Beyond Increasing Crop Yields, Farm Income and Soil Quality: The Role of Conservation Agriculture in Developing Resilient Sustainable Intensification Systems for Small Householders.

Enhanced resilience has been increasingly cited as a desirable attribute of farming systems worldwide. The concept of resilience, however, remains elusive owing to the context-related multiplicity of meanings, and the limited understanding of approaches to measure it in real systems. Among many, one definition states that resilience is ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, reorganize and retain function, structure and feedbacks”. A resilience analysis requires to characterize the biophysical (e.g., crops, water, soil) and socio-economic (e.g., beliefs, values, resources) environments, the possible disturbances of interest, and the system drivers and trends, as well as the interactions among these components at different scales. Self-organization, adaptive cycles, uncertainty and thresholds are important aspects in resilience thinking. Sustainable intensification is another term that is being adapted extensively. Namely “the increase in production per unit of land area while improving natural capital and environmental services”; sustainable intensification is the main theme for programs (e.g., Africa RISING, IntensAfrica, SIMLESA) aimed at increasing food security and providing other benefits for resource-poor smallholders in disadvantageous regions of the world. Conservation agriculture could improve the resilience of farming systems particularly in disturbance-prone regions, and also be one of the pathways to promote sustainable intensification. To bring these goals to realization would require clarifying definitions, developing metrics, producing conceptual models and fully integrating biophysical and socioeconomic knowledge.