What best practices of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) for vegetable crops production in West Africa?

Abstract

The requirements for a quality and sufficient market gardening production are far from being achieved. This problem has been exacerbated by climate change, while the demand for vegetables increases in proportion to the population growth and to the high rate of urbanization. Alternative practices are proposed by Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) that basically promotes a trade-off between improvement of crop productivity, climate change adaptation and mitigation. How could this approach contribute to positively impact the market gardening sub sector and vegetable production in particular? Therefore, this paper in a first phase identified and described potential practices from literature and in a second one analysed their performances. The first phase had three steps: (1) the review of the fundamentals of the CSA concept in regard to market gardening production, (2) identification and description of potential practices and technologies based on literature and (3) a qualitative comparative analysis of their potentialities vis-a-vis CSA criteria to identify recommendable practices. The second phase analysed quantitatively the performances of the recommendable practices using the Evidence of Resilient Agriculture (ERA), a meta-dataset online platform with Amaranthus, Lettuce/Cabbage and Tomato as test crops. This provides a comprehensive overview of the adequacy of these practices with CSA requirements. Thus, laying the foundation for scaling up the CSA concept in vegetable crops production with the reorientation and improvement of good practices against climate change. Practices and technologies recommended for a CSA, are those related to the use of improved crops varieties, ground-water mobilisation through on-farm water pits creation where water table is shallow and surface water unavailable, drip irrigation and use of mulching, optimal organic fertilizers application and rationale chemical application (like microdosing), and finally the use of processing and conservation techniques that demand less energy and promote renewable energy like solar driers. The results from the ERA analysis revealed an average change of 69.5% for Amaranthus, 53.3% for Lettuce/Cabbage and 36.4% for Tomato by applying those practices together. Thus, the combination of these practices and technologies in one package as CSA technologies could be favourable for CSA scaling up in vegetable crops production system in West-Africa.