Climate-smart agriculture, cropland expansion and deforestation in Zambia: Linkages, processes and drivers

There is an urgent need to increase agricultural production in order to meet increasing food demands driven in part by population growth and changing dietary preferences. Doing so by expanding area cultivated into forests has important environmental consequences, including engendering climate change. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is considered an important option to increase agricultural productivity and resilience, intensify agricultural production, and possibly reduce cropland expansion. This paper uses nationally representative survey data to assess the extent, intensity and drivers of cropland expansion, and applies an instrumental variable approach to determine the extent to which CSA reduced cropland expansion in Zambia. We find that one-fifth of the 7241 farm households surveyed in 2019 expanded cropland between the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 farming seasons, clearing on average 0.18 ha, but only 13% expanded their cropland into intact forests, clearing an average of 0.09 ha of forestland per household per year. In aggregate, cropland expansion by smallholder into forests represents about 60% of the estimated 250,000 ha of forests lost per year in Zambia. Most households expanded cropland because they needed to meet subsistence food requirements and a few others in response to market opportunities. We did not find statistically significant associations between adopting CSA and cropland expansion in our national sample. Thus, given the low extent and intensity of CSA adoption as defined in this paper, relying only on CSA as a means to spare forests may be risky. These findings have important implications on CSA practice definition, promotion, framing and adoption.