Innovative Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Practices in the Smallholder Farming System of South Africa

Climate change is easily the most serious human and environmental crisis of the present generation. While awareness of the existence and consequences of climate change is becoming widespread, the specific effects on agriculture and the extent to which innovative climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices are being adopted remain unclear. This study was conducted in three local municipalities of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa to determine the patterns of smallholder choice of alternative climate-smart agricultural practices and the factors affecting such choices. It was particularly crucial to investigate why adaptation of CSA practices continues to be lower than expectation despite awareness of their benefits, thus highlighting the social and cultural limits to adaptation to climate change. A total of 210 households were enumerated on the basis of their involvement in crop and livestock farming. The data were analyzed by means of multinomial logistic model, which was applied separately to individual local municipality data sets and a combined provincial data set, and it was revealed that most farmers were not being sufficiently motivated to move from established practices to adopt new CSA practices. The most influential factors in the decision process as to what CSA practice to adopt were primary occupation, farming system type, household size, age and membership of farmer groups. It seemed that asset fixity constrained farmers to continue with existing practices rather than shift to new, more profitable practices, a situation that can be resolved by external intervention by government agencies and/or other entities. Awareness creation targeting remote rural areas as well as institutions to ease farmers' access to credit and information will contribute to higher adoption rates, which are likely to lead to enhanced food security and standard of living for rural dwellers as their agricultural production and productivity improve.