All Articles

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.

Sub-Saharan African countries, with their initially large agricultural sectors, reduce poverty and urbanise most rapidly and efficiently when they achieve rapid agricultural growth.2 The faster agriculture grows, the faster its relative importance declines.

This study examines determinants of food loss and waste behaviour among farming households in western Nigeria

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.

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.

Baobab products provide cash income and supplement diets for local communities living in marginalised, arid and semi-arid regions. However, these products are neglected by research, selectively traded and considered underutilised. This study endeavours to narrow this information gap by analysing the determinants of baobab collectors’ choice of marketing channels in Kenya.

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 continent-wide review of studies on price transmission implemented for the global, regional cross-border, within-country urban and within-country rural market segments provides a broad overview of current conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa food markets and provides insights into how market development varies across regions and crops.

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

The transmission of price changes to markets has attracted renewed interest since the international food price spikes of 2007 to 2011. In response to this, this paper investigates the long-run behaviour of Nigerian cowpeas and yam tuber retail prices across space and time from 2000 to 2015.

Many governments adopt agricultural policies that affect production incentives across commodities. In addition, severe market failures in the form of high marketing margins often lower the prices that farmers receive.

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.

This study employs a binary probit model on a sample of 319 smallholder farmers in Thulamela and Collins Chabane municipalities to examine their willingness to pay for agricultural extension services.

Smallholder farmers face considerable risk and uncertainty, particularly when markets are incomplete or missing. We consider household crop diversity and crop choice in Zimbabwe, where output markets are largely absent and price signals are inaccurate.

The use of novel feed ingredients from aquaculture is growing globally. However, their contributions to scalable and sustainable aquafeed solutions are unclear. New ingredients for feeds are desired in the framework of sustainability and a circular economy; thus, initiatives for implementing such novel ingredients are of interest to agricultural practitioners.

Farmer–herder conflicts deepen the incidence of poverty and worsen the wellbeing of both farming and herding households in Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to cope with the effects of conflict on their livelihoods, households adopt various adaptation strategies.

The high volatility of the world cocoa price makes the millions of African cocoa farmers highly vulnerable to poverty. A large volatility in the value of an agricultural commodity is linked to the inelasticity of its supply or demand.

This paper conducts ex-ante impact assessments for policy interventions to promote amaranth value chains in Tanzania and Kenya. Amaranth is an underdeveloped, drought-resistant, and nutrition-rich crop used for human food, animal fodder, and ornamental purposes.

The impact of women’s empowerment in agriculture on women\s health, indicated by their body mass index (BMI), is examined using an instrumental variable estimation approach on a sample of 4 267 women.

This paper examines determinants of the adoption of rainwater-harvesting technologies in a rain shadow area of southern Malawi. The most common ex situ technologies in the area were dams, and the widely used in situ technologies were box ridges, contour markers and swales.

L’objectif de cette étude est d’identifier les segments de marchés appropriés pouvant permettre aux coopératives rizicoles de commercialiser efficacement leurs productions. Ainsi, des enchères expérimentales ont été menées en 2015 pour collecter les données auprès de 291 consommateurs urbains.

Our understanding of climate-induced crop failure and crop abandonment is limited at present. This study surveyed theoretical and empirical literature on climate-induced crop failure and crop abandonment.

We measured the producer price impacts of food and cash transfer programmes in Ethiopia using monthly panel data from 37 zones in four major regions over the period January 2007 to December 2010.

This study investigates the driving factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt modern agricultural inputs (MAI) and how this affects farm household welfare in rural Rwanda. To account for heterogeneity in the MAI adoption decision and unobservable farm and household attributes, we estimate an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model.