This study was undertaken to assess the utility of remotely sensed net primary productivity (NPP) data to measure agricultural sustainability by applying a new methodology that captures spatial variability and trends in total NPP and in NPP removed at harvest. The sustainable intensification of agriculture is widely promoted as a means for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and transitioning toward a more productive, sustainable, and inclusive agriculture, particularity in fragile environments.

Many of the world’s food-insecure and undernourished people are smallholder farmers in developing countries. This is especially true in Africa. There is an urgent need to make smallholder agriculture and food systems more nutrition-sensitive. African farm households are known to consume a sizeable part of what they produce at home. Less is known about how much subsistence agriculture actually contributes to household diets, and how this contribution changes seasonally. We use representative data from rural Ethiopia covering every month of one full year to address this knowledge gap.

Enhancing the diversity of agricultural production systems is increasingly recognized as a potential

means to sustainably provide diversified food for rural communities in developing countries, hence

ensuring their nutritional security. However, empirical evidences connecting farm production

diversity and farm-households’ dietary diversity are scarce. Using comprehensive datasets of

market-oriented smallholder farm households from Indonesia and Kenya, and subsistence farmers

The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) highlights the remarkably high severity and numbers of people in Crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) or equivalent in 55 countries/territories, driven by persistent conflict, pre-existing and COVID-19-related economic shocks, and weather extremes. The number identified in the 2021 edition is the highest in the report’s five-year existence. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food Crises (which includes WFP), an international alliance working to address the root causes of extreme hunger.

This paper examines the impact of mobile phones on farmers’ marketing decisions and prices they receive based on household- and village-level information collected from rural Ethiopia. It explains the reason for the weak impact of mobile phones observed in this study as well as in previous studies in Africa. We argue that even though many farmers participate in information searching, the number of farmers who use mobile phones for information searching is very small.

In response to population growth, rising income and urbanisation, the demand for livestock products, such as milk, meat and eggs is growing in Ethiopia. The growing demand for milk products offers opportunities for smallholders to realize better livelihoods. Whereas the growing demand for milk products in Ethiopia is widely recognised, the dairy sector has not been able to produce adequate milk to satisfy this demand, mainly due to low productivity of dairy animals.

We analyse the impact of intensity of tillage on wheat productivity and risk exposure using panel household-plot level data from Ethiopia. In order to control for selection bias, we estimate a flexible moment-based production function using an endogenous switching regression treatment effects model. We find that tillage has a complementary impact on productivity and risk exposure. As the intensity of tillage increases, productivity increases and farmers’ exposure to risk declines. Our results suggest that smallholder farmers use tillage as an ex-ante risk management strategy.

Postharvest loss exacerbates the food insecurity and welfare loss of farming households in developing countries. This paper analyses the effect of improved storage, a climate-smart crop management technology, on household food and nutrition security, market participation and welfare using nationally representative data from Ethiopia. Endogenous switching regression models are employed to control for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity.

The slow adoption of new agricultural technologies is an important factor in explaining persistent productivity deficits among smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Farmers delay in particular the uptake of technology packages. Since knowledge constraints are an important barrier to adoption, effective extension approaches are key. In recent decades, extension systems in many SSA countries have moved towards decentralized “bottom-up” models involving farmers as active stakeholders.

Rising demand for agricultural commodities coupled with population growth, climate change, declining soil fertility, environmental degradation and rural poverty in the developing world call for strategies to sustainably intensify agricultural production. Sustainable intensification refers to increasing production from the same area of land while reducing its negative environmental consequences.