Africa has been hesitant to adopt agricultural biotechnology, lagging behind global trends over the past decade. One exception is Burkina Faso, a West African country that commercially released 125,000 ha of Bt cotton in 2009. Bt cotton may serve as a working example of how African countries can...

In a WTO battle and the press the argument is often made that eliminating US cotton subsidies would have a large effect on the incomes and competitive position of farmers in developing countries. In Francophone West Africa cotton productivity has stagnated after rapid gains in the first two...

This article presents an analysis of the functioning of the staple food markets following privatisation and liberalisation in Mali. New econometric techniques are used to analyse how price changes are discovered and transmitted among spatially separated markets. Results provide empirical...

New technology introduction in this semiarid region of the Sahel is hypothesized to be made more difficult by three price problems in the region. First, staple prices collapse annually at harvest. Secondly, there is a between year price collapse in good and very good years due to the inelastic...

There are numerous water bodies in South Africa that have the potential to be utilised for aquaculture practices without an additional load being placed on water consumption. For example, the Western Cape has over 2 000 irrigation dams each with a water volume in excess of 500 000 m3 which are...

Some perspectives on the tertiary educational process of the Elsenburg College of Agriculture are given. The challenges of promoting and ensuring sustainable farming practices are central to the training of future agriculturists. This training needs to acknowledge the fact that agriculture...

Dairy farming in the Swart/and, one of the regions in the. Western Cape Province where milk is produced, was until the last decade a very important source of cash flow in farming, in contrast with wheat and sheep farming which produces an annual income. Presently the average size of a dairy is...