Rapid population growth, urbanization, and income growth are triggering increased demand for high-value agricultural products across Southern Africa with scope for gains from trade and regional integration. We analyse the animal feed to poultry value chain in Zambia focusing on the industry...

We examine the returns from owning cows and buffaloes in rural India. We estimate that when valuing labor at market wages, households earn large, negative average returns from holding cows and buffaloes, at negative 64% and negative 39% respectively. This puzzle is mostly explained if we value...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a new index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) product designed to compensate for area average predicted livestock mortality loss in northern Kenya, where previous work has established the presence of poverty traps. We simulate household-specific wealth...

India has one of the largest livestock sectors in the world and the largest livestock population with 520.6 million head. Of the world’s livestock population, cattle contribute 12.7%, Buffalo 56.7%, goats, 14.5% and sheep 5.9 % (FAOSTAT, 2008). Livestock constitutes a natural asset for the...

Owing to a variety of factors, the total forage consumed by grazing animals on a rangeland is a random variable. Although this fact has been recognized in the extant literature, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that have analyzed the statistical properties of this random...