Executive Summary The lack of market information represents a significant impediment to market access especially for smallholder poor farmers: it substantially increases transaction costs and reduces market efficiency. For any one crop, the marketing chain consists of multiple middlemen, each taking a margin at every stage of the chain, and price variations in space and time are often large and...

Zambian farmers have extensive experience with maize hybrids and input subsidies. Like other countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, the successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia during the 1970s and 1980s was supported by strong government commitment to parastatal grain and seed marketing and subsidized provision of services to maize growers. When this system was ...

This review presents a comparison of the potential of offering agricultural market information services that incorporate information and communications technology (ICT) in Ghana and Malawi. A comprehensive analysis was done involving data on economic indicators related to telecommunications services provided by the statistics division of the United Nations, and the current initiatives on agricu...

An appreciation of the dynamism of the links between soil resources and society provides a platform for examining food security over the next 50 years. Interventions to reverse declining trends in food security must recognize the variable resilience and sensitivity of major tropical soil types. In most agro-ecosystems, declining crop yield is exponentially related to loss of soil quality. For t...

The potential of smallholder irrigated agriculture to enhance food security and alleviate rural poverty has led the South African Government to prioritise and invest significantly in irrigation establishment, rehabilitation and revitalisation. The question addressed in this study pertains to the extent to which smallholder irrigation has been able to reduce poverty in the rural communities to j...

A Survey of the Economics of Fair Trade Fair Trade has spread in developing countries as an initiative aimed at lifting poor smallholder farmers out of poverty by providing them with premium prices, availability of credit, and improved community development and social goods. Fair Trade is also viewed as a niche market for high value products in a context of globalization and trade liberalizatio...

In response to this, an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) project titled “Farmer-based Adaptive Rodent Management, Extension and Research System in Cambodia” (referred to as the FARMERS project in this paper) has been trialing a physical method of rodent control called the Community Trap Barrier System or TBS (ACIAR 2001). TBS consists of a lure crop and trapping...

This paper explores the dynamics of smallholder technology adoption, with particular reference to a high-yielding, low-external input rice production method in Madagascar. We present a simple model of technology adoption by farm households in an environment of incomplete financial and land markets. We then use a probit model and a symmetrically trimmed least squares estimation of a dynamic Tobi...

The need to provide agricultural information to farmers has led to emergence of numerous ICT-based MIS projects in developing country. These projects aim at promoting commercialization of smallholder agriculture and subsequently their welfare. This study examines the welfare effects one such project in western Kenya. It uses household food security and access to medical health services as proxi...

The high incidence of disease is one of the major constraints to smallholder poultry production systems in Africa. In order to control various poultry diseases, ethnoveterinary medicine is widely practised by poor village farmers. Natural products, especially those which are locally available, are generally used. The use of ethnoveterinary medicine cari be considered sustainable as it is econom...