All Articles

This paper assesses the differences in technical efficiency of, and the cassava production systems employed by, male-managed (MMF) and female-managed (FMF) cassava farms in the Fanteakwa District of Ghana.

Uganda’s climate is changing in terms of rising temperatures and altered precipitation patterns, leading to extreme meteorological conditions such as prolonged drought, floods and landslides. Yet the majority (68%) of Ugandans rely largely on rain-fed agriculture, which is affected by climate variability.

Building up resilience in agricultural households has assumed a critical role in development strategies in recent years because, it is argued, the costs of strengthening resilience are less than the recurring expenditure for disaster assistance.

Sustainable food systems are necessary not only as a channel for addressing the food security needs of the world’s growing population, but are also crucial in ensuring that the needs of future generations are not compromised.

This is a special issue of the African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AfJARE), with papers contributed by the faculty members of the Collaborative Master’s in Agricultural and Applied Economics (CMAAE), one of the collaborative training programmes of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC).

Farm efficiency analysis provides significant insights into farms’ potential to enhance agricultural productivity. This article reports on an investigation of technology adoption and technical efficiency (TE) in the Ethiopian maize sector.

This study examined the effect of collective marketing on mango income for 226 smallholder farmers in Mwala sub-county. The study employed an endogenous switching regression model to account for selection bias from observed and unobserved farmer attributes.

Food security remains a major challenge in Burkina Faso, despite national and international commitments to reverse it. This paper evaluates the effect of the combined diversification of cash crops and food crops on the food security of rural farming households in Burkina Faso.

Descriptive statistics show that women with land rights were more empowered, younger, more educated and owned more land than those without land rights.

This study applied stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine the technical efficiency of maize production in northern Ghana using cross-sectional data from 360 maize farmers for the 2011/2012 cropping season.

Smallholder rural farmers are exposed to diverse idiosyncratic and covariate shocks that lead to high income and consumption volatility. Formal cash management tools, which are important for managing risk and volatility, often break down due to high information asymmetries and the transaction costs of operating in rural areas.

The adoption of improved agricultural technologies is known to significantly improve incomes, create more wealth, alleviate poverty and contribute to rural development in many developing countries.

This article analyses the level of integration in pastoral markets in Kenya using high-frequency data generated through a crowdsourcing endeavour. The vector error-correction model framework was used to estimate the causal relationships between the short- and long-run market price.

This article examines the current state of food safety preparedness and response in three representative countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. We focus on foodborne diseases associated with the microbial contamination of animal-sourced foods.

Consumers are increasingly becoming very concerned about food safety, with many giving preference to organic food products over conventional food products, which make use of agrochemicals with potential implications for health.

Climate change and its pronounced effects have greatly disfranchised the livelihoods of aquafarmers. To leverage these negative effects of climate change, climate-smart aquaculture (CSA) practices have been developed for adoption by farmers. However, it is not known whether these practices have made any meaningful contribution to farmers in terms of their livelihoods and resilience to the vagaries of climatic change.

This study aimed to bring forth empirical evidence of the effect of the sustained adoption of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) on the technical and profit efficiency of farmers. Previous studies remain inconclusive about whether the adoption of SAPs has any bearing on the efficiency of maize farmers.

The adverse effects of weather extremes produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of household agricultural production in Zambia. Extreme weather events such as floods and drought are expected to increase in intensity and frequency due to climate change.

Fair trade is an important ethical concern in the food value chains of developed countries. However, there is a dearth of empirical insights into consumer preferences for this critical aspect in the domestic markets of developing countries.

This paper investigates the interdependence of decisions on the adoption of agricultural technology and the simultaneous interaction between adoption and food security situations of smallholders, using a sample of 260 households from rural Ethiopia.

The main focus of this paper was to: (i) determine the impact of women’s share of household income on the pattern of expenditure on various categories of basic goods in southeast Nigeria; (ii) explain the pattern of household expenditure using the bargaining model of household behaviour; and (iii) extrapolate the results to the policy implications of gender-specific control of household incomes.

African animal trypanosomiasis (AAT) and its vectors, mainly tsetse, are a major constraint to livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Control efforts have been ongoing for decades, but finding a sustainable solution remains a major concern.

One of the debates around sustainability and the scaling up of micro-financial services is the commercialisation of micro-finance institutions (MFIs). This paper examines the contribution of the commercialisation of MFIs to ensuring the sustainability of MFIs and in scaling up their commitment to serve their primary target groups: poor and marginalised people.

The special issue focused on topics in environmental and resource economics that originated from the inaugural conference of the African Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AFAERE), held on 2-4 August 2021.