All Articles

The hazards and impacts of climate change are exacerbating. They threaten crop productivity, farmers’ resilience and the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Understanding climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and applying it is crucial.

Recognising potential selection bias due to non-randomness of the data, this study used propensity score matching on data from a nationally representative fifth Integrated Household Survey (IHS5) to investigate the effect of agriculture extension services on the technical efficiency of maize farmers in Malawi.

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.

Unexpectedly lower yield outcomes (downside risks) challenge farmers’ use of external inputs that can enhance crop productivity. Using household-level panel data collected from Ethiopia, we estimated the effects of crop diversification through maize-legume intercropping/rotation on maize yield distribution and downside risk.

This article examines the current state of food safety preparedness and response in three representative countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. We focus on foodborne diseases associated with the microbial contamination of animal-sourced foods.

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.

This study examines the impact of privatisation on the productivity of smallholder sugarcane out-growers in Malawi using a case study of Dwangwa Cane Growers Limited (DCGL).

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.

We measured the producer price impacts of food and cash transfer programmes in Ethiopia using monthly panel data from 37 zones in four major regions over the period January 2007 to December 2010.

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.

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.

The adverse effects of weather extremes produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of household agricultural production in Zambia. Extreme weather events such as floods and drought are expected to increase in intensity and frequency due to climate change.

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.

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.

The current study investigated the impact of using information and communication technology-based weather information services on the adoption of climate change adaptation strategies.

The starting point for this article is the concept of a commodity exchange. A working definition is a physical or – more likely – electronic marketplace for buying, selling and trading commodities, whether ‘hard’ commodities, which typically are natural resources that must be mined or extracted (gold, rubber, oil, etc.), or ‘soft’ commodities, which are mainly agricultural products or livestock (coffee, corn, cotton, sugar, soybeans, etc.).

This paper investigates the extent of price volatility of maize and rice in Ghana following the introduction of public buffer stockholding operations (PBSO) as a policy to stabilise farm output prices in the last decade.

Smallholder farmers face considerable risk and uncertainty, particularly when markets are incomplete or missing. We consider household crop diversity and crop choice in Zimbabwe, where output markets are largely absent and price signals are inaccurate.

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.

La production du riz sous contrat a pour avantage de répondre aux exigences de la qualité de la production du riz et de satisfaire la demande intérieure du riz pour le pays. Cette étude a pour objectif d’analyser les critères d’insolvabilité des contrats des riziculteurs au Burkina Faso.

Consumers are increasingly becoming very concerned about food safety, with many giving preference to organic food products over conventional food products, which make use of agrochemicals with potential implications for health.

This study examines determinants of food loss and waste behaviour among farming households in western Nigeria

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.

The adoption of improved agricultural technologies is very low in Tanzania, which has led to both low crop productivity and low production. This paper therefore analyses the factors that influence the adoption of improved seeds, inorganic fertilisers and a package of technologies by smallholder maize farmers in Tanzania