The implication is that increases in agricultural production have to be met through increases in agricultural productivity, and less through expansion of cultivated area. Another worsening factor is the climate change and global warming. Some studies predict that global warming will significantly and negatively affect African agriculture. They also indicate that the use of irrigation reduces the harmful impact of global warming. In addition, irrigation use is a catalyst of improved technology adoption, which will have a substantial impact on food security.The author’s understanding of food security is informed by Sen’s entitlement theory. Farmer’s access to food can be seized either through the output markets or through increases in productivity levels and improvements in food storage. As elicited by the “sell low, buy high” puzzle, the mark-up is usually very high and a significant number of households in rural Mozambique may not afford to purchase food during the lean season. Therefore, it becomes crucial to enhance both agricultural productivity and farmer’s ability to store food. Selective mechanization, improved storage, and other improved agricultural technologies play an essential role in ensuring farmers’ food entitlements. Previous attempts to mechanize the agricultural sector in the post-colonial period have failed, one of the reasons being the 16-year civil war that started a year after the independence in 1975. Moreover, the government established tractor-hire schemes had serious planning,vertical grow shelf management, and training problems, denting the image of agricultural mechanization in general. Agricultural mechanization is also mistakenly perceived as tractor mechanization.
This includes the use of tractors, animal-powered and human-powered implements and tools , as well as irrigation systems, food processing and related technologies and equipment. Although not addressed in this paper, the use of jab planters has been shown to significantly reduce labor requirements. Information on the economic impact of selected improved agricultural technologies is needed to target interventions efficiently and equitably, and to justify investment in such technologies.This paper assesses the impact of improved agricultural technologies by constructing a counterfactual comparison group. In this setting, a comparison of the outcome variable is made between farmers using a given technology and their counterparts with similar observable co-variates .The use of tractor mechanization is significantly correlated with road infrastructure. The distance to the nearest tarred road is three times higher among households who did not use tractors, relative to their counterparts. Remarkably, among the 2 percent of the population that used a tractor, 49 percent accrues to Maputo province, and 32 percent to Gaza province, both located in the south, a region of relatively lower agricultural potential, but of better road infrastructure. The remaining 19 percent are distributed across the other 8 provinces, which includes agro-ecological zones of higher agricultural potential, but relatively poorer road infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, adoption rates rise with increases in both landholding size and livestock flocks for all four improved technologies. Households with larger landholdings will potentially have higher production and thus feel compelled to invest in improved granaries. The use of animal traction or tractor mechanization is also cost-effective in larger fields. Additionally, the adoption of animal traction and tractor mechanization require some initial investment, and asset endowment is positively and significantly correlated with household welfare.
With regard to access to credit, the difference between treated and untreated households was only significant for the adoption of tractor mechanization, and marginally significant for the use of animal traction. This result, however, is an artifact of a low data variation as not many households could access the emerging rural credit market. Furthermore, a tractor can be used as collateral, a bottleneck for many rural households in accessing to the credit market. Membership to farmers’ association is also significantly correlated with the use of improved agricultural technologies. The number of farmers using tractor mechanization is three times higher among members of an association. Similarly, there are twice as many farmers using improved seeds among members of a farmers’ association.Figures 1A through 4A show the distribution of propensity scores for all four technologies. Treated and untreated households overlap very well, suggesting that the overlap assumption is plausible. Additionally, the assessment of the overlap assumption was complemented by the analysis of normalized differences. The results are presented in Table 2, and they show that normalized differences are in general smaller than 0.25 . Exceptions are the variables on head’s age and tropical livestock units. However, this outcome did not affect the estimation results because these two variables were dropped from the stepwise logit model due to their low explanatory power. The results on the stepwise logit model are not reported to save space, but are available from the author upon request.Table 4 presents the estimation results of the impact of selected improved agricultural technologies, contrasting the results obtained through three econometric approaches. With the exception of animal traction, the impact of improved agricultural technologies is consistently positive and significantly different zero. The impact is greater for tractor mechanization, followed by the use of improved seeds, and finally the use of improved granaries. Farmers that used animal traction and experienced losses in 2004/05 agricultural season may be enticed to abandon such technology, especially if they rented the animals and the implements. This is probably one of the reasons why “adoption rates” of improved agricultural technologies are usually very low: some farmers abandon the technology after some unsuccessful adoption attempts. Policies to sustain adoption of improved agricultural technologies should be put in place. Irrigation investments fall in that category.The significance of improved granaries underscores the relevance of post-harvest losses, and reducing these losses potentially results in higher household income in light of opportunities for inter-temporal price arbitrage; and improved food entitlements and farmer’s nutritional status. The author speculates that the benefits from an improved granary might outstrip by far its construction costs, considering that it will be used for more than a year.
