All Articles

Limited access to timely and adequate information has been identified as a major hindrance to smallholder agriculture in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This has negatively affected the socio-economic welfare of smallholder farmers, resulting in high numbers of food insecure households.

Weather is an important determinant of household well-being in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the relationship between novel measures of cropping-season weather conditions and household food consumption in rural Niger, and how household coping mechanisms mediate that relationship.

Insect pollination improves the yield of most crop species and contributes to one-third of global crop production. The importance of this ecosystem service in improving agricultural production has largely been overlooked, however, in favour of practices that improve soil conditions such as fertiliser use and supplementary irrigation.

In this paper, we establish a link between crop productivity, crop market participation and agricultural technology use among smallholder farmers.

Current global trends in population growth, urbanisation and a growing middle-class economy have resulted in increased demand for livestock and products, and more so dairy products. This necessitates the need for livestock producers to respond to the growing demand.

This study uses an online laboratory experiment and a post-experimental survey to test whether the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) scholarship programme causally influences the creation of cognitive social capital among University of Pretoria recipients.

Unexpectedly lower yield outcomes (downside risks) challenge farmers’ use of external inputs that can enhance crop productivity. Using household-level panel data collected from Ethiopia, we estimated the effects of crop diversification through maize-legume intercropping/rotation on maize yield distribution and downside risk.

Integrated pest management (IPM) has been promoted globally as an alternative approach to the widespread broad-spectrum chemical insecticidal application for the control of pests and diseases in agricultural production to minimise the harmful effects of the chemicals on humans and the environment.

Poultry waste management and the energy demand have generated environmental and climate change concerns. Experts have suggested converting poultry waste to biogas energy through recycling to reduce these concerns.

The conditions in which increased market participation leads to improved technical efficiency are still not adequately understood. This study therefore investigated farmers’ market participation rates and their predicted technical efficiency scores by performing a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis using household-level data obtained from the 2009 Ethiopian rural household survey.

This paper examines the optimal land resource allocation for tree crop enterprises in the Eastern region of Ghana based on data collected from sampled cocoa, oil palm, and rubber farmers.

Cet article analyse les effets des produits forestiers non ligneux (PFNL) sur la pauvreté multidimensionnelle au Burkina Faso. Il s'appuie sur des données primaires collectées auprès de 384 ménages sélectionnés aléatoirement.

Cet article analyse le rôle du crédit et de l’éducation dans les différences de productivité du maïs entre femmes et hommes au Burkina Faso.

Kenya has become a driving force of trade integration at the regional and continental level, albeit this process is still incomplete.

Variability in climate and debility in soil fertility affect agrarian production, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and thus threaten food security. This has prompted the seed sector to introduce various varieties of climate-smart maize in Kenya and release them in the market. In contrast, there is little experiential insight into how the adoption of these varieties by small-scale farmers affects their household income.

Dans le but d’appréhender l’influence des types de contrat de travail sur les performances des exploitations cacaoyères dans le Mbam et Kim au Cameroun, un échantillonnage raisonné a permis de sélectionner 114 exploitants cacaoyers. L’approche à deux étapes recourant aux modèles Data Enveloppent Analysis (DEA) et Tobit censuré a permis d’analyser l’efficacité des exploitations.

This study applied the zero-inefficiency stochastic frontier (ZISF) to analyse the technical efficiency of 333 improved rice-farming households for the 2012/2013 farming season in Ghana.

This paper evaluates the extent to which changes in international wheat prices are transmitted to domestic markets in Kenya using an error correction model (ECM) that employs monthly producer price data for the period 2002 to 2020. Domestic wheat markets in Kenya were found to be strongly integrated while, international wheat markets were cointegrated with domestic prices at the port of Mombasa.

Three experiments were conducted from 2014 to 2018 to examine the economics of yellow passion fruit production under different soil fertility management. In 2014, two yellow passion fruit genotypes, that is Conventional and KPF 4, were grown in the field and pot simultaneously under varying rates of poultry manure (PM), including 0, 10, 20, 30 and 40 t/ha.

This paper examines farmers’ preferences for an improved Bambara groundnut variety, the key attributes desired, factors influencing preference, and the number of attributes desired by smallholder farmers in Ghana.

This paper argues and provides empirical evidence that trade-offs and/or complementarities are inherent in technological options that shape the adoption of and land-use decisions in production systems involving multiple crops in Ethiopia.

La production du riz sous contrat a pour avantage de répondre aux exigences de la qualité de la production du riz et de satisfaire la demande intérieure du riz pour le pays. Cette étude a pour objectif d’analyser les critères d’insolvabilité des contrats des riziculteurs au Burkina Faso.

This paper analyses the heterogeneous effects of membership of a farmer group on access to water, use of inorganic fertiliser, household incomes, and farm asset holdings. A sample of 401 irrigators in South Africa was analysed using propensity score matching. The study found that group membership had a positive effect on all four outcomes.

Using the potential outcomes framework, we estimate the influence of the adoption gap, adoption drivers and impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties (IGVs) on groundnut yield among smallholder farmers in Nigeria.