Social critics have taken aim at modern production agriculture using a common theme: many food, health, and environmental problems are explained by corporate farms, agribusinesses, and fast-food restaurants failing to account for the full costs of their actions. How accurate is this diagnosis?...

Economic efficiency is a key issue in economic research and for policy design, and certainly for food security challenges. In the food system dynamics the understanding of changes and trends is crucial to improve our capacity to deal with the objectives of sustainable development and quality of...

Protecting the safety of the U.S. food supply is a shared responsibility. Accomplishing that task requires the efforts of multiple government agencies combined with private sector participation. Despite the best efforts of the public–private partnership, the presence of microbial...

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...

The objective of this paper is to present a framework and process that can be used by Ethiopians for strategic planning in the cereals system, to highlight the most important constraints to increased productivity and identify critical investments to alleviate them. The paper uses the framework...

The main question which this research originally sought to answer was whether or not inorganic fertilizers are generally profitable used alone on maize, or with pesticides on cotton, for small farmers in Zambia. Rather than give a definitive answer for each Zambian farmer, the authors developed...

Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Directorate of Economics, Republic of Mozambique

Paper prepared for the Policy Workshop on Fertilizer Use and Marketing, organized by MINAGRI and USAID, Rwanda, 22-23 February 20001.

Institute of Agricultural Research of Mozambique Directorate of Training, Documentation, and Technology Transfer

The major objective of this study was to assess the performance of grain markets in Ethiopia at the individual market levels and for groups of markets which are spatially linked. By examining the nature of relationships among producer, wholesale, and retail prices in individual markets and among...