More effective policies are needed to improve access and secure rights to land and other natural resources for various stakeholders, particularly smallholder farmers. Service delivery at all levels of governance needs to be restructured and strengthened in order to promote and improve economic...

Accurate information on farmer and consumer behavior is the foundation for Identifying public investments and policies that can effectively promote national food security and income growth objectives. This report synthesizes recent findings on smallholder crop marketing behavior and urban...

The world food and financial crises threaten to undermine the real incomes of urban consumers in eastern and southern Africa. This study investigates patterns in staple food prices, wage rates, and marketing margins for urban consumers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia between 1993 and...

Effective agricultural and food security policies in Africa need to be based on a solid empirical foundation. In Zambia, it is widely perceived that poverty rates are increasing, agricultural growth is stagnant, and real food prices are higher as food production declines. This study examines...

The view that widows and their dependents face greater livelihood risks in the era of HIV/AIDS is indeed supported by nationally-representative survey results from Zambia. Efforts to safeguard widows’ rights to land through land tenure innovations involving community authorities may be an...

Beyond the obvious catastrophic effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on mortality, demographic changes, and the suffering of individuals and their families, we are still only learning about the complex longer-term effects of the pandemic on poverty and vulnerability. For example, the HIV/AIDS...

The economic reforms in maize marketing and trade policies implemented during the 1990s have been highly controversial, and there remains a lack of solid empirical investigation on the impacts of these reforms on national food security, price stability and rural income growth. This study aims to...

As events in the 2008/09 season have amply demonstrated, instability in staple food market remains a major problem in Zambia. A rise in world food price levels and instability, which is projected to occur in the near future according to several international institutes, will make it all more...

Since the southern African food crisis of 2001/02, the ‘new-variant famine’ (NVF) hypothesis first proposed by de Waal and Whiteside (2003) has become an important part of the conventional wisdom surrounding the relationship between HIV/AIDS and food crises in the region. The NVF hypothesis...

1. The percentage of households that are headed by widows in rural Zambia increased from 9.4 % to 12.3% between 2001 and 2004. 2. Within 1 to 3 years after the death of their husbands, widow-headed households, on average, controlled 35 percent less land than what they had prior to their...