This paper describes the participation of smallholders in commercial horticultural farming in Kenya and identifies constraints and critical factors that influence their decision to participate in this industry by selling their produce. The study employs panel survey data on smallholder producers...

Using household survey data from Ethiopia, this paper evaluates the impact of agricultural cooperatives on smallholders' technical efficiency. We utilize propensity score matching to compare the average difference in technical efficiency between cooperative farmers and similar independent...

The market-driven agricultural transformation of the global food system requires all, directly and indirectly, participating actors to compete efficiently and to adapt to changes in consumer demand and buyer requirements. Regarding product quantity and quality, smallholders, in particular, have...

With the rising demand for agricultural land, land deals must be designed to benefit not only the investors but also the local population. This paper looks at two ways this might be done for farmers in the vicinity of a large-scale oil palm investment in Ghana: contract farming and secure...

The market-driven agricultural transformation of the global food system requires all, directly and indirectly, participating actors to compete efficiently and to adapt to changes in consumer demand and buyer requirements. Regarding product quantity and quality, smallholders, in particular, have...

Value chain development (VCD) has become a popular policy instrument to help farmers in developing countries access markets. While VCD initiated by the private sector has received much attention in the literature, there is yet little research on public-led VCD. This paper pro-vides a...

This paper seeks to indentify the determinants of smallholder farmer's market participation decisions using a farm level approach. By opening the black box which conceals the complex mechanism guiding farmers' market participation decision, this paper's contribution resides on its ability to...

Commercialization of smallholder agriculture is widely seen as an essential pathway towards rural economic growth. While previous studies have analyzed effects of commercialization on productivity and income, implications for farm household nutrition have received much less attention. We...

Why, after 30 years of aid, were so many African countries no better off in the 1980s than they had been at independence? Why, indeed, were so many of them slipping back and earlier economic achievements being undermined?Concentrating on Sudan, the Poverty of Nations examined what had gone wrong...