Lack of access to nutritious food is an underlying and major cause of child mortality in Africa. Improving the nutritional quality of food crops, through biofortification, would be a useful complementary strategy to other agricultural and public health interventions. Quality Protein Maize (QPM)...

This paper deals with the devastating food insecurity in two densely populated provinces in the north of Burundi as a result of overpopulation and low production capacity in the aftermath of conflict. We compare data that was collected in the Ngozi and Muyinga Province in 2007 with data of...

The cotton sector has been amongst the most regulated in Africa, and still is to a large extent in West and Central Africa (WCA), despite repeated reform recommendations by international donors. On the other hand, orthodox reforms in East and Southern Africa (ESA) have not always yielded the...

Irrigated agriculture in most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa has not been encouraging even with the threat of severe adverse effects of global food and financial crises and a scourge of the consequences of climate change. The situation in the West African Sahel is even more disturbing since it is...

The need to provide agricultural information to farmers has led to emergence of numerous ICTbased MIS projects in developing country. These projects aim at promoting commercialization of smallholder agriculture and subsequently their welfare. This study examines the how the environment in which...

Reliable data on private sector agricultural research and development is globally scarce, particularly in developing countries. In South Africa, it has been observed that research performance by the public sector via the Agricultural Research Council has declined in recent years and...

Replaced with revised version of paper on 01/14/2011.

This study aims first to measure the farm specific irrigation water use efficiency (IWUE), through non parametric DEA model; and second to evaluate the potential irrigation cost reductions and identify the main factors causing variations in IWUE among the sample farms. Cross sectional data...

The article used the ATE estimation framework to derive consistent semi-parametric estimators of population adoption rates and their determinants of the NERICA (New Rice for Africa) rice varieties in Nigeria. Empirical evidence shows that the observed sample adoption rate does not consistently...

Smallholder farmers in developing countries need to improve their position in food value chains in order to improve their margins and as a strategy for coping with agricultural food price volatility through innovations within the chains. Value chain mappings and gross margin analysis were...