When food prices shoot over import parity, this often leads to social and political unrest and even the toppling of governments. If markets behaved efficiently and in the absence of trade barriers, food prices should not exceed the price in world markets plus the cost of importing it to domestic...

School feeding program as a social safety net has been popular in developing countries as an instrument for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These programs are frequently targeted towards populations that are food insecure and reside in areas with high concentrations of families from...

The goal of this paper is to provide evidence of shifts in food consumption patterns in the ECOWAS countries of West Africa from 1980 through 2009.1 In particular, the analysis is intended to identify major contributors to diets, changes in the levels as well as in the composition of food supply...

Livestock products and fish form an important component of urban consumers’ diet accounting for about one third of the total monthly budgetary expenditure on food. The budgetary share of livestock products increases with affluence or household income while the opposite is true for fish; 2) The...

Rapid urbanization in Zambia means that increasingly heavy demands are being placed on urban food marketing systems. Investment in these systems has been woefully inadequate for many decades, creating supply bottlenecks and health hazards that work against the interests of both farmers and...

The ability of a firm to differentiate their product hinges critically on an accurate understanding of the perceptions consumers hold regarding the implications of a credence labeling claim. Building upon existing work evaluating other food attribute labels (e.g., genetically-modified products,...

Malawi continues to rely on maize for household food security. Policies to enhance food security continue to target maize production. Traditionally production and use of cassava was localized in lakeshore areas until the past two decades when maize production was increasingly affected by...

This paper aims to better understand the determinants of household crop income, by using the TIA panel household survey of 2002-2005 to measure the impact of various private and public assets on crop income. We build upon Walker et al.’s (2004) analysis of TIA02 crop income by utilizing the...

Decades of research have led to substantially improved understanding of the nature of food insecurity. A combination of economic growth and targeted programs resulted in a steady fall (until the food crisis of 2007/08) in the percentage of the world’s population suffering from undernutrition...

The world food and financial crises threaten to undermine the real incomes of urban consumers in eastern and southern Africa. This study investigates patterns in staple food prices, wage rates, and marketing margins for urban consumers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia between 1993 and...