Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to identify factors affecting formal credit constraint status of rural farm households in Vietnam’s North Central Coast (NCC) region.

Design/methodology/approach
– Using the direct elicitation method (DEM), the authors consider both internal and external credit rationing.

Background: Agriculture is important for economic growth and development in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Tanzania. However, agricultural production and productivity remain relatively low, with significant yield gaps attributed to factors such as limited access to and low adoption of appropriate agricultural technologies, and climate-related risks resulting from climate variability and change.

We analyzed the impact that the advent of the salmon aquaculture industry had on income distribution in coastal communities. Specifically, we evaluated whether salmon farms generated significant changes on household income distribution in the remote coastal areas of the Los Lagos region in Chile between 1992 and 2002. Salmon farms were expected to generate new labor and income opportunities for the local population. The impact on income distribution in the area should depend on which type of households were favored with this increased labor demand: low-income or high-income households.

The management of rangelands, including climate change adaptation strategies, is primarily responsible for stimulating livestock productivity, which consequently improves food security. This paper investigates the impact of climate change adaptations on food security among pastoralists in semi-arid parts of Kenya, who have not received due attention to date. Using an endogenous switching regression model, the current study revealed that pastoralists’ food security increased significantly when they employed measures to adapt to climate change.

This study was undertaken in Laikipia County, Kenya, to identify factors influencing the choices of strategies by pastoralists to adapt to climate change. The study particularly evaluates the role of perceived climate extremes (frequency of dry spells and droughts), early warning information, and access to private ranch grazing, in determining response decisions to climate change. Besides, we test if households jointly adopt climate change adaptation strategies. The primary data collected from 440 sample households was analyzed using the multivariate probit (MVP) model.

Market trends in many developing countries indicate that selling agricultural produce to itinerant traders at the farmgate has been rising, despite criticism that the practice preys on and exploits farmers. Using a cross-sectional data set of 525 households, we investigate the factors influencing participation in farmgate trading and its effects on agricultural productivity in western Kenya. We specifically consider the role of liquidity–related variables within a context of the perennial export crops, a contribution that has received less attention in literature.

The inverse farm size and productivity relationship (IR) is a recurring theme in the literature. However, most previous studies were undertaken within a setting of mixed cropping systems. In this article, we investigate the effect of farm size on productivity within the context of a perennial monocropping system, acute competition for farmland, frequent subdivision of farms and declining yields. We apply household survey data of smallholder tea farms in western Kenya and consider both technical efficiency (TE) and the yield per hectare as indicators of productivity.