All Articles

Soybean has been the world’s fastest growing crop over the last 15 years. Yet, as an untraditional and unfamiliar crop, soybean requires small farmers to move beyond their traditional production practices and marketing arrangements in order to produce a successful crop.

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.

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.

Using nationally representative cross-sectional data, the study investigated the impact of CA adoption through a multivalued treatment framework.

The determinants of the technical efficiency (TE) of adopters and non-adopters of soil and water conservation (SWC) technologies in the upper Rwizi micro-catchment of south-western Uganda are compared using cross-sectional survey data from 246 smallholder farmers.

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.

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

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.

In this paper, we explore the role of wildlife in climate change adaptation, especially in areas used predominantly for livestock production in South Africa. Using a sample of 3 449 wildlife and livestock ranches, we estimate a multinomial choice model of various ranching options in these areas. The results indicate that mixed wildlife-livestock ranches are less vulnerable to climate change when compared to ranches with only wildlife or only livestock.

This paper examines rice trade flows within and across regions in Madagascar, based on data of unique rice sales collected in 22 major markets in Madagascar in 2012 and 2013.

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.

En partant du postulat que le financement agricole contribue de manière significative à la production agricole, cet article analyse les liens entre ressources mobilisées pour le secteur et la sécurité alimentaire au Sénégal.

This study examined the effect of collective marketing on mango income for 226 smallholder farmers in Mwala sub-county. The study employed an endogenous switching regression model to account for selection bias from observed and unobserved farmer attributes.

This study applied the zero-inefficiency stochastic frontier (ZISF) to analyse the technical efficiency of 333 improved rice-farming households for the 2012/2013 farming season in Ghana.

Integrated pest management (IPM) has been promoted globally as an alternative approach to the widespread broad-spectrum chemical insecticidal application for the control of pests and diseases in agricultural production to minimise the harmful effects of the chemicals on humans and the environment.

Zimbabwe has set poverty reduction targets in a changing climate, yet the implications of climate variability for poverty remain under-explored.

African animal trypanosomiasis (AAT) and its vectors, mainly tsetse, are a major constraint to livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Control efforts have been ongoing for decades, but finding a sustainable solution remains a major concern.

Women’s time allocation is a dimension of women’s empowerment in agriculture, and is recognised as a pathway through which agriculture can affect child nutritional status in developing countries. Longer hours of farm work can potentially increase women’s time constraints, reducing the time allocated to child-caring responsibilities and raising the risk of poor child nutritional status.

This study analyses the trade-offs between welfare (measured by income) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using a farm-level optimisation model that incorporates the predominant cereal (sorghum), legumes (groundnut, soybeans), livestock (cattle, goats and sheep) and trees (locust bean, camel’s foot) representative of production systems at two contrasting sites in northern Nigeria.

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.

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.

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.

Since 2002, a range of South African policies have attempted to address the disproportionate burden of food and nutrition insecurity on the population. Yet malnutrition among the poor has worsened.

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.