Zambia’s maize crop grew by roughly 48% between the 2009 and 2010 harvests, leading to the largest crop recorded in recent history. The 2009 maize harvest was also very good, making the 48% rise in 2010 even more remarkable. The forces driving that increase, however, remain widely debated....

More effective policies are needed to improve access and secure rights to land and other natural resources for various stakeholders, particularly smallholder farmers. Service delivery at all levels of governance needs to be restructured and strengthened in order to promote and improve economic...

Accurate information on farmer and consumer behavior is the foundation for Identifying public investments and policies that can effectively promote national food security and income growth objectives. This report synthesizes recent findings on smallholder crop marketing behavior and urban...

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...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/16/10.

This paper summarizes and synthesizes across the results of a set of country studies on the effects of prime-age adult mortality on rural households in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Zambia. Each study is based on large representative rural household surveys. These findings have...

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...

This paper is concerned with the conduct of meaningful policy and project relevant research on small enterprise development. It responds to a growing demand for operationally useful small enterprise research, a demand which has surged over the past ten years in the wake of increasing concern...

This paper explores two sets of issues. The first concerns the magnitude of policy induced distortions in developing countries and the impact of these distortions on the economy, paying special attention to differential impacts between firms of different sizes and resulting effects on the level...