Itinerant traders provide an important route for West Africa’s farmers’ to get their perishable produce rapidly to the distant urban markets. But these farmers often accuse the traders of offering “unfairly” low prices while preventing direct access to these markets.

This paper integrates soil science variables into an economic analysis of agricultural output among small-scale farmers in Kenya's highlands. The integration is valuable because farmers’ choice of inputs depends on both the status of the soil and socioeconomic conditions. The study uses a stochastic production frontier in which the individual farm's distance to the frontier depends systematically on individual factors.

This paper concerns the patterns of food crop choice in a multicropping setting, in which production risk considerations and rainfall uncertainty are likely to be critical factors.

Crop biodiversity is very important for both the functioning of ecological systems and the generation of a vast array of ecosystem services.

More agricultural biodiversity is associated with higher agriculture production and lower risk exposure. This article explores the recent contributions on the economics of agrobiodiversity. The focus is (mostly) on the empirical literature. Future issues are also highlighted.

The lack of cooperation and prevalence of free riding in efforts to reduce emissions reflects the public good dilemma synonymous with climate change: whereby individual incentives lead to sub-optimal outcomes. This study examines how cooperative norms can be fostered through democratic processes.

Organic grain producers exhibited a diversity of motivations, including profit and stewardship.

Soil fertility depletion is considered the main biophysical limiting factor to increasing per capita food production for most smallholder farmers in Africa. The adoption and diffusion of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs), as a way to tackle this impediment, has become an important issue in the development policy agenda for sub-Saharan Africa.

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008. Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion of households had to adjust food consumption in response. Regression results indicate that households with low asset levels, and casual workers, were particularly adversely affected by high food prices.

The argument for promoting cash crops in developing countries has generally been based on their contribution to small farmer incomes and their impact on other household activities such as household crop production through interlinked markets.