Governance and Natural Resource Utilization in Uganda: Challenges, Gaps and Opportunities
Aid, Collective Action and Benefits to Smallholders: Evaluating the World Food Program’s Purchase for Progress Pilot 20-19
EfD Authors:
Smallholder farmers often face prohibitive transaction costs in agricultural commodity markets in developing countries. Consequently, they are only partly integrated into these markets.
Converting forests to farms: the economic benefits of clearing forests in agricultural settlements in the Amazon
Agricultural expansion into tropical forests is believed to bring local economic benefits at the expense of global environmental costs. The resulting tension is reflected in Brazilian government policy. The national agrarian reform program has settled farm families in the Amazon region since the 1970s, with the expectation that they will clear forests in order to farm the land. On the other hand, recent Brazilian policy initiatives seek to reduce deforestation to mitigate climate change.
Aid, collective action and benefits to smallholders: Evaluating the World Food Program's purchase for progress pilot
EfD Authors:
Agricultural commodity markets in developing countries often operate in a constrained environment of prohibitive transaction costs. Consequently, smallholder farmers are only partly integrated into these markets, a situation that keeps them in a lower level of development equilibrium (poverty trap). Although cooperative institutional alternatives such as Farmers’ Organizations (FOs) may reduce transaction costs and revitalize agricultural production and commercialization, they rarely have been successful in fully delivering on these promises.
Infrastructure Improvements and Maize Market Integration: Bridging the Zambezi in Mozambique
EfD Authors:
Historically, transport infrastructure connecting the most agriculturally productive areas of Mozambique and the richer southern region has been poor. A primary bottleneck was an unreliable ferry service over the Zambezi river, addressed by construction of a road bridge in 2009. In this paper we identify the impact of this transport infrastructure enhancement on integration of national maize markets.
Gender-Specific Livelihood Strategies for Coping with Climate Change-Induced Food Insecurity in Southeast Nigeria
EfD Authors:
This study assessed the livelihood strategies adopted by husbands and wives within the same households for coping with climate-induced food insecurity in Southeast Nigeria. Collective and bargaining approaches were used in collecting individual and intra-household-level data of 120 pairs of spouses in Southeast Nigeria; husbands and wives were interviewed separately. Focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and household surveys were used to elicit responses from the respondents.
How to Ask Farmers about Risk to Help Design Agricultural Policies
Researchers and officials interested in people’s attitudes toward risk when designing public policies should make sure that their questions about risk are asked in the specific context of the policy rather than in general abstract questions.
Farmers Prefer Post-Harvest Grazing Restrictions but Demand Policy Incentives to Increase Forage Production
While livestock is an integral component of the mixed crop-livestock farming system in Ethiopia, there is competition between crops and livestock for the limited feed resources. The residue after harvest is one source of livestock feed but has other potential uses, including leaving it on the field to conserve soil and water and reduce weeds. The current practice is open access grazing, in which any farmer’s livestock can eat the residue left on another farmer’s fields.