Planning in the Dark : What Do We Know about Remaining Available Cropland in Sub-Saharan Africa
Jayne, Thomas, Jordan Chamberlin et al.
Sub-Saharan Africa is typically regarded as land abundant, and previous efforts to estimate the true extent of potentially available cropland (PAC) have largely affirmed this perception. Such efforts, however, have largely focused on production potential and have underemphasized economic profitability and other constraints to expansion. This paper re-estimates PAC for Africa in a more explicit economic framework that emphasizes the returns to agricultural production under a variety of assumptions using newly available geospatial data. Existing PAC estimates for Africa are shown to be highly sensitive to assumptions about land productivity and market access, and are moderately influenced by the use of alternative data sources. However, the following conclusions about remaining PAC are relatively robust. Over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africaas underutilized land resources are concentrated in nine countries, many of which are fragile states. Land pressures among the other 45 Sub-Saharan Africa countries range from moderate to high. Moreover, almost a third of the regionns surplus land is currently under forest cover; conversion of forests to cropland would entail major environmental costs. The variations in land scarcity across countries are also found to apply on a more disaggregated level: 1% of the regionns arable rural lands contain 17% of its rural population, while 20% of its arable land holds 74% of its rural population.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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