The present article reviews selected key challenges regarding food security from both an academic and policy-oriented angle. In the analysis of the main constraints to achieve food access and availability in low and high-income societies, a detailed distinction is made between technological and...

A number of problems plague the current Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP), including: late delivery of inputs; distribution of standardized inputs that may not be appropriate for all agro-ecological zones or soil types; crowding out of private sector; poor targeting, and; high cost to the...

Despite being framed as a key component of the nation’s poverty reduction strategy, evidence suggests that inputs distributed under Zambia’s Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) tend to be targeted to the least poor rural households.

Livestock products and fish form an important component of urban consumers’ diet accounting for about one third of the total monthly budgetary expenditure on food. The budgetary share of livestock products increases with affluence or household income while the opposite is true for fish; 2) The...

This essay is one of 23 featured authors from around the world discussing the challenges and solutions to filling the global talent gap in agribusiness. www.ifama.org

Despite upward trends in fertilizer application rates on maize fields over the last twenty years, there remains a perception in Kenya that fertilizer use is not expanding quickly enough and that application rates are not high enough to reverse the country’s growing national food deficit. In...

Global agriculture must significantly increase production to meet by mid-century the demands for food, feed, and fiber posed by the world’s enlarging population. An important requirement to meeting those demands is a lifting of agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates. The...

The paper reviews and evaluates the global political discussions of G-8 and G-20 Member countries on food security and food price volatility since the L’Aquila Initiative in 2009. It shows that some progress was achieved with respect to better coordination of agricultural policies and stricter...

In this paper, we review existing food and nutrition security indicators, discuss some of their advantages and disadvantages, and finally classify them and describe their relationships and overlaps. In order to achieve this, the paper makes reference to the existing definitions of food and...