The long-term reduction of hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the great challenges for the international development community. Eliminating hunger and promoting widespread growth in the region inevitably involves agriculture, given its central role in the region's economies....

Future directions of food supply and demand will be determined by the interaction of various market forces (such as prices, population, and income) as they will be affected by decisions and policies of farmers, national governments, and international donors. Considering all these factors, an...

The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Climate change, population, and income growth will drive food demand in the coming decades. Baseline scenarios show food prices for maize, rice, and wheat would significantly increase between 2005 and 2050, and the number of...

Meeting world food needs in the year 2020 will depend even more than it does now on the capabilities and resources of women. Women are responsible for generating food security for their families in many developing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Women not only process, purchase,...

This paper introduces a modeling method which simulates a village's response to population and market pressure. The method combines a linear programming model with a biophysical model of soil condition and plant growth. The linear programming model simulates farmers' plans aggregated at the...

AIDS is a human tragedy and a major health problem. The scale of the disease is so large that it now raises questions about the impact of AIDS on the future development path of many of the world's poorest developing countries. Through its effects on population levels and growth rates and on...

Empirical evidence and microeconomic theory suggest that, in many settings, farm household production and consumption decisions are "non-separable." Non-separability may have important policy implications, including lack of response or threshold effects when incentives change. This paper extends...

In most countries in sub-Saharan Africa at present, the majority of the population is engaged in agriculture, with economies in the very early stages of structural transformation - the process whereby a predominantly agrarian economy is transformed into a diversified and productive economy...

Green Revolution technologies have not been widely adopted in Africa. What are the chances that they will play a major role in the near future? This paper shows that the enabling infrastructure, especially rural roads and irrigation systems are not likely to be in place in the humid and...

Two increasingly shared perspectives within the international development community are that (a) geography matters, and (b) many government interventions would be more successful if they were better targeted. This paper unites these two notions by exploring the opportunities for, and benefits...