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 is a prepublication version of J.M. Beddow, T.M. Hurley, P.G. Pardey, and J.M. Alston’s “Food Security: Yield Gap” chapter in N. Van Alfen, editor-in-chief, Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Vol. 3, San Diego: Elsevier, 2014, pp. 352-365.

Concerns about future food security in the face of volatile and potentially lower yields due to climate change have been at the heart of recent discussions on adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector. While there are a variety of studies trying to quantify the impact of climate change on...

In many African countries, as well as in other parts of the world where a significant part of the rural population is poor and food insecure, policymakers face what is called the food price dilemma. On the one hand, they need to provide farmers with incentives to increase the quantity of...

Agriculture is the main user of the world’s water resources. Due to increasing concern on water quality and quantity, there is a growing interest to use the scarce water resources in the most efficient way to feed the growing world population. By employing a meta-analysis, this paper shows...

Successive droughts, in Zimbabwe compounded by other economic shocks in recent years have resulted in decreased maize productivity amongst the communal farmers most of whom reside in regions IV and V which are considered semi-arid. This has given rise to the need to find alternative food crops,...

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...