Decades of research have led to substantially improved understanding of the nature of food insecurity. Until the food crisis of 2007/08, a combination of economic growth and targeted programs resulted in a steady fall in the percentage of the world’s population suffering from under-nutrition...

Crop production forecasts are widely recognized as an important input into food balance sheets and for anticipating production shortfalls. However, the role of accurate crop production forecasting systems in mitigating food price instability and transitory food insecurity is often...

Africa has inherited highly arbitrary political borders that vastly complicate current efforts to accelerate agricultural growth and reduce hunger. Because Africa’s inherited political borders arbitrarily partition agro-ecological zones and natural market sheds, current country borders serve...

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...

Performance of the agricultural sector in developing countries is fundamental to ensuring robust and equitable economic growth and broad-based food security. Yet donor support to agricultural development in developing countries has declined continuously for 30 years. This same period saw...

During the last decade, the Zambian government has dramatically increased expenditures on primary and secondary schooling, and enrollment rates have risen dramatically. At the same time, Zambia has faced the challenge of rising HIV prevalence and the possibility that recent gains in long-term...

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...

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...

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...