although alternatives are available for some ecosystem services, such as medicine and construction material, there are currently limited alternatives available for other services, such as firewood. Decline in wild food availability and consumption is likely to reduce the nutritional value of rural people’s food. Our analysis of changes demonstrates that shrubs and trees on fields generate many ecosystem services that are key to rural livelihoods, and that efforts to enhance crop yields should maintain shrubs and trees. Our approach for estimating historical ecosystem services may also be useful to apply in other data scarce regions.

Increasing agricultural land use intensity is one of the major land use/land cover (LULC) changes in wetland ecosystems. LULC changes have major impacts on the environment, livelihoods and nature conservation. In this study, we evaluate the impacts of investments in small-scale irrigation schemes on LULC in relation to regional development in Kilombero Valley, Tanzania. We used Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques together with interviews with Key Informants (KI) and Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with different stakeholders to assess the historical development of irrigation schemes and LULC change at local and regional scales over 3 decades. Overall, LULC differed over time and with spatial scale. The main transformation along irrigation schemes was from grassland and bushland into cultivated land. A similar pattern was also found at the regional valley scale, but here transformations from forest were more common. The rate of expansion of cultivated land was also higher where investments in irrigation infrastructure were made than in the wider valley landscape. While discussing the effects of irrigation and intensification on LULC in the valley, the KI and FGD participants expressed that local investments in intensification and smallholder irrigation may reduce pressure on natural land cover such as forest being transformed into cultivation. Such a pattern of spatially concentrated intensification of land use may provide an opportunity for nature conservation in the valley and likewise contribute positively to increased production and improve livelihoods of smallholder farmers.