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...

The view that widows and their dependents face greater livelihood risks in the era of HIV/AIDS is indeed supported by nationally-representative survey results from Zambia. Efforts to safeguard widows’ rights to land through land tenure innovations involving community authorities may be an...

Beyond the obvious catastrophic effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on mortality, demographic changes, and the suffering of individuals and their families, we are still only learning about the complex longer-term effects of the pandemic on poverty and vulnerability. For example, the HIV/AIDS...

1. The percentage of households that are headed by widows in rural Zambia increased from 9.4 % to 12.3% between 2001 and 2004. 2. Within 1 to 3 years after the death of their husbands, widow-headed households, on average, controlled 35 percent less land than what they had prior to their...

Economists have long held that broad-based agricultural growth is the most powerful source of poverty reduction in developing countries where most of the rural population is engaged in agriculture (Johnston and Mellor 1961; Mellor 1974; Lipton 2006). However, in Zambia’s case, despite sustained and...

The Conditional Land Transfer Agreement Act, P.A. 425, 1984 (MCLA 124.21-124.29) is a public policy tool designed to promote community economic development and minimize the use of annexation in Michigan. Academic research to evaluate the impact of P.A. 425 on communities executing such contracts...

The future of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) will be a pivotal issue in the 1995 farm bill debate. Established under the Food Security Act of 1985, the original objectives of the CRP were to provide a voluntary form of supply control and to reduce soil erosion by retiring highly erodible...

Despite its importance in agricultural development, the oft-observed inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity in developing countries has received very limited attention in Africa. This work tries to fill the gap by analyzing the relationship between farm-size and...