Agriculture, Peasant ^|^amp; Agricultural Studies in Africa

Production Efficiency in Peasant Agriculture: An Application of LISREL Model

The study examined a simplified conceptual model which incorporates variables that influence the processes and consequences of household decision-making in the Ada and Selale districts of the Ethiopian highlands. Linear structural relations (LISREL) analysis was performed on three conceptual models. The results of LISREL analysis indicate that the magnitude of contribution of factors to product...

Multifunctionality in Peasant Agriculture: a means of Insertion into Globalization

Peasant agriculture has been neglected as modern farming occupied its space in the production of basic foods. Exclusion of smallholders in LDCs is the outcome of declining prices for basic foods now produced and marketed globally by developed countries. This is an effect of globalization: it responds to advances in information technologies, communications, and biotechnology. Productivity gains ...

Agriculture in Africa

Agricultural Productivity in Africa

Raising agricultural productivity and accelerating agricultural growth are commonly promoted as core development strategies throughout Africa, since the majority of the continent’s poor and malnourished population depends largely on farming. Despite these strategies, agricultural growth in Africa lags behind overall economic growth, and agricultural performance falls below that of other develop...

Agents Adopting Agriculture: Modeling the Agricultural Transition

The question “What drove foragers to farm?” has drawn answers from many different disciplines, often in the form of verbal models. Here, we take one such model, that of the ideal free distribution, and implement it as an agent-based computer simulation. Populations distribute themselves according to the marginal quality of different habitats, predicting settlement patterns and subsistence metho...