All Articles

This study characterises the nature of the vegetable production shortfall throughout Ghana for remedial action to be taken. By applying the meta-stochastic frontier analysis to a sample of okra, pepper and tomato farmers, the results show that the ranking of production inputs in production is in the order land, hired labour, fertiliser, pesticide and family labour.

Soybean is one of the key legume crops that provides several financial benefits for farming households in Malawi. However, Malawi's persisting efforts to improve smallholder productivity and diversification have only translated into moderate improvements in food security outcomes.

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

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.

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.

We look at the prioritisation of agricultural value chains (VCs) for the allocation of R&D resources that maximise development outcomes (poverty, growth, jobs and diets) in Senegal.

This article investigated the role of cattle attributes in buyers’ choices and hedonic pricing in Benin. Cross-sectional data were collected on 347 market cattle transactions using the revealed preference method.

Understanding rice farmers’ responses to market prices is essential for policy makers to design effective policies to better manage input demand and rice supply. This paper applies duality theory to derive the elasticities of input demand and output supply for Vietnamese rice production using a translog profit function approach.

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 attempted to identify determinants of farmers’ maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for improved use of irrigation water.

The world is facing unprecedented challenges from COVID-19, which is disrupting lives and livelihoods. The pandemic could profoundly affect the African continent and wipe out hard-won development gains, as sub-Saharan Africa heads into its first recession in 25 years.

The hazards and impacts of climate change are exacerbating. They threaten crop productivity, farmers’ resilience and the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Understanding climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and applying it is crucial.

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.

To enrich agriculture reform and reap its benefits, policy makers need to localise policy issues within and across their domestic zones. Using a stochastic meta-frontier function, this study analysed the production efficiency of the cassava subsector of cassava growers from Bomi and Nimba counties in Liberia.

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.

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.

Climate change and heat stress are expected to worsen the issue of water scarcity that is affecting the agricultural sector, among others through increased crop prices and costs, in addition to changes in yields.

One of the three components of Rwanda’s flagship anti-poverty programme, Vision 2020 Umurenge (VUP), is the provision of credit to relatively poor households, nearly all of them farmers. In this paper we estimate the impact of the programme using high-quality household survey data from 2013/2014 and 2016/2017.

Achieving state market policies depends partly on the extent to which changes in commodity prices are transmitted along supply chains. This paper examines the effect of the National Food Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO) on price transmission between white maize wholesale and retail markets in Kumasi, Ghana.

Although organic farming is increasingly perceived as a viable alternative to conventional agriculture in the face of deteriorating environmental ecosystems, little is known about consumers’ preferences for organic products in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper bridges this gap in research and investigates the extent to which consumers value organic food in Dakar, Senegal.

Improving local rice production capacity is a key element on the agenda of most countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).

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.

Zambia has been implementing agricultural input subsidy programmes to stimulate crop production and productivity among smallholder farmers with the goal of increasing national food security.

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.