Resource of Choice

The HarvestChoice website is enhanced to further develop it into the “go to” resource for improving the targeting of agricultural investments in Africa

The HarvestChoice initiative’s website, designed to guide strategic agricultural investments, has just completed a major upgrade. The enhanced site offers a collection of new data products to help inform policy and investment decisions aimed at improving farm productivity and profitability.

The website is being developed as the “go to” resource for analysts and decision-makers seeking integrated and comprehensive information about agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. The information, which initially focuses on annual crops, provides users with a broad and in-depth understanding of major production challenges and opportunities in the region, as well as shedding light on how smallholder farmers can benefit from productivity-enhancing innovations and lower transportation costs.

HarvestChoice provides information on how smallholder farmers can benefit from agricultural innovations. Photo: Ethiopia/© Amanda Grandfield, 2007.

As development, commercial and humanitarian organizations — as well as governments and the private sector — face tighter budgets, designing and targeting improved investment strategies for African agriculture becomes even more critical. This is particularly important since pursuing one investment approach often requires forgoing other strategies, and new technologies can take years to show results, such that poor choices are expensive in both lost time and lost growth.

To help inform this investment process, HarvestChoice focuses on factors critical to crop production and marketing, such as climate, soil and pest conditions; the geography of current and future cropping systems; and the cost of transportation to market. The site provides access to literature reviews, household survey results, geographic information systems data sets and analytical tools, crop growth simulation methods, and, increasingly, results from a suite of economic modeling programs.

Recognizing the site-specific nature of many interventions designed to boost productivity, especially in the rainfed systems common throughout sub-Saharan Africa, HarvestChoice takes an explicitly spatial approach, using interfaces built around such open-source platforms as Google Maps. The detailed spatial data used to define resource and production conditions provides strategic insights for investors and policymakers.  The unique geo-referenced data sets and analyses presented by HarvestChoice are beginning to reveal the magnitude of productivity and economic trade-offs. The site shows work in progress, and a stream of new analyses and data products are currently in the pipeline.

Launched in October 2006, the HarvestChoice initiative is jointly led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the University of Minnesota program International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (INSTePP). Several Centers supported by the CGIAR collaborate with HarvestChoice, including the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), International Potato Center (CIP), and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). The CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI), Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Virginia Tech University are also project partners.

“Only by identifying agricultural strategies that provide direct benefits to poor people can the real harvest of crop technology and development investments be truly reaped,” notes Stanley Wood, IFPRI senior research fellow and co-principal investigator of HarvestChoice. “Ultimately, better investment choices will yield better lives.” 

Adds Philip Pardey, director of INSTePP and co-principal investigator of HarvestChoice, “Applying relevant knowledge from beyond Africa is one of the key ways in which HarvestChoice aims to improve those investments choices.”

For more information about HarvestChoice, please visit www.harvestchoice.org.