All Articles

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.

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.

Vitamin A deficiency is still a challenge in many African countries, including Tanzania. Survey data were gathered in Tanzania to determine consumers’ risk perceptions of vitamin A deficiency (VAD) and severe visual impairment.

Low agricultural commercialisation due to low productivity and a lack of access to and use of improved seeds are common features of smallholders in the Ethiopian highlands. Seed-producer cooperatives (SPCs) were established and strengthened in these highlands to facilitate smallholders’ access to improved seed.

The syndication of loans is an innovative financing model that has emerged in the financial landscape to help lenders spread risk and share opportunities. This study examines the relationship between syndicated loans and cocoa production in Ghana, using annual time-series data spanning from 1993 to 2020, as well as the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL).

The study provides evidence for how risk preferences determine fishing location choices by artisanal fishers on the south-west coast of the island of Mauritius. Risk preference is modelled using a random linear utility framework defined over mean-standard deviation space.

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.

This study ascertained the influence of farmers’ perceptions of climate change effects and their household characteristics on the choice of adaptation technologies they adopt. The survey relied mainly on institutional and primary data for its analysis.

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.

This study examines the complementarity and substitutability effect of private investment and public expenditure on agricultural productivity in Nigeria for the period 1978 to 2018. The study employs the vector error correction modelling (VECM) technique, and the estimate shows that government expenditure on the agricultural sector had the most significant effect on agricultural productivity, followed by commercial bank credit for the agricultural sector.

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.

The influence of food aid and remittances on West African food import demand is evaluated using a Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) model. Our results show that imports of oilseeds and the rest of the agricultural products category are highly price elastic, and that fruit and vegetables and dairy products are least responsive to price changes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The burden of low-quality diets and childhood undernutrition is widespread in rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, where households rely mostly on agriculture. Various empirical studies have shown the relative importance of the market, and hence food purchases, compared with farm diversification in raising dietary diversity.

This study examines the productivity of smallholder groundnut farmers in North-eastern Mozambique using data for 2016 from two provinces with high total production of said crop.

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.

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.

Poverty in its various forms is widespread among smallholder farmers, including income poverty, rendering interventions that improve household income relevant. We employ a linear model on cross-sectional data collected from October to December 2015, with the preceding 12 months as the reference period.

Soil acidity is a major constraint to crop production in tropical regions. Although agricultural lime is one option to remediate acid soils, there is limited information on the potential returns on investments to liming by smallholders.

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.

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.