Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa is exceptionally low, exposing millions of households who live from agriculture to low incomes and periods of hunger. Konrad Burchardi's three-part project will develop and apply novel empirical methods to quantify the extent of misallocation of inputs in Sub-Saharan agriculture; it will trial and evaluate new approaches to encourage the efficient adoption of modern agricultural inputs; and it will develop new techniques to measure agricultural output in such settings at low costs, which holds the potential to catalyse future research on agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa has been largely stagnant over the past half century, exposing large fractions of the population to low incomes and periods of hunger. Modern inputs such as chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds have enabled large increases of agricultural productivity elsewhere, but have hardly been adopted in Sub-Saharan Africa. This project studies novel approaches to study and encourage the efficient adoption of modern inputs, that is the adoption by those farmers and only those farmers who stand to gain from those inputs, and it will develop new methods for research on agricultural productivity in developing countries, says Konrad Burchardi.

Consolidator Grants are the European Research Council´s (ERC) prestigious grants for researchers with 7-12 years of experience since the completion of their PhD. Consolidator Grants may be awarded up to € 2 million for a period of 5 years.