This paper traces the trajectories of successful commercial smallholders operating under differing sets of market institutions. Analysis focuses on maize, cotton, and horticulture, three widely marketed crops with strikingly different market institutions. Maize receives intensive government...

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...

Distributed as: Appendix 1. Background Paper for Agriculture and Lands. African Ministers Meeting, April 2009. Prepared under the Food Security III Cooperative Agreement (GDG-A- 00-02-00021-00) between the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, and...

The coming 2005/06 maize harvest promises to be a good one, certainly better than last season. Market prices have begun falling, and the question now is how far they are likely to fall. Government currently has a maize export ban in place. This short note aims to assess the likely price levels...

This paper is concerned with the conduct of meaningful policy and project relevant research on small enterprise development. It responds to a growing demand for operationally useful small enterprise research, a demand which has surged over the past ten years in the wake of increasing concern...

This paper explores two sets of issues. The first concerns the magnitude of policy induced distortions in developing countries and the impact of these distortions on the economy, paying special attention to differential impacts between firms of different sizes and resulting effects on the level...

The study reported in this paper measures differences in profitability between conservation farming (CF) practices and conventional agriculture by comparing the value of differential output with the differential input costs. The main objective is to address and fill several important knowledge...

By law, US food aid relies on commodity procurement in the US. A powerful political coalition of US farm groups, shippers and relief agencies vigorously supports these in-kind food aid donation. As an alternative, local procurement of food aid, in Africa, has attracted growing interest because...

Cassava production has grown rapidly in Zambia since the early 1990’s. Available evidence suggests that volumes of traded cassava have been increasing roughly twice as fast as production. Yet this cassava production boom could stall unless commercial markets for it develop. To help accelerate...

Given heavy dependence on rainfed maize production, Zambia must routinely cope with pronounced production and consumption volatility in their primary food staple. Typical policy responses include increased food aid flows, government commercial imports and stock releases, and tight controls on...