Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.
Lors de la conception de projets, il importe de faire intervenir les parties prenantes locales le plutôt possible afin de veiller à ce que les activités de renforcement des capacités répondent vraiment à leurs besoins. Les processus multipartites peuvent aussi mener à à une plus grande appropriation des activités et des résultantes des projets. La présente étude de cas offre un exemple de processus multipartite mis en place avec succès au Soudan pour renforcer les systèmes d’information sur la sécurité alimentaire et la nutrition dans quatre États.
Bien que le nombre de personnes vivant au-dessous du seuil de pauvreté en Ouganda ait diminué de moitié cette dernière décennie, le taux de malnutrition a augmenté de 27 à 30 pour cent. Au cours de la même période, la consommation alimentaire journalière par habitant a reculé de 9,5 pour cent, ce qui représente une baisse des apports énergétiques alimentaires. Plusieurs raisons expliquent cette situation, mais selon le Plan d’action pour la nutrition de l’Ouganda (2011-2016) le manque de capacités est l’un des cinq principaux facteurs à l’origine de la persistance de la malnutrition.
Policy brief No. 3. Adequate nutrition is a crucial welfare dimension. Malnutrition at a young age can have severe con- sequences for a person’s development of human, social, and economic capital. Also in later phases of one’s life, malnutrition can severely affect health and restrict productivity as well as overall quality of life. Efforts to improve nutrition among rural populations, for example through more diversified diets, are therefore key components of many rural development agendas, especially in Africa where undernutrition is still a large public health prob- lem.
Farm workers in developing countries often belong to the poorest of the poor. They typically face low wages, informal working arrangements, and inadequate social protection. Written employment contracts with clearly defined rights and obligations could possibly help, but it is not clear how such contracts could be introduced and promoted in traditional peasant environments. To address this question, we develop and implement a randomized controlled trial with farmers in Côte d’Ivoire.
Mobile phone based money services have spread rapidly in many developing countries. We analyze micro level impacts using panel data from smallholder farmers in Kenya. Mobile money use has a large positive net impact on household income. One important pathway is through remittances, which contribute to income directly but also help to reduce risk and liquidity constraints, thus promoting agricultural commercialization. Mobile money users apply more purchased inputs, market a larger proportion of their output, and have higher farm profits.
Since the early 1990s, liberalization of the seed market in Tanzania has attracted several foreign companies that now market maize hybrids in the country. In this article, we analyze the impacts of proprietary hybrids on maize yields, production, and household living standards. We build on a recent survey of smallholder maize farmers in two zones of Tanzania. Hybrid adoption rates are 48% and 13% in the North and East, respectively. Average net yield gains of hybrids are 50-60%, and there are also significant profit effects.
Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers and a stochastic frontier approach, we show that participation in supermarket channels increases mean technical efficiency by 19%. This gain is bigger at lower levels of efficiency, suggesting the potential for positive income distribution effects.
Classical innovation adoption models implicitly assume homogenous information flow across farmers, which is often not realistic. As a result, selection bias in adoption parameters may occur. We focus on tissue culture (TC) banana technology that was introduced in Kenya more than 10 years ago. Up till now, adoption rates have remained relatively low.
Most micro-level studies on the impact of agricultural technologies build on cross-section data, which can lead to unreliable impact estimates. Here, we use panel data covering two time periods to estimate the impact of tissue culture (TC) banana technology in the Kenyan small farm sector. TC banana is an interesting case, because previous impact studies showed mixed results. We combine propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference estimator to control for selection bias and account for temporal impact variability.