The impact of improved seeds on maize is about 2 000 Meticais/ha, and 5 180 Meticais/ha for tractor mechanization . The estimates of the impact can also be regarded as shadow prices. Specifically, during the 2004/05 agricultural season, the use of tractor mechanization would be profitable for the farmer whenever the market cost of hiring a tractor was below $212/ha. Likewise, the market price of improved maize seeds required to sow 1 hectare of maize should be lower than $80. Taking into account that mean household income in 2004/05 was about $137 per adult equivalent , and that less than 5 percent had access to credit, understanding why adoption of improved technologies is extremely low becomes trivial. Even if improved agricultural technologies were riskless, a bulk of farmers would not be financially capable of investing in such technologies, much less irrigation. There is certainly an ample scope to enhance the impact of improved seeds and tractor mechanization, considering that less than 5 percent use irrigation or inorganic fertilizers, and about half of the tractors used in Mozambique are located in Maputo province, and more than 3/4 of all tractors are located in the south. If the Mozambican government wants to achieve the much talked-about green revolution, then huge investments on basic infrastructure and irrigation may pave the way for higher adoption rates and profitability of improved agricultural technologies. The bad news is that climate change and global warming is a translucent reality, potentially with severe implications to African agriculture. In the Mozambican agriculture context, the implication is that any effort to foster adoption of animal traction, improved seeds, tractors, and other improved technologies should be accompanied by investments on irrigation or water conservation technologies. Furthermore, drought-tolerant improved seeds will also significantly increase both agricultural production and productivity amidst low irrigation use and recurrent drought spells across the country.Hundreds of reports and articles begin with a variation on the same apocalyptic exhortation: The combination of population growth, food price volatility,vertical hydroponic and climate change demands a new agricultural revolution to expand and secure the global food supply. The bio-technologies frst deployed in the Green Revolution are still being constantly improved; food prices, however, stay stubbornly high and many fear a yield plateau. The new revolution, they argue, is digital technology. In a recent article about the use of artifcial intelligence in agriculture, for example, Wired gushed about “an explosion in advanced agricultural technology, which Goldman Sachs predicts will raise crop yields 70 percent by 2050” . Goldman, for their part, estimate that digital agricultural technologies will become a $240 billion market by 2050 . X, Google’s “moonshot” venture, recently hailed the arrival of “the era of computational agriculture” . Traditional agribusinesses have found themselves competing with Silicon Valley giants, venture capitalists, scrappy startups, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations , and research institutions to develop and market a dizzying array of new technologies to feed “the next two billion” and save the world. “Digital agriculture” is a heterogeneous suite of information-rich, computationally-complex, and often capital-intensive methods for improving the efficiency of agricultural land and the profit margins of sectoral actors.
Digital technologies have come to play a role in every stage of the agricultural cycle under capitalism, from input management to marketing produce, pricing commodities futures to pest control. However, while it is true that these technologies increase efficiency, we contest the notion that they will provide a long-term solution to the looming crises of the global food system. For what the narrative of an agricultural techno-revolution elides is how the methods of industrialized food production create these challenges in the frst place. We interpret the rise of digital technologies in agriculture as the continuation of a process dating back to the Green Revolution, namely, to reconfigure agrarian life in a manner amenable to increased profits, especially for actors further up the value chain. For the proponents of digital agriculture, the transition is between two technologically-paved pathways to profit: innovations in high dimensional computing supersede innovations in breeding. A purely technological perspective is insufficient and depoliticizes analyses of far-reaching changes to agricultural production, changes which have an effect on the rest of the capitalist economy . Nevertheless, this has not stopped digital agriculture’s boosters from frequently claiming that it heralds a “fourth agricultural revolution.”1 However, digital agriculture has received limited critical attention from social scientists. The vast majority of critical work on the ascendancy of global technology mega-firms and new information-centric accumulation strategies looks at their effects in non-agrarian industrial and service sectors. However, the generation of profits in these sectors depends in part on keeping inputs for production and reproduction— like food—artifcially cheap . By perpetuating an unsustainable regime of cheap food, digital agriculture technologies support the continued expansion of an equally unsustainable global urban system.We argue that the rise of digital agriculture is emblematic of an intensifying relationship between zones of agrarian production and extraction on the one hand, and zones of agglomeration, industrial production, and service provision on the other. A body of neo-Lefebvrian scholarship describes these apparently distinct zones as co-constitutive, entangled in a dialectic of extended and concentrated urbanization . In this framework, the growth imperative of capitalism requires the transformation of vast landscapes beyond the ‘city’ to increase extraction and agricultural output, the product of which is drawn back inward to fuel growth. In this reading, the socio-metabolic process of urbanization is increasingly generalized, to the point that some have argued for thinking of contemporary urbanization as a ‘planetary’ process. With this in mind, this article interrogates the political economy of digital agriculture and reinterprets the digitalization of the food system through the lens of extended–concentrated urbanization. We begin by introducing digital agriculture and the limited social scientific literature on the topic. Next, we critique the mainstream rhetoric surrounding digital agriculture, which makes a Malthusian argument for the need to feed a burgeoning global population in the face of climate change. Then, beginning from the observation that the crucial role of information is under-analyzed in the extended–concentrated urbanization framework, we build a theoretical argument for how digital agriculture challenges the urban–rural binarism. We locate the framework’s origins as a reaction to earlier threads of globalization theory, which emphasized the supposedly immaterial nature and deterritorializing effects of information and communications technologies .