World Food Policy Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 48

How Promising is the Rice Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Otsuka (1994). This indicates that the
yield potential under rain-fed condition
in SSA is not inferior to that in tropical
Asia. While it is true that the labor use per
hectare becomes larger with an increase
in the adoption of new technologies, the
factor share of labor tends to decline,
which indicates that new technologies are
not labor-using.

In sum, our case studies
demonstrate large potentials to increase
rice yields in SSA by disseminating
Asian Green Revolution technology.
Although we did not discuss in detail in
this article, our case studies indicate that
new technologies are not only productive
but also profitable. In short, Asian Rice
Green Revolution technology is directly
transferable to SSA.

not find any significant positive effect
of farm size on technology adoption.
In the case of Ghana, it has a negative
and significant effect on the adoption of
dibbling, which is highly labor-intensive.
In both the irrigated and rain-fed areas
in Mozambique (Kajisa and Payongayong
2011a; 2011b) and Uganda (Kijima, Ito,
and Otsuka 2011), the effects of farm size
on paddy yields are found to be negative,
implying that the yield per hectare is
higher on smaller farms. These findings
are consistent with the negative correlation
between the farm size and the yield, that is
widely observed in SSA recently (Larson
et al. 2014), which can be explained by
the higher intensity of family labor on
smaller farms.12 While the effect of farm
size on rice income per hectare is negative
and significant in Tanzania (Nakano and
Kajisa 2012), no effect on profit is found
in Uganda and Ghana (Kijima, Ito, and
Otsuka 2012; deGraft-Johnson et al.
2014). Thus, there is no evidence that new
rice technologies particularly favor large
farms. On the contrary, they seem to be
conducive to equitable distribution of
income in rural communities in SSA by
offering expanded work opportunities for
family labor, which is a major resource of
poor small farmers. This is consistent with
the observations in Asia that the impacts
of the rice Green Revolution technology
are neutral with respect to the farm size
(David and Otsuka 1994).

While irrigation is found to be an
important determinant of rice yield, there
is no evidence that it is necessary for the

III - Key Questions

B

efore
recommending
further
dissemination of new technologies,
we must ask a few key questions.
The first question is whether the benefit
of new technologies accrues to small
farmers. If these new technologies are
adopted primarily by large farmers, their
contribution to poverty reduction is
limited, because it is the small farmers
who suffer from poverty (Y amano, Otsuka,
and Place 2011). The second question
is what the major constraints are on the
adoption of new technologies. In order
to disseminate new technologies to wide
areas, we have to remove such constraints.

Commonly, our case studies do
12

Monitoring of hired labor in a spatially wide environment in agriculture is costly, so that the endowment of family labor relative to farm size is the critical determinant of crop yield (Hayami and Otsuka
1993).

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