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.

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.

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.

Descriptive statistics show that women with land rights were more empowered, younger, more educated and owned more land than those without land rights.

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.

Climate change and its pronounced effects have greatly disfranchised the livelihoods of aquafarmers. To leverage these negative effects of climate change, climate-smart aquaculture (CSA) practices have been developed for adoption by farmers. However, it is not known whether these practices have made any meaningful contribution to farmers in terms of their livelihoods and resilience to the vagaries of climatic change.

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.

The objective of this research was to assess the effects of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) on food consumption expenditure by agricultural households in the southwestern region of Burkina Faso.

Rural areas across the developing countries in every region of the world lag behind their urban counterparts in many important sectors and, most importantly, in improved water supply services.

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.

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.

Very few studies of the agricultural sector’s adaptation to climate change have been conducted in Benin. This paper focuses on farmers’ perceptions and adaptation decisions in relation to climate change.

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.

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.

Dans le but d’appréhender l’influence des types de contrat de travail sur les performances des exploitations cacaoyères dans le Mbam et Kim au Cameroun, un échantillonnage raisonné a permis de sélectionner 114 exploitants cacaoyers. L’approche à deux étapes recourant aux modèles Data Enveloppent Analysis (DEA) et Tobit censuré a permis d’analyser l’efficacité des exploitations.

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.

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.

Agricultural commercialisation is a critical pathway for economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, the lack of market information may impede this development. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine market information and preferences for soybean quality in a developing-world context.

Goat keeping is a common practice among rural farmers due to the adaptability of goats to harsh environments, their efficient forage conversion and rapid growth, and their multiple benefits, including the production of manure and high-quality milk.

A new high-yielding upland rice variety known as New Rice for Africa (NERICA) has been recognised widely as a promising technology for addressing the food shortage and poverty problems in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper evaluates output supply and input factor demands for livestock products in the Southern rangelands of Kenya. A flexible translog profit function that permits the application of the primal approach to the output supply and factor demand analysis was estimated using household-level data.

In this paper, we establish a link between crop productivity, crop market participation and agricultural technology use among smallholder farmers.

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.