All Articles

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

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.

Variability in climate and debility in soil fertility affect agrarian production, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and thus threaten food security. This has prompted the seed sector to introduce various varieties of climate-smart maize in Kenya and release them in the market. In contrast, there is little experiential insight into how the adoption of these varieties by small-scale farmers affects their household income.

Using an original database from French archives on French trade statistics, this article undertakes a comprehensive study of the nature and dynamic of French sectoral trade for the period 1880 to 1912.

The study employed the Phillips and Sul log-t convergence test to analyse the degree of convergence for the Niger Basin region (NBR) countries in terms of per capita carbon emission and food availability.

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.

This study examines the extent to which, in the Sahelian environment – where the scarcity of forage is intensifying – climate change perceptions influence the adoption of cottonseed cake among livestock producers in the Hauts-Bassins region of Burkina Faso.

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.

Kenya, like most countries in the Eastern and Southern Africa region, has continued to be overwhelmed by high and volatile food prices. In an effort to mitigate this problem, the government has implemented various trade and marketing policy instruments. The aim of this study is to examine whether the policies implemented have achieved their desired effects.

Empirical studies on the effects of governance structures on incentives have still received little attention in the wheat value chain research of developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of governance structures on actors’ incentives in different functional nodes of the wheat value chain.

This study examined the effect of sustainable intensification (SI) technologies, specifically the use of improved maize seed varieties, of improved bean seed varieties (Nua45), crop rotation, maize-legume intercropping and doubled-up legume systems on farm income in Dedza district, Malawi.

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 study compares the benefits of using digestate and compost in Burkina Faso. A mathematical programming model was used to simulate the advantages under three scenarios.

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.

This study investigates the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, their nutritional status and those of their children. Growing empirical evidence suggests that there is a positive link, but that not all empowerment dimensions influence nutritional outcomes.

This study investigates how public agricultural expenditure can mitigate the effect of climate variability on banks’ agricultural credit supply in sub-Saharan Africa.

This study uses an online laboratory experiment and a post-experimental survey to test whether the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) scholarship programme causally influences the creation of cognitive social capital among University of Pretoria recipients.

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 effects of climate change on smallholder agriculture under different crop technologies, namely conservation agriculture, Falbedia albida, optimal fertilisation and intensive farming, were analysed against the conventional subsistence farming in Malawi.

Nutrition knowledge is an important driver of household dietary diversity that can be improved through access to nutrition information. However, in many rural areas, the formal flow of nutrition information is limited, although social networks could play an important role as an informal source of such information.

Cette étude examine l'impact économique de l'utilisation des semences améliorées sur la sécurité alimentaire des ménages ruraux au Cameroun.

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.

The literature on what drives crop failure and crop abandonment is scant. This paper explores the interplay between risk factors and crop abandonment. We examine the role of risk sources and risk management strategies in crop abandonment by smallholder maize farmers in Zambia.

The conditions in which increased market participation leads to improved technical efficiency are still not adequately understood. This study therefore investigated farmers’ market participation rates and their predicted technical efficiency scores by performing a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis using household-level data obtained from the 2009 Ethiopian rural household survey.