The author investigated the Zimbabwean Fast Track Land Reform Program’s (FTLRP) impact on the agricultural productivity of its beneficiaries. The data revealed significant differences between beneficiaries and a control group of communal farmers in household and parcel characteristics and input usage.

This paper evaluates the impact of credit availability on communal and commercial sector maize output in Zimbabwe. This is important given the increased use of concessionary credit for agriculture as a policy strategy to increase agricultural output and food security, in response to the disruption caused by controversial land reform.

This paper uses relatively recent time series techniques on data spanning over different pricing regimes to estimate the aggregate agricultural supply response to price and non-price factors in Zimbabwe. The ARDL approach to cointegration employed here gives consistent estimates of supply response in the presence of regressor endogeneity and also permits the estimation of distinct estimates of both long-run and short-run elasticities when variables are not integrated of the same order.

Explaining soil capital facilitates a better understanding of constraints and opportunities for increased agricultural production and reduced land degradation. The diversity in farmers’ soil capital, production strategies, and general farming systems (including conservation investments) points to the value of internalizing these aspects in the formulation of the government’s policies and extension advice on sustainable agriculture.

This paper integrates traditional economic variables, soil properties, and variables on soil conservation technologies to estimate agricultural output among small-scale farmers in Kenya’s central highlands. The study finds that integrating traditional economics and soil science is invaluable, especially as omitting measures of soil capital can cause omitted-variable bias. The central policy implication is that while fertilizers are generally beneficial, their application is a complex art, and more is not necessarily better.

There is evidence that the Fast Track Land Reform Program created insecurity among its beneficiaries and adversely impacted investments in soil conservation. However, households in the study that believed investing in land enhanced tenure security invested significantly more in soil conservation measures than other households.

This study used the newly developed metafrontier approach to assess the technical efficiency of small-scale food production in the Ethiopian highlands at plot level, in order to investigate the role of soil conservation technology in enhancing agricultural productivity.

Fertilizer use (including dung) in Ethiopia is low, particularly in the northern highlands, where dung is a significant source of household fuel.

The empirical analysis in this paper shows that production risk plays a significant role in sustainable land-management technology adoption in the Ethiopian highlands.

Stone bunds in the Ethiopian highlands showed statistically significant and positive impact on yield in low-rainfall areas, but not in high-rainfall areas, and they did not have a statistically significant impact on production risk in either area.

Stone bund performance varied by agro-ecology type, which implies the need for appropriate technologies that enhance productivity and are better adapted to local conditions.