Zambia and particularly the Eastern province have one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. The most vulnerable are the children from rural households which depend entirely on seasonal agricultural production and income, and survive on diets that are deficiency in proteins and other...

Many of the ‘new’ agricultural input subsidy programs (ISPs) in sub-Saharan Africa list raising farm incomes and reducing rural poverty among their objectives, but are ISPs achieving these objectives? We use data from two nationally-representative surveys of smallholder farm households in...

This paper uses year-to-year variation in temperature to estimate the long-term effects of climate change on health outcomes in Mexico. Combining temperature data at the district level and three rounds of nationally representative household surveys,an individual’s health as an adult is matched...

High poverty rate persists in rural Kenya, where farming households continue to depend on agriculture for food and income, despite economic growth. Maize is the most widely grown crop, with the maize-growing smallholder population quite heterogeneous and diversified.However, less than half the...

This paper explores the U.S. agricultural production systems, focusing on the interactions between the crop and livestock sectors. The estimation results of the differential input demand system suggest that the demand for hired labor, self-employed labor, intermediate goods, capital, and land...

While climate change is widely regarded as a threat to food security in southern Africa, few studies attempt to link the science of climate change impacts on agriculture with the specificities of smallholder livelihoods. In this paper, we build a series of linear programming (LP) farm-household...

In the context of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) control in New Zealand cattle, we address the problem of management under uncertain disease prevalence by integrating a model of disease transmission and Bayesian learning from testing. We show the implications of accounting for the full dynamic value...

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown...

Effective food security work in developing countries, such as Mali, relies on a thorough understanding of the rural farming system. A common approach is to study land allocation decisions to specific crops. In accomplishing this, one challenge is to model all production outcomes in a multi-crop...