Since the southern African food crisis of 2001/02, the ‘new-variant famine’ (NVF) hypothesis first proposed by de Waal and Whiteside (2003) has become an important part of the conventional wisdom surrounding the relationship between HIV/AIDS and food crises in the region. The NVF hypothesis...

Produced for review by the United States Agency for International Development under the WACIP project funded by USAID (Programme de Renforcement du Secteur Coton en Afrique de l'Ouest et du Centre

It is generally agreed that increasing agricultural productivity is critical to stimulating the rate of economic growth in Africa. There are many important and often complementary determinants of agricultural productivity. In this brief and the full paper it draws from, the focus is on...

Effective agricultural and food security policies in Africa need to be based on a solid empirical foundation. In Zambia, it is widely perceived that poverty rates are increasing, agricultural growth is stagnant, and real food prices are higher as food production declines. This study examines...

This report discusses the potential for procurement of food aid in local/regional markets to improve the effectiveness of response to food emergency victims. The paper examines the relevance of local/regional procurement (LRP) to donors and the rationale for using it, reviews LRP’s efficiency...

The view that widows and their dependents face greater livelihood risks in the era of HIV/AIDS is indeed supported by nationally-representative survey results from Zambia. Efforts to safeguard widows’ rights to land through land tenure innovations involving community authorities may be an...

The economic reforms in maize marketing and trade policies implemented during the 1990s have been highly controversial, and there remains a lack of solid empirical investigation on the impacts of these reforms on national food security, price stability and rural income growth. This study aims to...

By law, US food aid relies on commodity procurement in the US. A powerful political coalition of US farm groups, shippers and relief agencies vigorously supports these in-kind food aid donation. As an alternative, local procurement of food aid, in Africa, has attracted growing interest because...