After many years of neglect, there is a renewed interest in agricultural mechanization in Africa. Since government initiatives to promote mechanization, e.g., by importing and subsidizing tractors, are confronted with major governance challenges, private-sector initiatives offer a promising...

Carbon farming, particularly soil carbon climate strategies, has emerged as a popular tool in addressing climate change and variability in worldwide agriculture. Yet, there is a paucity of evidence on its application, and even more so, limited evidence exists on the welfare impacts in developing...

Indian agriculture is dominated by smallholders. With an average holding size of just 1.08 hectares (ha) (in 2015-16), and 86 percent of holdings being of less than 2 ha in size, Indian agriculture transformed the country from functioning 'ship-to-mouth' during the mid-1960s to being a net...

This paper analyzes the current uptake of small-scale irrigation (SSI1), its profitability, and the constraints to its broader adoption in the Sahel using literature and survey data from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. Unlike most of the literature on irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa...

Biofuels production has experienced rapid growth worldwide as one of several strategies to promote green energy economies. Indeed, climate change mitigation and energy security have been frequent rationales behind biofuel policies, but biofuels production could generate negative impacts, such as...

The role of futures markets in stabilizing spot prices has been extensively discussed. Nevertheless, the ability of these markets to achieve the stabilizing function significantly depends on whether they are "efficient" in the sense that futures prices "fully reflect" the available information....

The present study examines the dynamics and regulatory regimes of commodity derivatives markets through time. The historical perspective allows to identify the reasons behind the use of derivatives and the impact of changing rules on financial systems. It further permits to highlight the...

The aim of this study is to investigate the possible contagion risk coming from energy, food and metals commodity markets and to assess risk spillovers from biofuel to food commodity markets and from crude oil to food markets. To this purpose, we use the delta Conditional Value-at-Risk CoVaR)...

We examine how media coverage of fluctuations in the price of agricultural commodities affects these prices and their volatility. We develop a unified empirical framework to analyze the media's effects on both returns and volatility using insights from the literature. We use daily prices of...

Implementation of suitable innovation packages into cropping systems is required to address the issues of food security and improvement of the crop yield in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, quantification of the effects of innovation packages such as increase in fertilizer application rates,...