Dr. Bruno Gerard.

Sustainable intensification approaches in maize and wheat based systems. CIMMYT’ strategy at glance.

Strategic efforts to boost crop productivity can increase smallholders’ food and income security, while also improving livelihoods, natural resource integrity, equity, nutrition and health, and resilience against biophysical or socioeconomic shocks. These are all urgent development priorities. However, most smallholder farmers' livelihoods do not depend exclusively on single commodities. Their farming systems are characterized by intricate strategies that integrate crop, tree and livestock production, with increasing reliance on off-farm income, and a strong risk management component that can hamper the adoption of innovations that focus on field agronomy alone.

Understanding smallholder farmer livelihood strategies (including their human, natural, social, financial and physical capital) and capturing the complexity of farming systems (specifically their trajectories in response to external drivers of change such as access to input/output markets, population and land pressure, changing demographic dependency ratios, and climate change) are prerequisite to co-developing technologies and management practices suitable for resource-poor farmers, while adapting and integrating them into smallholders’ diverse farming systems. Through this process, improved agronomic practices and innovations can be brought to scale. Such innovations must be assessed not only on their potential to increase field level productivity, but also in terms of overall farm productivity, profitability, stability, resilience, market risks, nutritional outcomes, as well as the interest and capacity (knowledge, financial) of individual farmers to sustainably adapt and adopt innovations. Technical innovations applied to crops also interact with other production units and institutions within smallholder farming systems, especially when resources such as land, labor and capital are in short supply. While co-developing interventions, it is also important to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to address livelihood constraints. Within smallholder farming communities, different families and family members have varying levels of access to land, labor and capital. Farmers’ production objectives may range from subsistence to commercial, which consequently influences their interest in intensified farming practices.