Publication: Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Rural Sudan
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Date
2020-06
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2020-06
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The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section two describes the state of the rural population in Sudan, by first discussing the spatial distribution of poverty across the states as well as changes in poverty levels between 2009 and 2014-15. It also describes the profile of poor rural households using characteristics such as their incomes, consumption, and assets. Section three focuses on the practice of agriculture in Sudan. It documents the agriculture-specific characteristics of households, such as choice of crops, use of inputs, irrigation, plot size, and credit access. We use these characteristics to illustrate the profile of rural farmers in Sudan and identify differences between poor and non-poor farmers. Section four describes agricultural yields across Sudan and relates these measures of farm productivity to the previously described farm characteristics to identify constraints to agricultural productivity. Section five concludes with a summary of the main findings and policy recommendations.
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“Ali, Haseeb; Etang Ndip, Alvin; Touray, Sering; Fuje, Habtamu. 2020. Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Rural Sudan. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36105 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Agricultural Productivity and Poverty in Rural Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)While agriculture remains the mainstay for a large share of the population in Sudan, and rural poverty has seen a dramatic decrease (between 2009 and 2014/15), poverty remains relatively high among those engaged in agriculture. Households engaged in agriculture—either crop farming or raising livestock—see among the highest rates of poverty among households classified by their main livelihoods in Sudan. As these households form a major bulk of the total population, understanding why these households remain poor and identifying strategies for lifting them out of poverty is a key concern for researchers and policy makers. This concern occupies the primary motivation for this study. Using data from the 2009 National Baseline Household Survey (NBHS) and 2014/15 National Household Budget and Poverty Survey (NHBPS), this study sheds light on the rural landscape in Sudan. Though rural Sudan has fared much better than urban Sudan between survey rounds, the number of poor remains higher in rural than in urban areas. Sudan severely lags other African countries in terms of agricultural productivity. Sorghum, Sudan’s most commonly produced crop—grown by close to half the agrarian households—has seen yields increase from below 500 kg per ha in 1995 to almost 700 kg per ha in 2017. A major constraint to improving crop productivity in Sudan is the low use of productivity-enhancing inputs, particularly fertilizers and pesticides and low-yield seed varieties. Increasing input use can be achieved by investing in rural markets. Market participation of agrarian households in Sudan is low, constraining farmers’ ability to raise their income levels and escape poverty. Improving rural transportation and telecommunications networks, providing access to rural credit and financial services, and increasing the ease of doing business for input providers and output marketers can increase the geographic penetration of agrarian input and output markets. Though sorghum and millet remain the dominant crops grown in Sudan, the recent increase in the number of households growing sesame is a welcome development. Deteriorations in the irrigation infrastructure need to be reversed to ensure Sudan remains competitive in the export of commercial crops. Access to cell phones has significantly increased channels of communication for the rural poor.Publication Shocks and Household Welfare in Sudan(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10)The Sudanese economy has faced several shocks over the years, sometimes resulting in devastating impacts on the economy and the welfare of Sudanese households. 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Greater effort will be needed to connect sectoral interventions and achieve synergies from public and private sector interventions; to build capacity and knowledge exchange; to take stock of experience in rain-fed agriculture; to ensure attention to financial sustainability and to cross-cutting issues of gender, environmental, and social impacts and climate; and to better integrate the World Bank Group support at the global and regional levels with that at the country level. This evaluation uses the typology of economies developed by the Agriculture for Development: World Development Report 2008 as one classification in its analysis. In the agriculture-based category, which includes most of Sub-Saharan Africa, development of the agriculture sector is essential to growth and poverty reduction, yet productivity is low, constrained by limited access to modern inputs, irrigation, communication, and transport. The World Bank Group support focused on alleviating these constraints is important to help achieve poverty reduction.
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