The restructuring process of the food markets in South Africa is at an advanced stages of consolidation and the emergence dominance of few supermarket chains expanding into non-traditional areas, through franchise format stores and forecourt stores overtaking informal wet markets and green...

In almost all of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries maize is cropped on a commercial basis except in Mauritius and Seychelles. Maize meal is the most important food staple in Southern and Eastern Africa. This is one of the main reason many governments in the region...

This article examines introducing Economic Value Added (EVA) as a performance measure for wine cooperatives in South Africa to determine whether member's value have been created. After a thorough explanation and calculation of the components of EVA, the EVA of a number of co-operatives were...

Agriculture in the Ethiopian economy has survived three major structural breaks, namely the 1974 change of policy in favour of a command-based economic system, the 1984 famine and the 1992 change of policy that introduced a market economy. A regression procedure was applied to analyze the effect...

Several manure use options were analysed for profitability using results from research and farmer participatory trials that were conducted in the small-scale farming sector in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The options analysed for profitability were a) not using any manure b) using aerobically...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the bulk of agricultural output is produced by small holder farmers who continue to depend on rainfall. As such, agricultural economists often use average rainfall as a summative environmental indicator in estimating agricultural production function. This methodology is...

Livestock is the most important source of cash for small-scale farmers in the semi-arid tropics of southern Africa. However, with limited access to markets, farmers do not have the incentive to invest in improved livestock management. Livestock production and off-takes remain low and farmers are...

Due to the size of the European Union’s agricultural production and its market, the impact of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reaches far beyond Europe and has major implications for trade in agricultural goods all over the world including the ESA region. Since the 1950s, the CAP...

A large proportion of the on-going reductions in global food prices are attributable to the efficiency gains associated with various green revolutions. Unfortunately the welfare gains associated with such productivity growth are unevenly distributed, with many African states reaping relatively...

This paper highlights a market information and linkage system (MILS) developed and tested by the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange Limited (KACE) that increases the efficiency of agricultural markets to work better for smallholder farmers and other small and medium sized agro-enterprises...