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.
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.
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 analysis sits against the backdrop of unsuccessful attempts to reindustrialise Africa. Zambia must diversify from copper dependency to agriculture and the agro-processing sectors, and the question is whether there is enough capacity to deliver jobs or growth.
The Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ) has reformed the implementation of the Farmer
Input Support Programme (FISP). The objective of FISP is to increase competitiveness in the
agricultural sector among all key players (input suppliers, agro-dealers, banks, etc.), while improving
farmers’ welfare.
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.
Using a non-experimental cross-sectional dataset of 471 households, we evaluate the impacts of satellite collection points (SCPs) under the Purchase for Progress (P4P) initiative implemented by the World Food Programme (WFP) on storage decisions and crop income from maize sales among smallholder farmers in Uganda.
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.
The recent increase in farmland investments in developing countries by private equity funds, large multinationals and sometimes foreign governments has attracted widespread attention and strong emotions from various interest groups.
While a large body of literature documents the existence of informal arrangements to share risk across and within households, there has been little research on the various coping strategies through which risk sharing takes place, and how these strategies function.
