What's New

Several new country briefs for Africa south of the Sahara have recently been released by FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning Systems (GIEWS). The GIEWS country brief series provides an overview of the food security situation in prioritized countries, focusing on the current agricultural season, harvest prospects for staple food crops and livestock, estimates and forecasts of cereal production, and food price and food policy trends.

Agriculture in West Africa faces numerous challenges, including soil degradation, market instability, and significant threats from climate change. In response to these obstacles, many adaptation strategies, such as production of non-traditional crop varieties, have been encouraged. It remains less clear, however, what actually drives farmers’ decisions to adopt (or not adopt) these strategies. For example, a farmer may choose to plant a new crop variety in response to a short-term drought or as part of a longer term strategy to adapt to climate change.

Rain-fed agriculture forms the mainstay of many West African economies, making the region particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and weather variability.  As a result, there is growing emphasis being placed by both researchers and policymakers on climate-smart agriculture and climate change adaptation strategies to help protect the livelihoods and food security of farmers and rural households.

The World Bank, in collaboration with USAID, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and CIAT, has continued its series on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) with a new country profile for Senegal . The profile takes an in-depth look at Senegal’s current agricultural and climate conditions and highlights several efforts that the Senegalese government is making to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies into its broader agricultural and economic development policy.

According to a 2014 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2050, the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events could increase hunger and child malnutrition by as much as 20 percent.  This would mean an enormous setback in Africa’s progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and could significantly slow the region’s economic development and growth.