Guinea-Bissau’s agriculture sector is the backbone of its economy, contributing between 30 and 50 percent of GDP and providing income for 85 percent of the population. Yet low productivity, climate vulnerability, post-harvest losses, and weak market connectivity continue to constrain the country’s agricultural potential. Recent World Bank assessments suggest that combining agroecological approaches that increase productivity and resilience with agrologistics investments that reduce losses and improve market access could help unlock substantial economic gains, including nearly US$30 million annually in the rice and cashew sectors alone, equivalent to about 3% of the country’s agricultural GDP.
Building more productive and resilient farming systems
Guinea-Bissau is one of the world’s leading producers of raw cashew nuts. The crop accounts for more than 90 percent of exports and contributes approximately one-quarter of national GDP. Yet despite its importance, agricultural production remains constrained by low cashew nut yields below 0.4 t/ha compared to 0.8-1 t/ha in India and Vietnam. The rice sector faces similar productivity gaps, with yields around 2 t/ha compared to above 6 t/ha in most of Asia.
The country lost around 188,000 hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2021 due to land clearing for farming. Unsustainable land-use practices have contributed to soil degradation and erosion, undermining the productivity of both upland and lowland farming systems and leading to further deforestation. This perpetuates a cycle that undermines environmental sustainability and threatens the long-term sustainability of agricultural outputs and rural livelihoods. “Daqui a alguns anos não poderemos mais morar aqui” (“In a few years we won’t be able to live here anymore”) is a statement frequently heard from interviewed farmers and village chiefs across the country.
Agroecological approaches can help reverse these trends. Practices such as agroforestry, crop diversification, crop rotation, nutrient recycling, and soil restoration can improve the productivity, resilience, and sustainability of agricultural systems while reducing dependence on external inputs. To achieve broader adoption, these practices need to be complemented by access to small-scale mechanization to ease labor constraints and by sustainable seed systems that improve seed quality.
Promising examples include cashew orchards combined with annual crops, systems of rice intensification (SRI), agroforestry horticultural perimeters, and small-scale free-range poultry farming. These approaches have delivered encouraging results in other countries. In Asia, SRI has significantly improved yields while reducing water use by 30-50 percent and seed requirements by 80-90 percent.
Together, these approaches can help farmers diversify income sources, improve soil health, and strengthen the resilience of farming systems, while opening new opportunities for women and youth in production, input supply, and local services.
Capturing more value beyond the farm gate
Improving agricultural production alone will not transform Guinea-Bissau’s agrifood sector. Farmers may adopt more productive and resilient practices, but if crops cannot be stored, processed, or transported efficiently, much of the potential value is lost before reaching consumers. Agroecology helps create value on the farm, while agrologistics helps capture that value across agricultural value chains. Sustainable competitiveness requires both. However, the country’s agrologistics system faces major constraints across infrastructure, services, and governance, faring worse than the average across low-income countries (Figure 1).
