Paper to be presented at the Comesa policy seminar“Food price variability: Causes, consequences, and policy options"on 25-26 January 2010 in Maputo, Mozambiqueunder the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Markets Project (AAMP)

Crop income is the predominant source of income for most rural Mozambican households, accounting for 73% of rural household income on average in 2002, and greater than 80% of the total income of the poorest 40% of rural households. While the Government of Mozambique recognizes the need to...

This study analyzes the implications of increasing population density in Kenya’s rural areas on smallholder production and commercialization. Using data from five panel surveys on 1,146 small-scale farms over the 1997-2010 period, we use econometric techniques to determine how increasing rural...

This paper examines the situation of food security for the landless rural households of the Punjab province in Pakistan. Primary data from 576 landless households were collected from 12 districts of the province. About 27% of the sample households were measured to be food insecure. Household’s...

More than one third of the population in Africa is still facing undernourishment and malnutrition. While poor and food-insecure people are most often living in unfavourable agricultural zones, such as semi-arid areas, only few studies have assessed the potential of well adapted dryland cereals...

The potential contributions of new biotechnologies to sustainable food and income security have been the subject of widespread discussions around the turn of the twenty-first century. But distributional issues of which segments of GMO adopters benefit the most have not been given ample...

This paper offers an empirical case study of the potential for urban gardening to contribute to individual food security. Food security generally encompasses both availability and accessibility. In Western Europe, availability per se has declined in importance with the development of national...

The majority of the global population lives in cities. In the developing world, a three-fold challenge of population growth, urbanization, and urban food insecurity is posing challenges for cities. Urban agriculture has received increasing attention as one strategy to help cope with this. Using...

Since the 2007–08 food crisis, many thoughtful analyses have addressed the causes and impacts of high and volatile international food prices and proposed solutions to the crisis. These studies have covered global as well as local food price dynamics and policy reactions. The food price problem...