It is argued that dairying is vital to future viability of many small farms in East Africa and that high transactions costs for dairy production and marketing limit participation by asset- and information-poor smallholders. Case studies from Kenya and Ethiopia illustrate the role of dairy...

The author argues that African rural areas behave differently from rural areas in fully commercialized market economies. In commercialized economies, price signals quickly induce factor flows, including items such as investment and technological change. A need for more food is quickly translated...

The high use of modern inputs in Egypt's agricultural system well before the reforms has been very favorable to the development of private markets, particularly in the fertilizer sector. The level of adoption being very high, the usual demand constraints did not operate and traders' entry was...

The development of the maize seed industry and private seed companies in selected Sub-Saharan Africa countries over the past 95 years is outlined. The study provides evidence that seed industry development is an evolutionary learning-by-doing process of fitting together a set of interactive and...

This study represents one of the first attempts to examine the process of adjustment within the farming and marketing sectors to the reform of agricultural markets in Egypt. Even though it is primarily based on rice sector data, it gives the following interesting insights into the initial...

This paper investigates the respective roles of spatial integration and arbitrage costs in explaining the adjustment of local prices to policy changes using the example of Ghana. We introduce a model of price formation and market integration that incorporates the price transmission process...

Market integration analysis may be helpful in providing a photograph of the operation of local markets at a given point in time. However, the process of market reform in the context of structural and institutional deficiencies, rather than being a one-shot issue, involves a lengthy transition...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a research approach and a set of different quantitative techniques for analysis of questions related to agricultural input market reforms. The broad objective of the Multi Country Project 1 (MP 1) undertaken at the International Food Policy Research...

The study carried out on behalf of the Conference of Ministers of Agriculture of West and Central Africa represents one of the first attempts to analyze the impact of the devaluation of the CFA Franc that took place in early 1994. Its main focus is on the impact the change in parity has had on...

The objective of this paper is to derive lessons from selected literature concerning the impact and the conditions of successful agricultural input market reform. The agricultural inputs of interest in this review are: fertilizers, seeds, agricultural equipment, pesticides, and livestock...