Increased capital use in agriculture, including mechanization, is considered an integral process of agricultural transformation. However, mechanization remains low in Sub Sahara Africa (SSA), especially among smallholders, despite increasing pressure from rapidly growing population and increasing labor cost. Supported with funding from Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, IFPRI researchers, Yanyan Liu and Hiroyuki Takeshima, use long-term panel household data from three Asian countries (China, India, and Vietnam) and two African countries (Ghana and Nigeria) to explore the mechanization process and its determining factors and constraints. The purpose is to shed light and provide policy suggestions on the mechanization process in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), based on what we learn from the process in Asia.
Despite increasing numbers of medium-to-large scale farmers in SSA, as well as labor movement out of the agricultural sector (particularly youth), smallholders without substantial mechanization have remained the majority in the agricultural sector in countries like Ghana. Globally, mechanization has often been associated with large-scale farming given the complementarity between machine and land. The experiences in Asia in the last few decades, however, suggest that mechanization may grow even among smallholders before they transition into larger-scale farmers. These experiences have prompted the need to understand better how mechanization may be adopted by smallholders for whom the scope for exploiting complementarity between mechanization and land is limited. IFPRI researchers tested the hypothesis that high-yielding technologies, which potentially increase returns to more intensive farm labor use, are important drivers of adoptions of agricultural mechanization among smallholders at both extensive and intensive margins. They did so using three rounds of repeated cross-sectional, nationally representative data (Ghana Living Standard Surveys (GLSS) 2006, 2013, 2017), as well as unique tractor-use data in Ghana collected by IFPRI and Savannah Agricultural Research Institute, and multi-dimensional indicators of agroclimatic similarity with plant-breeding locations. The policy note, "Determinants of agricultural machinery adoption intensities in Ghana", describing the results of this study can be downloaded here.