This paper traces the trajectories of successful commercial smallholders operating under differing sets of market institutions. Analysis focuses on maize, cotton, and horticulture, three widely marketed crops with strikingly different market institutions. Maize receives intensive government...

The 2012 harvest was, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock national food balance sheet estimates, a major surplus production season. However, by November the same year, Zambia started experiencing widespread maize meal shortages and skyrocketing maize meal prices. Responding to...

The Feed the Future (FtF) program being implemented in Zambia’s Eastern Province by United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) has its goal of lifting more than a quarter of a million rural people (mostly farmers) out of poverty by 2015 (USAID 2011). The attainment of this...

Targeted fertilizer subsidies are growing in popularity in Sub-Saharan Africa and are a pillar of the Government of the Republic of Zambia’s (GRZ’s) agricultural sector strategy. For example, over the 2004 to 2011 fiscal years, the budget allocation to the Fertilizer Support Programme (FSP)...

The successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia is a major achievement in African agriculture. Since independence in 1964, and most notably from the 1970s, the commitment of the Government of Zambia (GoZ) to ensuring food security through the involvement of smallholder...

The successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia during the 1970s–80s was a major achievement of African agriculture but was predicated on a government commitment to parastatal grain and seed marketing, the provision of services to maize growers, and a pan-territorial...

Millions of smallholder farm households in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are net consumers of staple crops, and millions of poor urban households spend a significant share of their income purchasing staple foods. Recent research has underscored the major effects of changes in food prices on poverty,...

Nearly three decades after the initiation of agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), subsidies for fertilizer and seed are once again the cornerstone of many SSA governments’ agricultural development and poverty reduction strategies. Zambia is a prime example. In the last...

Input subsidy programs that provide inorganic fertilizer and improved maize seed to small farmers below market rates are currently receiving a great deal of support as a sustainable strategy to foster an African Green Revolution. In recent years numerous countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)...

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has a stated goal of lifting more than a quarter of millions of rural farmers out of poverty in Zambia’s Eastern Province through the implementation of the Feed the Future program (FtF). Part of the program’s goal will be...