In South Africa water law has recently changed, adopting the principle of water as an economic good, thus levying charges on its use. For small-scale irrigators this is an important change, because currently their water use is entirely subsidized. In the coming years, subsidies will gradually...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relative contribution of technical efficiency, technological change and increased input use to the output growth of the Tunisian olive oil growing farms using a stochastic frontier production function approach applied to panel data for the period 1995-...

The production structure of Tunisian agriculture over the last three decades is investigated using a translog variable cost function. Standard results of neoclassical duality theory are used to obtain measures of elasticities of substitution between inputs, price elasticities of factor demands...

This paper analyzed the factors that affect farmers’ willingness to adopt salt-tolerant forage for livestock, using a Tobit model. The data used for the empirical analysis was obtained from a survey of 97 farmers in southeastern Tunisia. The results of this study show that variables...

Water rights are currently receiving increased attention from scholars and policymakers due to the growing understanding that ill-defined water rights impair efficient use. In South Africa, smallholder irrigation faces problems of low water use efficiency and cost recovery of government...

With increasing water scarcity, research on policy options for improved water allocation and governance becomes an urgent priority for many developing and developed countries. Evaluating institutional alternatives is however a challenging task. This article takes a comparative approach and...

The objective of this article is to determine the efficiency of the poultry farm in Bangladesh and to assess the influence of contract farming system, using a data envelopment analysis. Seventy-five commercial poultry farms (25 and 50 independent and contract farms, respectively) were randomly...

Farmers in Kenya's drylands have difficulty accessing farm production resources and in consequence farm productivity is low. It is therefore important to find strategies for improving access to these scarce resources to help farmers use them efficiently. This paper analyses and compares the...

For practical considerations, it is in some case impossible to simulate MAS models at population level. The current paper shows that MAS models applied to samples with heterogeneous costs of interactions between agents have biased results. Heterogeneous costs of interactions in MAS models can...

To ensure efficient water allocation and use, policy designers have adopted various strategies, including price setting, decentralising irrigation water management or improving water rights. Most of these strategies have been applied individually, without considering the complementary...