Over the last decade, governments in eastern and southern Africa have become increasingly involved in grain marketing via strategic reserves and marketing boards. Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia all have one or both of these entities, and their level of involvement in...

Forest products play an important role in supporting rural livelihoods and food security in many developing countries. Pimentel et al. (1997) found that the integrity of forests is vital to world food security, mostly because of the dependence of the poor on forest resources. Studies of the role...

Rural poverty rates in Zambia have remained very high, at 80%, over the past decade and a half, whilst urban poverty rates have declined, from 49% in 1991 to 34% in 2006. Redressing this high rural poverty rate remains a government priority in the National Development Programs. However,...

The study surveyed 127 households from Central, Eastern, Luapula, Northern, and Southern Provinces of Zambia. The primary objective was to explore life-trajectory patterns and key drivers of welfare change. Households were classified based on long term poverty dynamics i.e., how they perceived...

Smallholder farmers’ access to markets and agricultural support services has been a major concern of Zambian policy makers. As with many governments in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Zambian government’s agricultural policies, particularly for maize, have fundamentally been conceived of as a...

Zambia's record-breaking maize harvest of nearly 2.8 million metric tons (MT) in 2010 is a major achievement and a testimony to what input subsidies, output price incentives, and favorable weather can do to elicit a major supply response. Maize-growing smallholders harvested more than in...

Africa has inherited highly arbitrary political borders that vastly complicate current efforts to accelerate agricultural growth and reduce hunger. Because Africa’s inherited political borders arbitrarily partition agro-ecological zones and natural market sheds, current country borders serve...

The development of agricultural commodity exchanges in Africa has become an increasingly popular strategy for addressing some of the ills plaguing African food markets, including poorly developed risk management systems, high transaction costs, and limited price discovery. However, despite...

This technical compendium was developed to serve two interrelated purposes: 1.To assist in the development of USAID Zambia’s Feed the Future (FtF) strategy by providing a broad empirical analysis of the current conditions and historical trends shaping Zambia’s agricultural and food sector;...

The main purpose of the study is to measure the level of influence exercised by the recent outbreak world prices of rice and maize, the prices of local products (rice and corn), also how to assess the competitiveness of local products has been affected by this increase in West Africa