Millions of smallholder farm households in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are net consumers of staple crops, and millions of poor urban households spend a significant share of their income purchasing staple foods. Recent research has underscored the major effects of changes in food prices on poverty,...

An important hypothesized benefit of large-scale input subsidy programs in Africa is that by raising maize production, the subsidies should put downward pressure on retail maize prices to the benefit of urban consumers and the rural poor who tend to be net food buyers. To inform debates related...

Many of the agricultural input subsidy programs (ISPs) currently being implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa include among their objectives raising farm incomes and reducing rural poverty. However, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on the extent to which ISPs are achieving these objectives....

Raising agricultural productivity to meet growing food demands while increasing the resilience of rain-fed farm systems to climate variability is one of the most pressing contemporary development challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Anchored on the three core principles of minimum tillage...

Wheat consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is increasing rapidly, faster than any other major food grain. Between 2000 and 2009, per capita wheat consumption in SSA increased at a rate of 0.35 kilogram (kg)/year, outpacing maize and rice. Total wheat consumption increased by nearly 650,000...

Only a small percentage of well-capitalized smallholders are able to sell maize to the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) and take advantage of the maize price support. For example, in the 2007/08 marketing year, only 10% of smallholders sold maize to the FRA and these households had larger landholdings,...

The Farmer Input Support Program (FISP, formerly the Fertilizer Support Program) has expanded the scale of its fertilizer distribution from 48,000 metric tons (MT) in 2002/03, when the program started, to nearly 183,000 MT in the 2012/2013 farming season. Yet, after more than a decade of input...

Targeted fertilizer subsidies are growing in popularity in Sub-Saharan Africa and are a pillar of the Government of the Republic of Zambia’s (GRZ’s) agricultural sector strategy. For example, over the 2004 to 2011 fiscal years, the budget allocation to the Fertilizer Support Programme (FSP)...

The successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia is a major achievement in African agriculture. Since independence in 1964, and most notably from the 1970s, the commitment of the Government of Zambia (GoZ) to ensuring food security through the involvement of smallholder...

The successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia during the 1970s–80s was a major achievement of African agriculture but was predicated on a government commitment to parastatal grain and seed marketing, the provision of services to maize growers, and a pan-territorial...