Off-farm earnings account for a substantial and growing share of household income among smallholder farmers in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but evidence concerning the effects of these earnings on investment in food production remains sparse. Conceptually, some factors may push farm families to...

In the coming decades, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) could see a major humanitarian crisis. If rapid population growth continues and agricultural productivity rises slowly or not at all,large increases in the working-age population and daunting problems of food supply, poverty,and underemployment...

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...

Despite upward trends in fertilizer application rates on maize fields over the last twenty years, there remains a perception in Kenya that fertilizer use is not expanding quickly enough and that application rates are not high enough to reverse the country’s growing national food deficit. In...

This study examines the impact of the World Food Program’s (WFP) Local and Regional Procurement of food aid (LRP) on households and markets. It focuses on four countries and commodities where WFP LRP has had a meaningful share of the market: maize in Uganda and Mozambique, beans in Ethiopia,...

Women are central to food production and maize is a dominant food staple in Sub-Saharan Africa, but published gender analyses of hybrid seed use in Sub-Saharan Africa are uncommon. Building on previous work, this paper tests the effects of headship definitions on hybrid seed use and explores the...

In many African countries, as well as in other parts of the world where a significant part of the rural population is poor and food insecure, policymakers face what is called the food price dilemma. On the one hand, they need to provide farmers with incentives to increase the quantity of...

In market-oriented economies, agricultural markets and marketing functions become increasingly important as the food system evolves. This paper focuses on how selected dimensions of markets and marketing functions can be studied and evaluated in Third World settings. The specific purpose of this...

This study surveys the empirical record of grain marketing and pricing policy in selected Eastern and Southern Africa countries. The paper addresses five key issues with major implications for food policy in Africa: (a) why the anticipated supply response to market liberalization has not yet...