Sustainable Intensification of small-scale
agriculture: How to ensure food and nutritional
security?
Fentahun Mengistu (EIAR)
ILRI@40 Livestock and sustainable food and nutrition security
workshop
Addis Ababa, 7 November 2014

Challenges
• Human population growth represents higher demand
for food
• Increase in livestock population represents greater
pressure on land
• Limited land availability for agricultural production
• Land fragmentation
• Many of the areas are already degraded
• Climate change
• African governments agreed to enable smallholder
farms to continue providing a large proportion of the
food required by the population.

How and where…….Potential
Interventions
• Should tackle inefficiencies at farm and other
nodes of the value chains
• Farm level:
– Better integration of crop/livestock / agroforestry
components
– Enhanced use of the so-called “wastes”
– Check if available technologies help to increase
productivity, not affecting negatively the
environment.

How and where…….Potential
Interventions
• Beyond the farm gate
– Promote collective action (access to technology
innovations, services and markets) to increase
competitiveness
– Value addition (including the development of new
products)
– Role of policies and partnerships to enable the
adoption and scaling up of technology innovations
– Contribute to the rehabilitation of degraded lands

Opportunities for Innovative Research
Emphasis on:
– Climate smart innovations (i.e., adaptation to stress)
– Better understanding of local/indigenous knowledge.
– Enhancing crop livestock-interactions (i.e., more efficient
use of crop residues, manure as fertilizer, biogas
production).
– Use of biotechnology options (i.e., animal genotypes,
vaccines, etc.)
– Complementarity between basic and applied action
research
– How to address gender issues
– Options for establishing mechanisms for the valuation and
payment for environmental services

Complementarity with pother key
issues
• Environmental issues clearly identified in
previous slides
• The smart identification of options for increasing
productivity should result not only on sustainable
nutritional security, but also improve economic
well-being.
• Improved nutritional security will contribute to
healthy lives
• Intensification could increase the risk of
introduction and susceptibility for infectious
diseases