Access to crop diversity and small farms’ resilience to climate variability in African drylands: The role of seed and information networks

Crop diversity is a key resource for smallholder farmers in drylands, as it plays a major role in their resilience by stabilizing crop production in the face of climate variability. Although access to crop diversity is pivotal for these farmers, the processes driving access are not fully understood.

Previous research indicates that access to crop diversity may rely on the social networks through which crop seeds and information are diffused.

These networks display a wide diversity of patterns, including differences in the composition of the actors involved and in the structure of the pathways through which seeds and information diffuse.

Understanding the consequences of these different network patterns for crop diversity and their implication for farm resilience is a crucial and timely challenge.

In this project, I will address this challenge by combining theory and methods from agroecology and social network research to tackle three objectives: (1) identify the most critical network patterns to maintain high crop diversity on farms over time or to change crops, (2) assess the relation between network patterns and temporal stability of crop production at the farm level, and (3) assess how farmers socioeconomic characteristics affect their access to seed and information.

To reach these objectives, I will (i) design a standardized protocol to collect longitudinal and panel data across three dryland areas in Africa, which could serve as a reference for future studies, (ii) build an innovative simulation model combining agent-based and network approaches, and (iii) develop new statistical methods for network analysis.

This project will enable a major advance in our understanding of the processes driving farmers access to crop diversity and their resilience.

By doing so, it will contribute to improve decision-making for smallholder farmers adaptation to increased climate variability in drylands.