This paper traces the trajectories of successful commercial smallholders operating under differing sets of market institutions. Analysis focuses on maize, cotton, and horticulture, three widely marketed crops with strikingly different market institutions. Maize receives intensive government...

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...

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 aims to develop and test methods for spatial mapping of population, food production, consumption, and marketed quantities in Africa. As an initial, exploratory exercise, the paper examines the spatial pattern of population, food production, consumption, and trade in the three...

In spite of vast expanses of the country’s land currently being uncultivated, there is increasing evidence that a surprisingly high share of rural smallholder households face land constraints that adversely affect their productivity and ability to participate in agricultural supply chains.

Though Zambia has considerable agricultural potential, the sector’s contribution to growth and poverty reduction has been limited. The sector remains one of the most important employers of labour and remains the main source of livelihood for most rural households in Zambia. Thus key...

A number of problems plague the current Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP), including: late delivery of inputs; distribution of standardized inputs that may not be appropriate for all agro-ecological zones or soil types; crowding out of private sector; poor targeting, and; high cost to the...

Despite being framed as a key component of the nation’s poverty reduction strategy, evidence suggests that inputs distributed under Zambia’s Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) tend to be targeted to the least poor rural households.

Livestock products and fish form an important component of urban consumers’ diet accounting for about one third of the total monthly budgetary expenditure on food. The budgetary share of livestock products increases with affluence or household income while the opposite is true for fish; 2) The...

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...