This study analyses the potential of organic agriculture (OA) for sustainable intensification and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and more specifically:

a) how different organic interventions enable farmers to practice organic agriculture;

b) how organic agriculture comparatively performs in terms of productivity and profitability.

Organic farms are classified into two categories:

Active organic management (AOM): farmers who intentionally practice OA and implement agroecological farming practices.

Passive organic management (POM) (i.e. just omitting prohibited inputs) is prevalent among all organic farmers.

While OA aims at such an agroecological system design, our study shows that the reality in SSA looks very different. After being exposed to an intervention for introducing OA, most farmers do not fully adopt even POM and are even further away from sound AOM. This is due to:

-       the limited knowledge and lack of capacities to manage the organic production system;

-       the lack of suitable organic biomass and other organic inputs for soil fertility management, and effective plant protection inputs, and

-       the lack of markets which are sufficiently stable and allow for generating organic price premiums as additional incentives.

The farmers who managed their farms organically were mostly performing not substantially different from conventional farmers in terms of yields and profitability.

The exception farmers in an organic certified case, in which an intervention introduced effective capacity development, including the provision of necessary organic inputs and an intensive and functioning monitoring and control system to allow for organic premium prices. Uptake of organic practices as well as most physical yields and profits of organic farmers were substantially higher than their conventional counterparts in that case study.

This indicates that capacity development needs to be targeted to the main challenges of input availability, farmers’ capacity development for agroecosystem management, and access to local and international markets with price premiums.

From a societal perspective, it should be considered that organic farming induces less external costs to society (e.g. for clean water, biodiversity protection and workers health), while delivering more expensive food to consumers. From a resource-economic perspective, the cost for providing public goods to society should not be borne by consumers as is currently the case for certified OA in SSA.

Governments should either make efforts to internalise these external effects, and thus improve the relative competitiveness of organic farming practices, or facilitate and finance such capacity development and economic perspectives for the implementation of OA and enable smallholders to practice it.