Building pathways out of poverty through climate smart agriculture and effective targeting

ABSTRACT

One focus of agricultural development is climate smart agricultural technologies and practices (CSA). Development practitioners invest in scaling these to have wider impact. Ineffective targeting stymies CSA’s contribution to poverty reduction by excluding many of the poor and/or including those for whom agriculture is not a pathway out of poverty. This viewpoint proposes the need to recognise differentiated livelihood pathways within smallholder agriculture, linked to farmers’ differential capacity to engage in climate risk management. A farmer and livelihoods typology provides a framework to improved targeting of CSA and to identifying where alternative interventions, such as social protection, are more appropriate.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment (built and natural) – Agriculture, Climate change, Food security
• Gender and diversity
• Labour and livelihoods – Poverty reduction

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to an anonymous referee for comments on an earlier version of this viewpoint. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the authors’ institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jon Hellin was Principal Scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Mexico and is now Platform Leader, Sustainable Impact Platform at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Eleanor Fisher is Associate Professor in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading, United Kingdom.

Additional information

Funding

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, Feed the Future, supported recent work in Guatemala. This work was also supported in part by the MAIZE CGIAR research programme.